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Updated: May 10, 2025
For the nature of miracles does not consist in the inconceivable at least not in the planless and arbitrary, but in the fact that they call the attention of man to God and his government; and this leads to the reverse of all that is magical and necromantic, because the magical is unworthy of the idea of God and contradicts all the other self-testimony of God.
We call such a view relatively conceivable, not because we agree with it for we find a logic which, in contemplating the universe, starts from an intelligent author of the world, infinitely less surrounded by difficulties than one contrary to it but because the acknowledgment or denial of a living God is in the last instance not the result of any scientific investigation or logical chain of reasoning, but the moral act of the morally and religiously inclined individual, and because, if the individual has once refused the strongest factor of faith in God, namely, his self-testimony in the conscience, it is no longer impossible for the individual to ignore his other testimonies as such, or to declare them deficient.
Now if, on the one hand, our idea of God is established as a self-testimony of God to our ethical consciousness and as a result of our teleological reasoning, and if, on the other, is established the fact of the world and of its processes going on conformably to law, and likewise the fact of human freedom and its actions upon the course of things, and finally the fact of the admission of the human will and action into a higher teleology which is superior to human will, and which, in the history of mankind, of individuals, and nations, reaches its higher ends, now by affirming, now by denying, human will; then we have simply to account for all these facts as mere facts, and the scientific attempt at pursuing them into their inner connection is nothing else but a more or less successful compromise.
Nevertheless, all the points against teleology thus far quoted can be understood by us as attempts at rejecting the necessity of acknowledging a teleologically acting principle of the world or, to express ourselves more clearly, of a living God after having once rejected the deepest motive for this acknowledgment, namely: the self-testimony of God in the human conscience and mind.
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