The Need and Possibility of Demonstrating God's Existence

A demonstration is not a simple synonym for proof. For a proof may be compelling, or convincing, or merely persuading. But a demonstration is always a compelling proof. It is a proof “to the eyes” as an eloquent Latin expression has it,—not, of course, that it is limited to the universe of things visible to bodily eyes. When the teacher of history informs the schoolboy that Columbus discovered America in 1492, there is, if the lad be skeptical, a wealth of proof avail-

GOD’S EXISTENCE A TRUTH able, but there is no demonstrating the truth in question. Of its nature, it is something that depends on statements and documents and the word of man. It is not something that, given objective data to examine, the mind sees to be inevitable, as, for example, the mind sees that the sum of two and two is inevitable. But the teacher of geometry has no need to call witnesses and to adduce the testimony of reliable documents for the purpose of convincing the doubting pupil that the angles of a triangle come to 1800. This is a truth that can be reasoned out so thoroughly and completely that the person who understands every step of the process is compelled to recognize it. And only such a compelling proof is entitled in strict justice to the name demonstration. Now, do we require a demonstration for the truth of God’s existence? We do unless that truth is selfevident. For there are two sorts of truths that do not require demonstration. One is the sort of truth already considered in reference to the history lesson, in which demonstration is not required because it does not apply and indeed is not available. The other sort of truth that does not need demonstration is the truth that is inevitably recognized at first glance (or intuitively, by immediate or direct grasp, as philosophers say). You cannot, for example, demonstrate your own existence and so compel yourself to recognize the fact that you are here. For demonstration is always a process of analyzing the subject to be proved, of getting it down to terms of its simple elements, and of seeing how these inevitably fit together. But your own existence is itself a simple and an elemental thing, not subject to further analysis. You have a direct and an intuitive grasp of it; it obtrudes itself upon your acceptance so inescapably that even if you deny it you affirm it. Try to deny your own existence, and to express the denial in intelligible terms. You may say, “I do not exist.” But why then do you say “I” ? What you have said amounts to this, “Tm here to say I’m not here.” If you really doubt your own existence (or any self-evident truth) you must lapse into complete and endless silence, and, in the dark despair of your non-existent mind, you must forever admit that even your doubts are non-existent. Thus there are truths so simple and inescapable that the moment we understand the terms in which they are expressed (whether these be mental terms or speechterms) we understand the necessary connection of the terms and are forced to acknowledge, and to understand, that what they express is necessarily true. Such truths are called self-evident. Now, manifestly, the existence of God is not a thing to be proved to us by historical documents. Indirectly, of course, all human history is a proof of an existing and provident God. But directly, and considered absolutely or in itself, the existence of God cannot be a mere historical truth like the discovery of America in 1492. Is it, then, a self-evident truth? If so, it needs no demonstration.

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If we consult our own experience, each of us will doubtless say at once, “I learned the truth of God’s existence, first from my mother’s teaching, and later by noticing that the world and all things in it require an accounting First Cause.” We may all truly say (omitting consideration of the divine gift of faith) that our natural or human knowledge of God has its origin in human reason dealing with the objective world about us. Reason approved the acceptance of early instruction from those whose constant care and love made us certain that they would not mislead or deceive us in a matter of the utmost importance. Reason later recognized the more direct evidence for God’s existence, presented by the existence of creatures and an ordered universe. Hence, so experience testifies, the truth of God’s existence is not something obtruded upon senses or mind as selfevident. It is something that has to be learned. It is a truth to be reasoned out, directly or indirectly. Therefore, we say, the truth of God’s existence is not selfevident, but requires demonstration. Yet there is a subtle consideration to be made before we declare with finality that the truth of God’s existence is not a self-evident truth. It is this: God exists necessarily, for He is all-perfect, and involves in Himself the perfection called existence. Existence is of His very essence and nature. Therefore, to a mind that thoroughly understands the whole meaning of the idea God, the note of existence is evidently conZ2 tained in it; the proposition “Cod is an Existent Being” is one in which the subject demands the predicate, for it contains it; and a mind capable of instantly analyzing the subject would know the predicate too; thus the proposition, to such a mind, would be selfevident. But the human mind is not such a mind. As we shall presently see, we build up our idea of God by the laborious process of mental abstraction, and while the building is wholly justified by fact, and is in no sense the figment or fictional creation of the mind, it is, none the less, a process that involves attention, abstraction, analysis, synthesis, reasoning. It is an idea that is worked out by the mind from the data of experience, and is not intuitively grasped. And even when the idea has been formed, it is not necessarily present to the mind with that degree of distinctness and detail which would make every thought of God a keen realization of His necessary existence. A man may have the clear idea of God, and may fully acknowledge God as actual, and may make God, as indeed he should, the whole goal of his activity and his life, and yet not advert directly to the fact that God, who exists, has got to exist. The note of God’s necessity may be entirely overlooked even by the mind that has a clear and fully usable idea of God. Therefore we say that while the proposition, “God is an Existent Being” is self-evident in itself, and would be known with absolute certitude, not needing or admitting demonstration, by a mind adequate to understand its

