Theism

A PRIORI THEISTIC PROOFI

The arguments which we have been considering are not merely proofs that God is, but indications of what He is. They testify to the Divine existence by exhibiting the Divine character. They are expressions of how He manifests Himself, and expositions of how we apprehend His self-manifestations. We have seen that against each of them various objections have been urged, but that these objections when examined do not approve themselves to reason; they leave the arguments against which they have been thrown quite unshaken. These arguments, however, although perfectly conclusive so far as they go, do not, even in combination, yield us the full idea of God which is entertained wherever theism prevails. They show Him to be the First Cause of the world – the Source of all the power, wisdom, and goodness displayed therein. They do not prove Him to be infinite, eternal, absolute in being and perfection. Yet it cannot be questioned that the cultivated human mind thinks of God as the absolute, infinite, eternal, perfect First Cause, and that no lower idea of God can satisfy it. The intellect cannot accept, and the heart also revolts against, the thought that God is dependent on any antecedent or higher Being; that He is limited to a portion either of time or space; or that He is devoid of any excellence, deficient in any perfection. Such a thought is rejected as at once utterly unworthy of its object, and inherently inconsistent.

Are we, then, rationally warranted to assign to God those attributes which are called absolute or incommunicable? This is the question we have now to answer. What has been proved makes it comparatively easy to establish what is still unproved. We have ascertained that there is a God, the First Cause of the universe, the powerful, wise, good, and righteous Author of all things. We are conscious, also, that we have ideas of infinity, eternity, necessary existence, perfection, &c. We may be doubtful as to whence we got these ideas – we may feel that there is very much which is vague and perplexing in them; but we cannot question or deny that we have them. Having them, no matter how or whence we have got them, and knowing that God is, as also in a measure what He is, the remaining question for us is, Must these ideas apply to God or not? Must the First Cause be thought of as eternal or not – as infinite or finite, as perfect or imperfect? Reason, after it has reached a certain stage of culture, has never found this a difficult question. Indeed, often even before freeing itself from polytheism, it has been internally constrained to ascribe to some of the objects of adoration those very attributes of eternity, infinity, and perfection which polytheism implicitly denies. Once it has come to believe that the universe has its origin in a rational and righteous creative Will, it can hardly refuse to admit that that Will must be infinite and eternal. Where it has rejected polytheism without accepting theism, it has been forced to acknowledge the world itself to be infinite and eternal. When it has risen beyond the world, when it has reached an intelligent cause of the world, it cannot, of course, refuse to that cause the perfections which it would have granted to the effect – to the Creator what it would have attributed to the creation. The first and ultimate Being, and not any derived and dependent Being, must obviously be the infinite, eternal, and perfect Being.

The proof that God is absolute in being and perfection should, it seems to me, not precede but follow the proofs that there is a cause sufficiently powerful, wise, and good to account for physical nature, the mind of man, and the course of history. The usual mode of conducting the theistic argumentation has been the reverse; it has been to begin by endeavouring to prove, from principles held to be intuitive and ideas held to be innate, the necessary existence, absolute perfection, infinity, and eternity of God; or, in other words, with what is called the a priori or ontological arguments. This mode of procedure seems to me neither judicious nor effective. If we have not established that there is a God by reasoning from facts, we must demonstrate His existence from ideas: but to get from the ideal to the actual may be impossible, and is certain to be difficult; whereas, if we have allowed facts to teach us all that they legitimately can about the existence, power, wisdom, and righteousness of God, it may be easy to show that our ideas of absolute being and perfection must apply to Him, and can only apply to Him.

Theism, according to the view now expressed, is not vitally interested in the fate of the so-called a priori or ontological arguments. There may be serious defects in all these arguments, considered as formal demonstrations, and yet the conclusion which it is their aim to establish may be in no way compromised. It may be that the principles on which they rest do not directly involve the existence of God, and yet that they certainly, although indirectly, imply it, so that whoever denies it is rationally bound to set aside the fundamental conditions of thought, and to deem consciousness essentially delusive. It may be that the a priori arguments are faulty as logical evolutions of the truth of the Divine existence from ultimate and necessary conceptions, and yet that they concur in manifesting that if God be not, the human mind is of its very nature self-contradictory; that God can only be disbelieved in at the cost of reducing the whole world of thought to a chaos. Whether this be the case or not, some of the a priori proofs are so celebrated that I cannot pass them over in entire silence.47

