United States or Azerbaijan ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
These are the leading dogma contained in Clarke's book and as they are deemed invincible by a respectable, though not very numerous, section of Theists, we will briefly examine the more important important of them.
With regard, then, to this stricture on the scientific method of reasoning, I conclude that although the caveat which it contains should never be lost sight of by atheists, it is not of sufficient cogency to justify theists in abandoning a scientific in favour of a metaphysical mode of reasoning.
And as nothing stands such chance of success among men as contradiction, the idea of a religion of pleasure, renewed from Epicurus during an eclipse of public reason, has been taken as an inspiration of the national genius; it is this that distinguishes the new theists from the Catholics, against whom the former have inveighed so loudly during the last two years only out of rivalry in fanaticism.
If, on the other hand, they have this capacity, the argument for the existence of deity loses its force, and the theist is bound to admit that all that he claims as due to the action of deity might have happened without him. The theists own argument, if logically pursued ends in divesting it of all coercive value.
The dilemma, therefore, which Epicurus has stated with great lucidity, and which Professor Flint quotes, appears to me so obvious as scarcely to require statement. The dilemma is, that, looking to the facts of organic nature, theists must abandon their belief, either in the divine omnipotence, or in the divine beneficence.
Whatever men could doubt or deny they have doubted or denied, but in no country of the world, in no age, has the dogma there is something, been denied or even treated as doubtful. Here then Atheists, Theists, and Polytheists agree. They agree of necessity.
Finally, I shall persuade the reader that the differences between the so-called atheist and the so-called theist are differences rather about words than things, inasmuch as not even the most prosaic of modern scientists will be inclined to deny the existence of this God, while few theists will feel that this, the natural conception of God, is a less worthy one than that to which they have been accustomed.
It is this assumed, but completely unknown cause of our conscious states, and of all else, that Spencer distinguishes as the Unknowable, the Unconditioned, the Absolute, etc., and which appears to have brought so much consolation to hard-pressed theists. I have no intention of discussing here the philosophic value of the "Unknowable."
In the name of humanity we protest against this indignity to our race. Let God be responsible for good and evil both, or for neither; and if man is to consider himself chargeable with all the world's wrong, he should at least be allowed credit for all the compensating good. The theory of evolution is being patronised by Theists rather too fulsomely.
Among the theists, who reject the use of images, it has been found necessary to restrain the wanderings of the fancy, by directing the eye and the thought towards a kebla, or visible point of the horizon.
Word Of The Day