GOD’S EXISTENCE A TRUTH subject in the fullest and completes! and most instantaneous manner, yet this proposition is not selfevident to the limited human mind, and, for that mind, it is a proposition which both admits and requires demonstration. In other words, we say that the proposition in question is self-evident in itself, but not selfevident to the human mind. To use the old Latin formula, the proposition is per se nota quoad se but not per se nota quoad nos, “self-evident in itself, but not self-evident to us.” Out of the fact that the truth of God’s existence is self-evident in itself a certain confusion can arise in the mind that is not acutely attentive, and a mistaken conviction may be evoked that God’s existence can actually be proved by the fact that we have the idea of God. St. Anselm (1033-1109), a philosopher and theologian of wondrous mentality, was not prevented by his great natural gifts from making this mistake. He elaborated the so-called ontological argument for God’s existence, and he was followed in it by Descartes (1596-1650), Leibnitz (1646-1716), and Spinoza (1632-1677), each of whom gave the argument a special phrasing and shading of his own. St. Anselm, however, may be regarded as the originator of the famous argument, and it has intrigued many since his time. He was fully aware of the compelling nature of the usual demonstration of God’s existence, a demonstration which proceeds from the created and contingent universe to the increate and necessary

First Cause. But he believed that another true argument could be developed, which would proceed from the concept or idea of God in the human mind to the actual existence of God. His argument may be stated thus: Everyone understands by God the most perfect Being that the human mind can think of; but, if God does not really exist, then He is not the most perfect Being thinkable, for He lacks the perfection called existence: therefore, God must exist. The argument is not valid. Its conclusion is not justified by its premisses. Let us restate it, drawing the only allowable conclusion, and we shall see the fallacy of the original form : God is the most perfect Being we can think of; But the most perfect Being we can think of must be thought of as existing; Therefore, God must be thought of as existing.

Manifestly, we can grant this conclusion and still have no valid proof that God, who must be thought of as existing is, in fact, actually existing outside thought. The argument as proposed by St. Anselm involves a “jump” from the order of thinking to the order of actual being, and Logic condemns as fallacious any argument with such a gap or jump in its structure. Still, we must not think that St. Anselm or any of the notable defenders of this intriguing ontological argument were so childish as to suppose that the mere thought of anything is valid proof for its existence. One of St. Anselm’s early critics had this

GOD’S EXISTENCE A TRUTH silly notion, and he sought to upset the ontological argument by reducing it to an absurdity. He proposed the following argument as paralleling the ontological argument, which, of course, it does not do at all: I have an idea of a most beautiful and perfect island; But it is not the idea of a most beautiful and perfect island unless the island actually exists; Therefore, the island of which I have an idea actually exists.