There is a charge which has been very often brought against the a priori proofs, but which may be at once set aside as incorrect. It has been alleged that they proceed on forgetfulness of the truth that the Divine existence is the first and highest reality, and therefore cannot be demonstrated from anything prior to or higher than itself. But in no case that I know of have those who adopted what they supposed to be the a priori line of argument been under the delusion that the ground of the existence of God was not in Himself, but in something outside of or above Himself, from which His existence could be deduced. Such a notion is, in fact, so self-contradictory, that no sane mind could deliberately entertain it. It would imply that theism could be founded on atheism. Whatever a priori proof of the Divine existence may be, it has certainly never been imagined by those who employed it to be demonstration from an antecedent necessary cause.48

A priori proof is proof which proceeds from primary and necessary principles of thought. From its very nature it could only appear at a comparatively late period in the history of intelligence. It is only a profound study of the constitution of thought, only a refined reflective analysis of consciousness into its elements, which can bring to light the principles which necessarily underlie and govern all intellectual activity; and it is only on these principles that a priori proof is based. As these principles never exist in an absolutely pure form, as what is universal and necessary in thought is never found wholly apart from what is particular and contingent, no absolutely pure a priori argumentation need be looked for, and certainly none such can be discovered in the whole history of speculation.

Plato was, perhaps, the first to attempt to prove the existence of God from the essential principles of knowledge. He could not consistently reason from the impressions of sense or the phenomena of the visible world. He denied that sense is knowledge, and that visible things can be more than images and indications of truth. He maintained, however, that besides the visible world there is an intelligible world, with objects which reason sees and not sense. These objects are either conceptions or ideas, either hypothetical principles or absolute principles, either scientific assumptions and definitions or necessary and eternal truths which have their reality and evidence in themselves. The mathematical sciences deal with conceptions; but their chief value, according to Plato, is that they help the mind to rise to that absolute science – dialectics – which is conversant with ideas. The apprehension of ideas is the apprehension of the common element in the manifold, the universal in the individual, the permanent in the mutable. Reason contemplates ideas, and participates in ideas, and ideas are at once the essences of things and the regulative principles of cognition. By communion with them the reason reaches objective reality and possesses subjective certainty. They are not isolated and unconnected, but so related that each higher idea comprehends within it several lower ones, and that all combined constitute a graduated series or articulated organism, unified and completed by an idea which has none higher than itself, which is ultimate, which conditions all the others while it is conditioned by none. The supreme idea, which contains in itself all other ideas, is absolute truth, absolute beauty, absolute good, absolute intelligence, and absolute being. It is the source of all true existence, knowledge, and excellence. It is God. In this part of its course the dialectic of Plato is simply a search for God. It is a priori inasmuch as it rests on necessary ideas, but a posteriori inasmuch as it proceeds from these ideas upwards to God in a manner which is essentially analytic and inductive. Only when God – the principle of principles – is reached, can it become synthetic and deductive.

The question, Is the Platonic proof of the Divine existence substantially true? is precisely equivalent to the question, Is the Platonic philosophy substantially true? Of course, I cannot here attempt to argue a theme so vast as Spiritualism versus Empiricism, Platonism versus Positivism. My belief, however, is, that Platonism is substantially true; that the objections which the empiricism and positivism at present prevalent urge against its fundamental positions are superficial and insufficient; that what is essential in its theory of ideas, and in the theism inseparable from that theory, must abide with our race for ever as a priceless possession. The Platonic argument – by which is meant not a particular argument incidentally employed by Plato, but the reasoning which underlies and pervades his entire philosophy as a speculative search for certainty – has been transmitted from age to age down to the present day by a long series of eminent thinkers. Augustine, for example, argues for the existence of God from the very nature of truth. It is impossible to think that there is no truth. If there were none, to affirm that there was none would be itself true; or, in other words, the denial of the existence of truth is a self-contradiction. But what is truth? It is not mere sensuous perception, not a something which belongs to the individual mind and varies with its moods and peculiarities, but a something which is unsensuous, unchangeable, and universal. The human reason changes and errs in its judgments; but ideas, necessary truths, are not the products, but the laws and conditions, of the human reason – they are over it, and it is only through apprehending, realising, and obeying them, that it enlightens and regulates our nature. These ideas – the laws of our intellectual and moral constitution – cannot have their source in us, but must be eternally inherent in an eternal, unchangeable, and perfect Being. This Being – the absolute truth and ultimate ground of all goodness – is God. Anselm reasoned in altogether the same spirit and in nearly the same manner. In one of his works he institutes an inquiry as to whether the goodness in good actions is or is not the same thing present in all; and when he has convinced himself that it is the same thing, he asks, What is it? and where has it a real existence? Ascending upwards by these stages, Good is; Good is perfect; Good is one; the one perfect Good is God, – he comes to the conclusion that the goodness constitutive of good actions has necessarily its source in God, and that the absolutely and essentially good is identical with God. In another of his works he similarly inquires whether there is any truth except mere actual existence. He holds that there is, and argues, as he had done before in regard to the good, that the absolute and ultimate truth must be God. Thomas Aquinas was at one with Anselm thus far. The very nature of knowledge seemed to him to show that it was in man only through the dependence of the human intelligence on an underived and perfect intelligence.

