By Rev. Thomas Whitelaw. M.A., D.D., Kilmarnock, Scotland.
Whether or not there is a supreme personal intelligence, infinite and eternal, omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, the Creator, upholder and ruler of the universe, immanent in and yet transcending all things, gracious and merciful, the Father and Redeemer of mankind, is surely the profoundest problem that can agitate the human mind. Lying as it does at the foundation of all man’s religious beliefs - as to responsibility and duty, sin and salvation, immortality and future blessedness, as to the possibility of a revelation, of an incarnation, of a resurrection, as to the value of prayer, the credibility of miracle, the reality of providence, - with the reply given to it are bound up not alone the temporal and eternal happiness of the individual, but also the welfare and progress of the race. Nevertheless, to it have been returned the most varied responses.
The Atheist, for example, asserts that there is no God. The Agnostic professes that he cannot tell whether there is a God or not. The Materialist boasts that he does not need a God, that he can run the universe without one. The (Bible) Fool wishes there was no God. The Christian answers that he cannot do without a God.
I. THE ANSWER OF THE ATHEIST
”THERE IS NO GOD”
In these days it will hardly do to pass by this bold and confident negation by simply saying that the theoretical atheist is an altogether exceptional specimen of humanity, and that his audacious utterance is as much the outcome of ignorance as of impiety. When one meets in the “Hibbert Journal” from the pen of its editor such a statement as this: “Society abounds with earnest and educated persons who have lost faith in a living personal God, and see their fellows and foresee themselves passing out of life entirely without hope,” and when Blatchford in the English “Clarion” writes: “There is no Heavenly Father watching tenderly over us, His creatures, He is the baseless shadow of a wistful dream,” it becomes apparent that theoretical atheism is not extinct, even in cultured circles, and that some observations with regard to it may still be needful. Let these observations be the following:
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Belief that there is no God does not amount to a demonstration that no God is. Neither, it is true, does belief that God is, prove the truth of the proposition except to the individual in whose heart that belief has been awakened by the Divine Spirit. To another than him it is destitute of weight as an argument in support of the theistic position. At the same time it is of importance, while conceding this, to emphasize the fact that disbelief in the existence of a Divine Being is not equivalent to a demonstration that there is no God.
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Such a demonstration is from the nature of the case impossible. Here again it may be true as Kant contends that reason cannot demonstrate (that is, by logic) the existence of God; but it is equally true, as the same philosopher admits, that reason can just as little disprove the existence of God. It was well observed by the late Prof. Calderwood of the Edinburgh University that “the divine existence is a truth so plain that it needs no proof, as it is a truth so high that it admits of none.” But the situation is altered when it comes to a positive denial of that existence. The idea of God once formed in the mind, whether as an intuition or as a deduction, cannot be laid aside without convincing evidence that it is delusive and unreal. And such evidence cannot be produced. As Dr. Chalmers long ago observed, before one can positively assert that there is no God, he must arrogate to himself the wisdom and ubiquity of God. He must explore the entire circuit of the universe to be sure that no God is there. He must have interrogated all the generations of mankind and all the hierarchies of heaven to be certain they had never heard of a God.
In short, as Chalmers puts it, “For man not to know God, he has only to sink beneath the level of our common nature. But to deny God he must be God himself.”
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Denial of the divine existence is not warranted by inability to discern traces of God’s presence in the universe. Prof. Huxley, who once described himself in a letter to Charles Kingsley as “exactly what the Christian world called, and, so far as he could judge, was justified in calling him, an atheist and infidel,” appeared to think it was. “I cannot see,” he wrote, “one shadow or tittle of evidence that the Great Unknown underlying the phenomena of the universe stands to us in the relation of a Father, loves us and cares for us as Christianity asserts.” Blatchford also with equal emphasis affirms: “I cannot believe that God is a personal God who interferes in human affairs. I cannot see in science, or in experience, or in history, any signs of such a God or of such intervention.” Neither of these writers, however, it may be presumed, would on reflection advance their incapacity to perceive the foot-prints or hear the voices of the Creator as proof that no Creator existed, any more than a blind man would maintain there was no sun because he could not see it, or a deaf man would contend there was no sound because he never heard it. The incapacity of Huxley and Blatchford to either see or hear God may, and no doubt does, serve as an explanation of their atheistical creed, but assuredly it is no justification of the same, since a profounder reasoner than either has said: “The invisible things of God since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even His everlasting power and divinity; so that they [who believe not] are without excuse.”
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The majority of mankind, not in Christian countries only, but also in heathen lands, from the beginning of the world onward, have believed in the existence of a Supreme Being. They may frequently, as Paul says, have “changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds and four-footed beasts and creeping things;” but deeply seated in their natures, debased though these were by sin, lay the conception of a Superhuman Power to whom they owed allegiance and whose favor was indispensable to their happiness. It was a saying of Plutarch that in his day a man might travel the world over without finding a city without temples and gods; in our day isolated cases have been cited of tribes - the Andaman Islanders by Sir John Lubbock, and the Fuegians, by Admiral Fitzroy - who have exhibited no signs that they possessed a knowledge either of God or of religion. But it is at least open to question whether the investigators on whose testimony such instances are advanced did not fail to discover traces of what they sought either through want of familiarity with the language of the natives, or through starting with the presupposition that the religious conceptions of the natives must be equally exalted with their own. In any case, on the principle that exceptions prove the rule, it may be set down as incontrovertible that the vast majority of mankind have possessed some idea of a Supreme Being; so that if the truth or falsehood of the proposition, “There is no God,” is to be determined by the counting of votes, the question is settled in the negative, that is, against the atheist’s creed.