St. Anselm treated this argument with the contempt it deserves. For he was speaking of the infinite Being, of that one and only Being which has existence as one of the phases or notes or component elements of its idea in the mind. Of no finite being, such as an island, can necessary existence be predicated, since the perfection of such a being is always limited and relative (despite the fact that one calls it “most beautiful” and “most perfect”), and existence does not enter into its adequate idea or concept. But, as we have seen, the human mind is not capable of an intuitive and adequate concept of God as the necessary Being (but derives its idea of God from the intuitively formed ideas of finite things in the sense-world around us) and so, even in the case of the infinite Being, the ontological argument, based on human knowledge, is not valid. Our idea of God as the necessary Being, that is, the Being which necessarily exists, is reasoned knowledge, and the idea itself is not evidence of the existence of its object; this evidence is found in the objective reasonZ6 ing that justified us in forming the idea. Hence it appears that reasoning, the working out of demonstration, is still required for the truth of God’s existence to which the human mind assents; nor is the ontological argument a valid demonstration. Thomas Reid (1710-1796) and his followers in the so-called “Scottish School of Common Sense” declared that no demonstration of God’s existence is needed because we have a certain equipment of intellectual judgments that are instinctively formed, and these neither require nor admit demonstration; and among such necessitated judgments is the judgment, “God exists.” Something of the same sort is the doctrine of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) who taught that practical reason makes us acknowledge the existence of God as an inevitable fact, although the thinking mind (or theorizing reason) cannot work out a true proof for it. Then there is the sentimentalist doctrine of Friedrich Jacobi (1743—1819) which holds that man has a natural longing for God and a natural affection for virtuous living, and by force of this feeling he is inescapably aware of religious and moral truths and needs no rational demonstration to support the certainty with which he holds them. To Reid and Kant we may say that a blind instinct cannot be one and the same as the intellect or reason which struggles ever for light and for evidence; the instinct theory (or the practical reason theory, which is the same thing) cuts straight against our whole conGOD’S EXISTENCE A TRUTH cept of reasoning and of intellectual knowledge. Reid and Kant merely contradict themselves when they try to explain intellectual or rational conviction on the basis of that which is wholly different from intellect or reason. As for the doctrine of Jacobi, it is sufficient to remark that we can have no longings, yearnings, or affections without previous knowledge; we must know a thing, at least in some measure, before we can intellectually realize it as desirable. Back of the sentiment of Jacobi must be knowledge, and manifestly it must be knowledge of mind, of intellect, of reason, for God is in no wise the object of any of the senses. But the object of intellectual knowledge, unless it be self-evident, is capable of rational discussion, or reasoned argument, and of demonstration. And in as far as an important intellectual object admits demonstration it also requires it. The most notable of all the theories which declare that the existence of God needs no demonstration to our minds is the theory called ontologism. The theory itself is very old, but the only famous proponent of it belongs to the modern era of history. He is Nicole Malebranche (1638-1715), a learned, a pious, but a much mistaken man. The theory of ontologism lays down, without offering proof for it, the following principle as fundamental: the order of thought (called the logical order) must parallel the order of existence (called the ontological order). Therefore, since God is the first Being in the order of existence, He must be the first also in the order of thought. In other words, God is not only the first Being, but He is the first Being we know. Our very first idea, formed when we come to use our infant minds, is the idea of God. Ontologism goes on to say that, since God contains in Himself, as identical with His essence, the archetypal ideas or “exemplars” of all things creatable, the more we know God, the more we know His creation. Indeed, says ontologism, our knowledge of creatures is explicable only by the fact that it is acquired in and through our knowledge of God. The theory does not maintain that we are aware of the first-formed idea of God, nor that we advert to this idea early in life as we gather knowledge of creatures through its ministration. Ontologism sets forth its doctrine as a somewhat defiant fact, and not as something that a man can check by his own memory or his own experience; indeed, as we have seen, experience is all against it. But it is not experience alone that makes ontologism an inadmissible doctrine; there are other very definite and destructive objections to it. For example, ontologism would make the finite human mind naturally adequate for the grasp of an infinite object. In other words, it would make the human mind naturally finite and naturally infinite at the same time, which is a manifest contradiction in thought and in terms. Only when the finite mind is raised and enlarged, so to speak, and furnished supernaturally with a medium called the Light of Glory, is it enabled to see God as