Among the many modern philosophers who have adopted and enforced the same doctrine I shall refer only to a few. Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the founder of English deism, is very explicit on the subject. He thought of the human mind as united in the closest and most comprehensive way to the Divine mind through the universal notions of what he called the rational instinct. These notions are the laws which every faculty is meant to conform to and obey – the laws of all thought, affection, and action. As to nature and origin, they are, in Herbert's view, Divine; thoughts of God present in the mind of man; true revelations of the Father of spirits to His children. In apprehending one of them we have truly an intuition of a Divine attribute, of some feature of the Divine character. It is through contact, through communion with the Divine Intelligence, Love, and Will, that we know and feel and act. The Divine is the root and the law of human thought, emotion, and conduct. Not afar off, not to be realised by great stretch of intellect, not separated by innumerable existences which intervene between Him and us, but close around us, yea, with nothing between Him and our inmost souls, is the Being with whom we have to do. "In Him," really and without any figure of speech, "we live, and move, and have our being."

Among the various metaphysical proofs of Divine existence employed by Cudworth, one is in like manner founded on the very nature of knowledge. Knowledge, it is argued, is possible only through ideas which have their source in an eternal reason. Sense is not only not the whole of knowledge, but is in itself not at all knowledge; it is wholly relative and individual, and not knowledge until the mind adds to it what is absolute and universal. Knowledge does not begin with what is individual, but with what is universal. The individual is known by being brought under a universal, instead of the universal being gathered from a multitude of individuals. And these universals or ideas which underlie all the knowledge of all men, which originate it and do not originate in it, have existed eternally in the only mode in which truths can be said to be eternal, in an eternal mind. They come to us from an eternal mind, which is their proper home, and of which human reason is an emanation. "From whence it cometh to pass, that all minds, in the several places and ages of the world, have ideas or notions of things exactly alike, and truths indivisibly the same. Truths are not multiplied by the diversity of minds that apprehend them; because they are all but ectypal participations of one and the same original or archetypal mind and truth. As the same face may be reflected in several glasses; and the image of the same sun may be in a thousand eyes at once beholding it; and one and the same voice may be in a thousand ears listening to it: so when innumerable created minds have the same ideas of things, and understand the same truths, it is but one and the same eternal light that is reflected in them all ('that light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world,') or the same voice of that one everlasting Word that is never silent, re-echoed by them."

Malebranche's celebrated theory of "seeing all things in God" is but an exaggeration of the doctrine that "God is the light of all our seeing." It found a zealous English defender in John Norris of Bemerton. According to Malebranche and Norris, all objects are seen or understood through ideas, which derive their existence neither from the senses nor from the operations of the mind itself but are created in us by the Deity; and which are not drawn from contemplation of the perfections of the soul, but are inherent in the Divine nature. Better guarded statements of the Platonic argument from necessary ideas will be found in Leibnitz, and Bossuet, and Fenelon.

In the hands of Cousin more was again attempted to be deduced from it than it could legitimately yield. We may reject, however, his opinion that reason is not individual or personal, without rejecting with it the substance at least of what he has so eloquently said regarding the necessary ideas which govern the reason, or the reasoning by which he seeks to show that truth is incomprehensible without God, and that all thought implies a spontaneous faith in God. The most recent defenders of theism employ in one form or another the same argument. In the works of Ulrici, Hettinger, and Luthardt, of Saisset and Simon, of Thompson and Tulloch, it still holds a prominent place.

I pass from it to indicate the character of some other arguments, which are of a much more formal nature, but which have by no means commanded so wide an assent. In fact, the arguments to which I now refer have never laid hold of the common reason of men. They are the ingenious constructions of highly-gifted metaphysicians, and have awakened much interest in a certain number of speculative minds, but they have not contributed in any considerable degree either to the maintenance or the diffusion of theistic belief, and have had no lengthened continuous history. They obviously stand, therefore, on a very different footing from the proofs which have already been adduced – proofs which are as catholic as the conclusions which they support, or as any of the doctrines of the Christian system.

