Varieties of Religious Experience: a study in Human Nature, Centenary Edition

PHILOSOPHY

339

reasons would be in duty bound to show more general convincing-

ness. Causation is indeed too obscure a principle to bear the weight

of  the  whole  structure  of  theology.  As  for  the  argument  from

design, see how Darwinian ideas have revolutionized it. Conceived

as we now conceive them, as so many fortunate escapes from almost

limitless processes of destruction, the benevolent adaptations which

we find in Nature suggest a deity very different from the one who

figured  in  the  earlier  versions  of  the  argument.

1

  The  fact  is  that

1

It  must  not  be  forgotten  that  any  form  of  disorder  in  the  world  might,  by  the  design

argument, suggest a God for just that kind of disorder. The truth is that any state of things

whatever that can be named is logically susceptible of teleological interpretation. The ruins

of the earthquake at Lisbon, for example: the whole of past history had to be planned exactly

as  it  was  to  bring  about  in  the  fullness  of  time  just  that  particular  arrangement  of  débris

of  masonry,  furniture,  and  once  living  bodies.  No  other  train  of  causes  would  have  been

sufficient. And so of any other arrangement, bad or good, which might as a matter of fact be

found resulting anywhere from previous conditions. To avoid such pessimistic consequences

and  save  its  beneficent  designer,  the  design  argument  accordingly  invokes  two  other  prin-

ciples, restrictive in their operation. The first is physical: Nature’s forces tend of their own

accord only to disorder and destruction, to heaps of ruins, not to architecture. This principle,

though  plausible  at  first  sight,  seems,  in  the  light  of  recent  biology,  to  be  more  and  more

improbable. The second principle is one of anthropomorphic interpretation. No arrangement

that for us is “disorderly” can possibly have been an object of design at all. This principle is

of course a mere assumption in the interests of anthropomorphic Theism.

When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or the other, one sees

that order and disorder, as we now recognize them, are purely human inventions. We are inter-

ested in certain types of arrangement, useful, æsthetic, or moral, — so interested that whenever

we find them realized, the fact emphatically rivets our attention. The result is that we work

over  the  contents  of  the  world  selectively.  It  is  overflowing  with  disorderly  arrangements

from our point of view, but order is the only thing we care for and look at, and by choosing, one

can always find some sort of orderly arrangement in the midst of any chaos. If I should throw

down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient

number of them, leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me,

and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the

other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature are just

like this. She is a vast plenum in which our attention draws capricious lines in innumerable

directions. We count and name whatever lies upon the special lines we trace, whilst the other

things and the untraced lines are neither named nor counted. There are in reality infinitely

more things “unadapted” to each other in this world than there are things “adapted”; infinitely

more things with irregular relations than with regular relations between them. But we look for

the regular kind of thing exclusively, and ingeniously discover and preserve it in our memory.

It accumulates with other regular kinds, until the collection of them fills our encyclopædias.

Yet all the while between and around them lies an infinite anonymous chaos of objects that

no one ever thought of together, of relations that never yet attracted our attention.

The  facts  of  order  from  which  the  physico-theological  argument  starts  are  thus  easily

susceptible of interpretation as arbitrary human products. So long as this is the case, although

of course no argument against God follows, it follows that the argument for him will fail to

constitute a knockdown proof of his existence. It will be convincing only to those who on

other grounds believe in him already.

---

340THE  VARIETIES  OF  RELIGIOUS  EXPERIENCE

these  arguments  do  but  follow  the  combined  suggestions  of  the

facts and of our feeling. They prove nothing rigorously. They only

corroborate our preexistent partialities.

If  philosophy  can  do  so  little  to  establish  God’s  existence,  how

stands it with her efforts to define his attributes? It is worth while

to look at the attempts of systematic theology in this direction.

Since God is First Cause, this science of sciences says, he differs from all

his creatures in possessing existence a se. From this “a-se-ity” on God’s part,

theology deduces by mere logic most of his other perfections. For instance,

he must be both necessary and absolute, cannot not be, and cannot in any

way be determined by anything else. This makes Him absolutely unlimited

from without, and unlimited also from within; for limitation is non-being;

and God is being itself. This unlimitedness makes God infinitely perfect.

Moreover, God is One, and Only, for the infinitely perfect can admit no

peer. He is Spiritual, for were He composed of physical parts, some other

power would have to combine them into the total, and his aseity would thus

be contradicted. He is therefore both simple and non-physical in nature.

He  is  simple  metaphysically  also,  that  is  to  say,  his  nature  and  his  exist-

ence cannot be distinct, as they are in finite substances which share their

formal natures with one another, and are individual only in their material

aspect. Since God is one and only, his essentia and his esse must be given

at one stroke. This excludes from his being all those distinctions, so familiar

in the world of finite things, between potentiality and actuality, substance

and accidents, being and activity, existence and attributes. We can talk, it

is true, of God’s powers, acts, and attributes, but these discriminations are

only “virtual,” and made from the human point of view. In God all these

points of view fall into an absolute identity of being.

This  absence  of  all  potentiality  in  God  obliges  Him  to  be  immutable.

He is actuality, through and through. Were there anything potential about

Him,  He  would  either  lose  or  gain  by  its  actualization,  and  either  loss

or  gain  would  contradict  his  perfection.  He  cannot,  therefore,  change.

Furthermore, He is immense, boundless; for could He be outlined in space,

He  would  be  composite,  and  this  would  contradict  his  indivisibility.  He

is  therefore  omnipresent,  indivisibly  there,  at  every  point  of  space.  He  is

similarly wholly present at every point of time, — in other words eternal.

For  if  He  began  in  time,  He  would  need  a  prior  cause,  and  that  would

contradict his aseity. If He ended, it would contradict his necessity. If He

went through any succession, it would contradict his immutability.

He  has  intelligence  and  will  and  every  other  creature-perfection,  for  we

have them, and effectus nequit superare causam. In Him, however, they are

---