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He is, and, even then, its grasp, while intuitive, is not exhaustive, but will be eternally enriched in the contemplation of the Ever Ancient Ever New. But never can the Infinite be the immediate natural and proportionate object of the finite mind. Hence, ontologism is wholly inadmissible as involving a self-evident contradiction. Further, ontologism renders inexplicable the fact that imagination (a sentient and material faculty) constantly co-operates with the human intellect in the forming and using of ideas; imagination goes along, so to speak, with intellect, and keeps pace with it in its own way and in the measure of its limitations, even when intellect is engaged in the most abstruse reasoning. Now, if we behold the essences of things directly in our intuitive idea of God, this known service of imagination is not only useless but it is a thing impossble to explain; it flies straight in the face of the axiomatic truth that nature does nothing in vain. Again, ontologism overlooks the fact that when a man has a direct and intuitive knowledge of God he is instantly constituted thereby in the state of heavenly happiness, which is obviously not the case with human beings here on earth. For all these reasons, any one of which would suffice, we reject ontologism as a wholly fallacious doctrine. And with ontologism, we reject its thesis that God’s existence needs no demonstration to the human mind. Reason and experience, then, assure us that our knowledge of God’s existence is not self-evident knowledge for our minds. It is a truth that admits demonstration and, in that same measure, requires it. We have need for the demonstration of the truth of God’s existence. We must now inquire whether this need can be met. We are to investigate the possibility of demonstrating the existence of God. b) POSSIBILITY OF THE DEMONSTRATION

Against the possibility of demonstrating the existence of God stand the theories of (a) atheism which denies that there is a God to prove existent; (b) agnosticism which declares God existent (or admits that He may exist) but declares Him unknowable; (c) traditionalism which teaches that the human mind is powerless to formulate a true demonstration in this case, but has its certitude of God’s existence from a primitive revelation made to the first men and handed down to us by tradition. Now, we need not here make any direct attack on the atheistic position, for our whole study confutes it, and we shall have the pleasure of pointing out the fact in brief detail on a later page. Here we are to deal with the agnostic and the traditionalist positions. But before we take up the rather simple matter of their refutation, we must mention certain types of demonstration listed by logicians, and decide which of these may be used for our present purpose. A demonstration is, first of all, either direct or indirect. A direct demonstration deals with reasons or

GOD’S EXISTENCE A TRUTH causes which affect the thing demonstrated. An indirect demonstration shows that something is true because its opposite is false, groundless, self-contradictory, or that it leads, if accepted, to absurdities. In other words, a direct demonstration proves a point itself; an indirect demonstration proves the contradictory point unacceptable. When you meet the skeptic’s claim that the human mind is incapable of achieving true certitude, you may demonstrate the existence of certitude by showing the character of objective evidence and its inevitable effect upon the mind; then your demonstration is direct. But you may also confute the skeptic by taking his own word that no certainty is achievable, and asking him how he became certain of that. In a word, a direct demonstration establishes a position as right in itself; an indirect demonstration establishes a position as right by showing that its contradictory is wrong. An indirect demonstration is valid because, as we learned in Logic, two contradictories cannot be simultaneously true nor simultaneously false; one must be true, one false; for contradictories exhaust the possibilities and cover the whole ground: the proof that one is true is proof positive and complete that the other is false; the proof that one is false is complete proof that the other is true. Our present concern is the possibility of direct demonstration of the truth of God’s existence. Now, a direct demonstration deals with causes and reasons, and the plan of its formulation is always either “cause to effect” or “effect to cause.” The “cause to effect” type of demonstration is called a priori demonstration. A priori means “from beforehand”; it indicates the forehanded view, so to say, which one takes from the consideration of a cause looking towards the effect that must come from that cause. If, for example, you argue thus: “Spherical bodies throw spherical shadows. The earth is a spherical body. Therefore, the earth will throw a spherical shadow,” you are arguing a priori. You do not take the shadow as a known effect to begin with; you take the cause of the shadow, and from the consideration of the cause you look forward, so to speak (or a priori) to the inevitable effect.—If demonstration argues from “effect to cause,” it is called a posteriori demonstration. A posteriori means “from afterwards” ; it indicates the backward view from an effect to its accounting cause. The a priori view knows the effect before it is there by studying the cause and learning what the effect, when it comes, must be. The a posteriori view knows the effect after it is there, and learns from studying it what sort of cause is required to explain it. If, for instance, you argue thus: “All bodies which throw spherical shadows are themselves spherical. The earth throws a spherical shadow. Therefore, the earth itself is spherical,” you are arguing a posteriori. You are taking an effect (i. e., the shadow) and arguing from it to its accounting cause.

