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“Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer;” even persons fed on the mere whey and buttermilk of literature must know that in philosophy Voltaire was nothing if not a theist—must know that he wrote not against God, but against Jehovah, the God of the Jews, whom he believed to be a false God—must know that to say Voltaire was an atheist on this ground is as absurd as to say that a Jacobite opposed hereditary monarchy because he declared the Brunswick family had no title to the throne.
It would not find less order or less beauty, the order and the beauty would simply be found in another direction. And, presumably, the theist would still point to the existence of that order as clear proof of a designing intelligence. Something needs to be said here on a more recent form of the argument from the "order" of nature than the one we have been discussing.
Thus, year by year continually, the whole inhabitants of the world are supported by the fruits of harvest, which are produced and matured under the action of natural laws; yet every intelligent Theist ascribes the result ultimately to the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, and sees in the very processes by which it is brought to pass some of the most signal proofs of these Divine perfections.
I ask, and whether a man calls himself theist or agnostic so that he does admit something greater than man, and does give us scope and opportunity for the exercise of those powers and emotions which refuse to be bounded by, or satisfied with, the merely phenomenal and transitory, but are ever seeking for communion with the Noumenal and the Eternal in my judgment matters very little.
Let it be said once more: if, with the pantheist, we assume that we are essentially and inalienably one with the All part of It, as the bay is of the ocean prayer, as the theist understands it, is a self-contradiction; if offered at all, it will be, not the establishment of a relation which is ex hypothesi always in being, but at most a clearer realisation by the particle of its fundamental identity with the Whole.
But a theist may not be allowed to confuse this provisional explanation of his own mind's existence with that of the existence of Mind in the abstract; he must not be allowed to suppose that, by thus hypothetically explaining the existence of known minds, he is thereby establishing a probability in favour of that hypothetical cause, an Unknown Mind.
It is an absurd answer to reply that the creator created himself, yet, even if this is granted, may not the universe have created itself? If the theist puts forward the statement that God has always existed, the atheist may well reply that if God has always existed, why can he not say that the universe has always existed?
But it is evident that when the theist talks of intuition, what he has in mind is something very different from this. He is thinking of some special quality of mind that operates independently of experience, either racial or individual. And this simply does not exist. In religion man is never putting into operation qualities of mind different from those he employs in other directions.
Now all that Atheism conscious and reflective Atheism does is to carry a step further the restricted denial of the ordinary religionist. The Christian theist denies every god but his own.
This contention would make it appear that there is a law outside and anterior to the divine edicts, and God does not serve the purpose of the theist since he is not the ultimate lawgiver. The anthropomorphic conception of God, our Martian finds, is now denied by most cultured theists; nevertheless, they still maintain a belief in a deity endowed with consciousness.
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