The Stoic philosopher Cleanthes, author of the famous Hymn to Zeus, argued that every comparison, in affirming or denying one thing to be better than another, implied and presupposed the existence of a superlative or an absolutely good and perfect Being. Centuries later, Boethius had recourse to nearly identical reasoning. It is only, he maintained, through the idea of perfection that we can judge anything to be imperfect; and the consciousness or perception of imperfection leads reason necessarily to believe that there is a perfect existence – one than whom a better cannot be conceived – God. Cleanthes and Boethius were thus the precursors of Anselm, who was, however, the first to endeavour to show that from the very idea of God as the highest Being His necessary reality may be strictly deduced. In consequence, Anselm was the founder of that kind of argumentation which, in the opinion of many, is alone entitled to be described as a priori or ontological. He reasoned thus: "The fool may say in his heart, There is no God; but he only proves thereby that he is a fool, for what he says is self-contradictory. Since he denies that there is a God, he has in his mind the idea of God, and that idea implies the existence of God, for it is the idea of a Being than which a higher cannot be conceived. That than which a higher cannot be conceived cannot exist merely as an idea, because what exists merely as an idea is inferior to what exists in reality as well as in idea. The idea of a highest Being which exists merely in thought, is the idea of a highest Being which is not the highest even in thought, but inferior to a highest Being which exists in fact as well as in thought." This reasoning found unfavourable critics even among the contemporaries of Anselm, and has commended itself completely to few. Yet it may fairly be doubted whether it has been conclusively refuted, and some of the objections most frequently urged against it are certainly inadmissible. It is no answer to it, for example, to deny that the idea of God is innate or universal. The argument merely assumes that he who denies that there is a God must have an idea of God. There is also no force, as Anselm showed, in the objection of Gaunilo, that the existence of God can no more be inferred from the idea of a perfect being, than the existence of a perfect island is to be inferred from the idea of such an island. There neither is nor can be an idea of an island which is greater and better than any other that can ever be conceived. Anselm could safely promise that he would make Gaunilo a present of such an island when he had really imagined it. Only one being – an infinite, independent, necessary being – can be perfect in the sense of being greater and better than every other conceivable being. The objection that the ideal can never logically yield the real – that the transition from thought to fact must be in every instance illegitimate – is merely an assertion that the argument is fallacious. It is an assertion which cannot fairly be made until the argument has been exposed and refuted. The argument is that a certain thought of God is found necessarily to imply His existence. The objection that existence is not a predicate, and that the idea of a God who exists is not more complete and perfect than the idea of a God who does not exist, is, perhaps, not incapable of being satisfactorily repelled. Mere existence is not a predicate, but specifications or determinations of existence are predicable. Now the argument nowhere implies that existence is a predicate; it implies only that reality, necessity, and independence of existence are predicates of existence; and it implies this on the ground that existence in re can be distinguished from existence in conceptu, necessary from contingent existence, self-existence from derived existence. Specific distinctions must surely admit of being predicated. That the exclusion of existence – which here means real and necessary existence – from the idea of God does not leave us with an incomplete idea of God, is not a position, I think, which can be maintained. Take away existence from among the elements in the idea of a perfect being, and the idea becomes either the idea of a nonentity or the idea of an idea, and not the idea of a perfect being at all. Thus, the argument of Anselm is unwarrantably represented as an argument of four terms instead of three. Those who urge the objection seem to me to prove only that if our thought of God be imperfect, a being who merely realised that thought would be an imperfect being; but there is a vast distance between this truism and the paradox that an unreal being may be an ideally perfect being.

The Cartesian proofs have been much and keenly discussed. The one which founds on the fact of our existence and its limitations is manifestly a posteriori. The other two both proceed from the idea of a perfect being. The first is, that the idea of an all-perfect and unlimited being is involved in the very consciousness of imperfection and limitation. The imperfect can only be seen in the light of the perfect; the finite cannot be conceived of except in relation to the infinite. But can a finite and imperfect cause – like the human mind or the outward world – be reasonably supposed to originate the idea of an infinite and perfect being? Descartes holds that it cannot; that the idea of an infinite and perfect being can only be explained by the existence and operation of such a being. Was he correct in this judgment? Perhaps not; but what has been urged in refutation of it is probably by no means conclusive. It has been said that the ideas of infinity and perfection are mere generalisations from experience. But this is a statement which can only be proved on the principles of sensationalism, and never has been proved. It has been likewise said that these ideas are purely subjective, or, in other words, that there may be nothing whatever to correspond to them. But this is a meaningless collocation of words. No finite mind can conceive the infinite, for example, as within itself at all. The human mind can only think of the infinite as without itself. If the infinite be not objective, the idea of the infinite is false and delusive. The infinite, it has been further objected, means merely what is not finite; and the perfect what is not imperfect. So be it; the argument is as valid if the words be taken in that sense as in any other. Only do not add, as some do, that the perfect and the imperfect, the finite and the infinite, are mere verbal correlatives. Such a proposition can be spoken, but it cannot be thought; and it is most undesirable to divorce thought from speech. It has also been urged that all men have not the idea of perfection; that different men have different ideas thereof; and that in each man who possesses it the idea is constantly changing. This must be granted; but it does not affect the argument, which is founded on the existence of the idea of a perfect being, and not on the perfection of the idea itself.