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We need not pause here to explain or illustrate further than we have done the type of demonstration called indirect. For, while we shall not hesitate to employ it when it offers its service, our present concern is the possibility of direct demonstration of the existence of God. We ask: Is direct demonstration in this case possible; and, if so, are both the a priori and the a posteriori types of it available to us; or, if but one type can serve us, which of the two is it? We answer: Direct demonstration of the existence of God is possible, for any naturally knowable truth that is not self-evident is capable of direct or indirect demonstration; and when the truth to be demonstrated stands in a causal relation to known effects, then direct demonstration is possible. Now the existence of God is a naturally knowable truth as the whole history of mankind attests, and God is, by very concept and definition, a Being that stands in causal relation to known effects, that is, to the visible universe. Therefore, direct demonstration of the existence of God is possible. But it is manifest that the type of direct demonstration called a priori or cause-to-effect demonstration will not serve us here. For God cannot be approached a priori. We cannot, so to speak, get back of God, for the very concept of God is a concept of the absolutely first Being. We cannot study God in His causes, for He has no causes; the first and necessary Being is inevitably causeless. Nor can we study the essence of

God in an a priori fashion, seeking to know from this essence what the attributes or perfections of God must be, even though, by a special view of our minds, we make a distinction in the absolutely simple (i. e., undivided and indivisible) God, and regard the Divine Essence in the light of a cause, and the Divine Perfections in the light of effects. For to do this we should have to possess an immediate and intuitive knowledge of the Divine Essence to begin with, and that, as a fact, we do not possess. The progress of our knowledge is all the other way about. We advance from the knowledge of creatures, and of creatural perfections, to the knowledge of the Divine Perfections, and thus our detailed knowledge of the Divine Essence Itself is built up in the effect-to-cause or a posteriori fashion, and not a priori. We form our knowledge of God a posteriori, and in four steps: we first recognize God as the First Cause of all things; secondly, we attribute to God all that we recognize in creatures as perfection; thirdly, we attribute this perfection to God in a manner eminently superior to that in which individual perfections are found in creatures; fourthly, we remove from our idea of divine perfection every limitation or imperfection, attributing to God all possible perfections in an absolutely infinite or boundless degree and in perfect unity and simplicity, identifying them all in the undivided Divine Essence. Thus our knowledge of God is the result of the convergence of four

GOD’S EXISTENCE A TRUTH “ways”: the way of causality; the way of attribution; the way of excellence or transcendence; the way of removal or denial of limitation. And clear reason justifies the approach to the sure knowledge of God by these four converging paths. Thus we possess a distinct idea of God, the Infinite Being, although we cannot have a perfectly comprehensive idea of Him in our finite minds. But, for the matter of that, none of our ideas is perfectly comprehensive; none of them exhausts the knowability of its object. Our idea of God is clear, distinct, usable, sufficient. It is a genuine idea, not a figment of the mind, for it is formed by the mind working on solid reality and advancing along the solid paths of abstractive reasoning. The ontological argument of St. Anselm, which we have discussed in detail, is an attempt to prove God’s existence in a somewhat a priori fashion. It is not a purely a priori argument. Rather, it is an argument a simultaneo> that is, an argument which proceeds from the existence of the idea of God in our minds to the simultaneous actual existence of God outside our minds. The argument does not pretend to deal with the cause of God, for the very notion of such a cause is an absurdity; it would be the notion of “a cause of the causeless” which is a manifest contradiction. But, as we have amply seen, even the a simultaneo type of demonstration fails to afford us a valid proof for the existence of God. By exclusion, then, we know that the only type of direct demonstration available in this case,—and we have seen that direct demonstration is possible,— is the a posteriori or effect-to-cause type. By this type of thinking we build up our knowledge of God; by this type of proof we establish the actual existence of God. And it is this type of thinking that serves us, fundamentally, in all our reasoning. For, granted that there can be such a thing as an a priori argument, there is ever back of it a truth that was learned a posteriori. Thus, though you begin your argument about the shadow of the earth in this fashion: “Spherical bodies throw spherical shadows,” and go on to conclude that the earth, being spherical, will throw a spherical shadow, you have learned a posteriori your original facts that the shadows of bodies conform to the shapes of bodies, and that the earth is spherical. To deny value to a posteriori reasoning is to bankrupt all human knowledge and to relapse into the evil silence of complete skepticism. But, it is objected, the a posteriori type of demonstration is an effect-to-cause demonstration; it involves the dread thing called causality, and there are philosophers in the world who have no stomach for causality, and turn sick at the very mention of it. Since Immanuel Kant (1724—1804) threw his cloud of prideful doubt across the lightsome land of human intelligence, the doctrine of causality has been suspect in many minds. The positivists, for instance, who are one of the many companies in the motley

