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On the other hand, notwithstanding resemblances between the Hebrew and the Persian, the difference between the Semitic group and the Indo-European is well-defined. This difference may be indicated by pointing out certain peculiarities of the Semitic theistic system. +811+. Features of Semitic theism. 1. Paucity of departmental gods and absence of highly specialized gods.
The contrast between their former scepticism as to man's ability to attain to any knowledge of things beyond the phenomenal world, and their present faith and conviction which their belief in the Person of Christ gave them, must have made the part of any such means of arriving at truth as the already discredited theistic argument most insignificant. They, themselves, had no need for it.
Hume's theism, such as it is, dissolves away in the dialectic river, until nothing is left but the verbal sack in which it was contained. Of the two theistic propositions to which Hume is committed, the first is the affirmation of the existence of a God, supported by the argument from the nature of causation.
But for those who did take this step, their former distrust of the theistic argument, as a basis for religious conviction, must have been greatly emphasized.
Each stage of theistic belief grows out of the proceeding stage, and if it can be shown that the beginning of this evolution arose in a huge blunder, I quite fail to see how any subsequent development can convert this unmistakable blunder into a demonstrable truth."
The materialistic tide is "going out," and we shall see that there is some truth in the view which holds that the incoming tide is largely that of occultism, a thing disliked and despised and indeed with some reason by the materialistic school even more than it dislikes and despises theistic opinions.
As a matter of fact the statement is one long tissue of fallacies and unwarranted assumptions. In the first place, even admitting the universal pressure of certain facts, it by no means follows that the theistic interpretation of those facts is the only one admissible.
Let it ever be remembered that the Theistic argument depends, not on the mode of production, but on the character of the resulting product.
Every theistic philosopher is bound, with whatever cautions, to conceive God by the analogy of the human mind. When Leibniz declares the harmony of monads to be pre-established by God, he is invoking the image of intelligent human pre-arrangement.
That there is evil in the world all admit, that it offers prima facie objection to the theistic hypothesis is confessed by the many attempts made to fit in this evil with the existence of God, to prove that it works in some mysterious way for some larger good, or that its presence cannot be dispensed with profitably.
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