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Updated: October 6, 2025
This the fatalists are bound to explain, quite as much as the theists are bound to explain what sort of an infinite intelligence that can be which is unable either to foresee or prevent the misery of its creatures. But that is not all. Liberty, intelligence, fatality, are at bottom three adequate expressions, serving to designate three different faces of being.
The work of actual creation may have been limited to a few elementary types, and evolution may have done the rest. Evolutionists may still be theists. We have already seen that the doctrine, as carried out to its logical consequences, excludes creation and theism.
Nevertheless, it seems to me that he is very unjust to the atheists, in that while he spares no pains to "purify" and "refine" the theory of the theists, so as at last to leave nothing but what he regards as the distilled essence of Theism behind; he habitually leaves the theory of the atheists as he finds it, without making any attempt either to "purify" it by removing its weak and unnecessary ingredients, or to "refine" it by adding such sublimated ingredients as modern speculation has supplied.
Coming closer to earth the theist attempts to find a justification for the existing order of things by finding a use for pain and suffering in their educational influence on human nature, and in the impossibility of altering for the better the consequences of natural law. The real question at issue, says one of the most eloquent of modern theists, the late Dr.
As nothing is inconceivable, we cannot even imagine a time when there was nothing. Universalists say, something ever was, which something is matter. Theists say, something has been from all eternity, which something is not matter but God. They boldly affirm that matter began to be. They affirm its creation from nothing, by a something, which was before the universe.
Priestley's reasonings on the existence of God, well remarked that 'Theists are always for turning their God into an overgrown Man. Anthropomorphites has long been a term applied to them. They give him hand and eyes, nor can they conceive him otherwise than as a corporeal Being. We make a Deity ourselves, fall down and worship him. It is the molten calf over again. Idolatry is still practised.
Hence we shall utterly demolish it, that neither a fragment nor a shadow of it may remain to darken and delude the minds of men. Section IV. The argument of the atheist—The reply of Leibnitz and other theists—The insufficiency of this reply. Sin exists. This is the astounding fact of which the atheist avails himself.
There is a show of reason and logic, but little more. Quite unquestionably a great deals depends upon what is meant by causation, and still more upon the use made of the law of causation by theists. Thus we have seen it urged against Materialists that neural activity cannot be the equivalent of thought because they do not resemble each other.
Collibeer, who is considered by Christian writers 'a most ingenious gentleman, has told the world in his treatise entitled 'The Knowledge of God, that Deity must have some form, and intimates it may probably be the spherical; an intimation which has grievously offended many learned Theists who consider going so far 'an abuse of reason, and warn us that 'its extension beyond the assigned boundaries, has proved an ample source of error. But what the 'assigned boundaries' of reason are, they don't state, nor by whom 'assigned. That if there is a God, He must have some form is self-evident; and why Mr.
I need the hypothesis of God to prove my good-will towards a multitude of sects, whose opinions I do not share, but whose malice I fear: theists; I know one who, in the cause of God, would be ready to draw sword, and, like Robespierre, use the guillotine until the last atheist should be destroyed, not dreaming that that atheist would be himself; mystics, whose party, largely made up of students and women marching under the banner of MM. Lamennais, Quinet, Leroux, and others, has taken for a motto, "Like master, like man;" like God, like people; and, to regulate the wages of the workingman, begins by restoring religion; spiritualists, who, should I overlook the rights of spirit, would accuse me of establishing the worship of matter, against which I protest with all the strength of my soul; sensualists and materialists, to whom the divine dogma is the symbol of constraint and the principle of enslavement of the passions, outside of which, they say, there is for man neither pleasure, nor virtue, nor genius; eclectics and sceptics, sellers and publishers of all the old philosophies, but not philosophers themselves, united in one vast brotherhood, with approbation and privilege, against whoever thinks, believes, or affirms without their permission; conservatives finally, retrogressives, egotists, and hypocrites, preaching the love of God by hatred of their neighbor, attributing to liberty the world's misfortunes since the deluge, and scandalizing reason by their foolishness.
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