GOD’S EXISTENCE A TRUTH regiment of agnostics, will have none of it, for they cannot put pure causality into a test-tube or on a scale or cut it in sections on a microtome, and so they deny it. They fall back upon a theory of succession or constant sequence, and say that what we call effect follows what we call cause, but we cannot say more about it nor connect the two essentially. This, of course, is explaining something by explaining it away; it is solving a problem by blotting the problem out, a strange procedure for a scientific mind. Further, it is a denial of fundamental and universal human experience, and, in consequence, it is the denial of the basis of all knowledge and certitude. Besides, the thing called succession, and the theory which proposes it, are not objects that can be sensed or handled in a laboratory. The positivist neatly contradicts himself when he essays to attack causality. For the rest, his argument that only the data of sense can be positively or scientifically known involves a quite evident absurdity. For what are the data of sense? They are not things the senses know. The senses do not know anything. The man who has the senses knows something by their use. The man who has a mind also knows something by its use. It is the man that knows in either case, not the senses nor the mind. Therefore, to say that only what a man knows by the conscious use of his senses is reliably known, and what he knows (as he knows causality) by his mind is not reliably known, is just as foolish as to say that what a man learns by the sense of touch is reliably known, but what he learns by the sense of sight is not reliably known. But there are many who see the absurdity of the extreme positivistic position and these do a neat maneuver and come up smiling on a new tack. They say that causality can indeed be known, but that we cannot carry it “beyond the realm of the phenomenal.” In other words, you can know what causes stomachache, and you can know what causes this to cause stomach-ache, but you cannot ultimately know what causes the stomach. You can know cause and effect within the borders of the bodily world, but your reason, which carries you successfully through causality in this world, cannot take wing and bear you aloft into the world of the ultimate and primal causality. Why? It seems that these peculiar people who limit causality to the phenomenal world (that is, the world of sense, of bodily appearances) have themselves explored the outer and invisible realm; they have been there; they know all about it; and they tell ordinary stupid people like you and me that we cannot go there. If we are not very stupid, we shall resent this intolerable impertinence. These scientistic people declare that only the realm of sense-reality can be dealt with scientifically ; only in this realm can causality be known. Does that doctrine belong to the realm of sense? By what sense does one acquire that knowledge? Again we come back to the fundamental fallacy involved

GOD’S EXISTENCE A TRUTH in all this nice assignment of fields and areas in which sound knowledge can be garnered. Not that we should not make clean distinctions between the field of sensation and that of intellection; indeed, it is the failure to notice the fence between these fields that is characteristic of all the muddle of even the finest minds since Descartes (1596-1650). And it is the very failure of the positivists and of the positivistic to notice the distinction, that mixes them all up, and enables them to propose with serious faces a wholly intellectual and reasoned conclusion (though their reason be twisted) as the fundamental principle of an entirely sensistic system! Once more we insist that in the case of human knowledge, whether it be knowledge of cows or of causality, it is the man who knows, not his senses and not his mind. And there is certainly no scientific or philosophical ground for admitting value to one sort of awareness and denying it to the other. You may indeed follow with critical care any complex line of intellectual procedure; but so you must do in any penetrating use of the senses. And you cannot be critical of either sentient or intellectual procedure without the use of the very mind whose reliability is questioned or denied with the question or denial of man’s knowledge of causality, even of primal causality. For the rest, any causality belongs to the supra-phenomenal world. There are phenomena which mark effects, and show the presence and the action of causes, but causality itself is no phenomenon; and what it produces by way of phenomena is regularly only secondary to an underlying and nonphenomenal effect upon the very essences of things. To sum up: the knowledge which we possess of causality is a direct intuition of the mind working with the findings of sense. It is a fundamental certitude that makes us connect cause and effect, and upon it not only all human knowledge but all human practice is built up. Even those who twist their minds into an acceptance of a bizarre theory which denies causality or limits it to the realm of phenomena (where, strictly speaking, it does not even apply, except in a secondary way) are forced in their practice to recognize causality as true and as validly known. Even if we allow the positivistic and scientistic people to play about with names, and to call causality by the name of succession, or constant sequence, we recognize clearly from their whole procedure, and even from their terminology in unguarded moments, that they mean by these names neither more nor less than genuine causality. Causality is simply inescapable in the whole experience of man, and it affords to philosopher, theologian, and scientist, as to the man in the street, the ground of argument and of demonstration. Therefore, with clear minds and spirits unburdened with the intolerable positivistic error, we take up the proofs for God’s existence, basing them on causality, proceeding in a true and valid a posteriori manner to make clear the most important truth of all. And to the stubborn

GOD’S EXISTENCE A TRUTH positivistic person who refuses to accompany us on this interesting and all-important journey, we say, “While you’re waiting, you might try to account for the succession and constant sequence of things in this world, and for what these things scream at you about the non-phenomenal world. For even a positivist can’t deny that succession and constant sequence are things that demand a bit of explaining.” The agnostic, then, is wrong when he insists that God cannot be known. For a cause can be known, and the effects from which we proceed to the knowledge of the cause, are, in the present case, all about us. Our whole procedure in setting forth the demonstration of God’s existence will be a sufficient refutation of agnosticism, if any further refutation be needed than that already given. The traditionalist also is wrong. His theory of a primitive revelation is so far true; there doubtless was a primitive revelation. But to say that there had to be such a revelation, by physical necessity, so that man could never have had a knowledge of God without it; and to say that our knowledge of God is a blind acceptance of the human tradition, is to make wild assertions that do not square with the facts; the fact of the human mind is against it; the fact of the human experience is against it; and nothing really is for it. We have seen in the present study that God’s existence can be proved, and that there is a valid way for developing this proof. To the traditionalist then we say, “What! Are you answered?” And

Z2 if he is not answered, we may say, losing reverence momentarily for his solemn stupidity, “We can’t prove God’s existence? Just watch us do it.”

Summary Of The Article

In this Article we have explained the meaning of demonstration, and have discovered that the truth of God’s existence is not self-evident to our minds, and therefore admits and requires demonstration. We have noticed the defects of the demonstration attempted by St. Anselm and others (called the ontological argument) and have rejected this as an inept proof, and one that does not dispense us from the necessity of finding other and valuable evidence for God’s existence. We have seen that the true demonstration of God’s existence is not furnished by the instinct theory of Reid and the Scottish School, by Kant and his theory of practical reason, or by Jacobi and his theory of religious and moral sentiment. Viewing all these theories, we find that the need still exists for valid demonstration of God’s existence. Further, we have seen that this need can be met by a proof that is direct and a posteriori, a proof necessarily involving causality. Against the doctrines that deny value to the argument from causality, and against the whole agnostic, and traditionalistic position, we have established our right to use this argument in building up a true demonstration.

This Chapter sets forth the traditional a posteriori proofs for the existence of God. All of these proofs are applications of the principle of causality, that is, of the fundamental truth which may be fully expressed as follows: “Every effect requires, to explain its existence, the existence of an adequate cause or sum of causes, and it ultimately requires the existence of an uncaused and necessarily existing First Cause which is Subsistent Being Itself.” But, although all the proofs here offered are expressions of causality, all do not exhibit the same type of causality. Therefore, as a kind of preface to our demonstration, we offer a short introductory Article on the chief types of causes. In the succeeding Articles we present the proofs for God’s existence. The Chapter is divided into these Articles: Article i. The Chief Types of Causes Article 2. The Proof from Efficient Causality Article 3. The Proof from Formal and Final Causality Article 4. Certain Supplementary Proofs