Certain Supplementary Proofs

a) the moral proof The word moral is a derivative from the Latin mos (stem mor-) which literally means “custom” or “characteristic way of acting.” Now, the characteristic way of acting which distinguishes man from all other creatures is found in the fact that he acts with responsibility; in other words, he acts in a characteristically human way when he exercises his free-will. Free-will acts are therefore moral acts. And, since these acts are free, and man is their author and their responsible agent, it is of first importance to know of them whether they measure up to what they ought to be or fall short and fail of what they ought to be. For, while man is free to choose, he is not independent in his choice; he is under obligation and law; he has a goal to achieve and he himself has not set the ultimate goal; he is free in the physical choice of this or that act which is meant to carry him towards the goal, and he may choose wisely and advance, or perversely and fall away. But the ultimate goal is there, and the deepest forces of man’s rational nature incline him towards that goal (the Summum Bonum), nor is he free to set another goal; he is free in his choice of means, not of the ultimate end. Man necessarily tends towards the Supreme Good and supreme happiness in the possession of that Good, even when he perversely seeks these ends in the wrong places or by the use of wrong means, as he does when he sins. Sin is a perversity; it is an abuse, not a use, of freewill. Necessitated in the tendency towards the Ultimate Goal, man is not necessitated in the choice of things he elects to bear him to that Goal. In his characteristic action, his freely chosen and knowing conduct, man needs a guide so that his choice will be a wise one and really advance him towards his ultimate end. He needs law, objectively existent and subjectively realized and applied. And the law is there and is recognized by right reason (called, in this service, conscience), and so a man’s characteristic or moral activity is always to be judged in the light of law and conscience, and, by that light or standard, it will be found good or bad, right or wrong. And so the word moral has come to suggest that quality of human conduct by which it is good or bad, right or wrong. And morality is the relation which exists between free human conduct (that is, moral conduct) and the norm or standard of what that conduct ought to be; this standard is law (ultimately, the Eternal

Law or God Himself) as applied by conscience (that is, by human reason pronouncing on the right or wrong, the lawfulness or unlawfulness, of something here and now to be decided upon as a thing to be done, permitted, avoided). The moral proof for the existence of God is a proof drawn from the fact of man’s responsibility, of his subjection to moral law, of his realization of the rule of conscience. For man, however bad and perverse, is aware of obligation, of duty, of moral requirements. These things he may ignore, to a great extent, in his practical life, but while he may ignore them he cannot be ignorant of them. The idea of right and wrong, of moral good and evil, is acquired so early and so clearly in life, that it amounts to one of the most evident facts of human existence and experience. No theory of custom, or of tyrannous ruling classes, or of racial or tribal evolution in things of the mind, will ever suffice to explain it. The dawning reason grips, and henceforth holds fast forever, the fundamental moral truth, “There is such a thing as right, such a thing as wrong; I must do the one, I must avoid the other.” It is vain for the mechanist, and the anti-moralist, and the materialist of any description, to try to explain the human consciousness of this truth by pointing out the fact that different objective things have been called good and bad, or right and wrong, in different ages and among different peoples. Of some objective facts and practices, this is true; it is not true of certain very obvious and important matters, like the authority of parents over the young, the respect due to the life and property of one’s fellows, the duty of telling truth. And even if it were, the question of a changeless moral law would be untouched in its essential nature; for the essence of the question lies in this fact that every normal human being, once he has advanced out of infancy and crossed the threshold of earliest adolescence, is naturally adjudged responsible, that is, answerable at the bar of a requirement and a law which says irrefutably, “There is such a thing as right; there is such a thing as wrong; I must do right; I must avoid wrong.” To say that morality is a changing thing because the ancient Kanakas thought it a great evil (which they punished with death) to step on the shadow of the king, while modern man does not think it evil to step on the shadow of the king,—or even, sometimes, to step on the king,—is as silly an argument as to say that the sense of smell is not a constant human faculty because some people, such as the Eskimos, like the odor of oil and grease, and some people find it repulsive. The point is that all normal men can smell; the point is that all normal men recognize the fact that there is such a thing as right and such a thing as wrong. Perversity, custom, education, and other influences can, in certain cases, account for mistaken judgment about what particular thing is right or wrong; but about the essential human recognition of right and wrong as such there can never be any serious question, nor can there be any sense in the cant phrase about “changing morality.” Morality is as eternal as the relation of thirty-six inches of cloth to a yardstick. And that relation will not change, even if the more cultured and evolutionary merchants succeed in convincing large numbers of customers that thirty-five inches is a much more stylish kind of yard. Man is aware of right and wrong; he is aware of obligation or law requiring him to do right and to avoid wrong; this awareness is an awareness of natural reason; it is therefore something as natural to normal man as his eyesight, and is manifestly given to man for as practical a purpose as eyesight. But if it is given to man (and certainly man did not make it or give it to himself, for in many instances man would find it a great convenience to change the law if he could) it is given by man’s Designer and Author; it is given as a rule and direction by One who would guide man’s life to its goal. In a word, it is a law incumbent upon man, and where there is an unmistakable law, there is unmistakably a lawgiver. And where there is a lawgiver, there is ultimately a First and Supreme Lawgiver. And the First Lawgiver must be identical with the First Being and the First Necessary Cause. In a word, the First and Supreme Lawgiver is God. We may put the argument briefly in this form:

If all normal men are inevitably aware of an absolute law which requires free-will (but does not force it) to do good and avoid evil, then there exists a lawgiver who is ultimately identified with the First and Necessary Being called God. Now, all normal men are inevitably aware of an absolute law which requires free-will to do good and avoid evil. Therefore, there exists a lawgiver who is ultimately identified with the First Necessary Being called God. Therefore, God exists.

b) The Historical Proof

The argument from history is often called the argument from universal human consent, that is, universal human agreement or consensus. Briefly, it amounts to this: that history assures us that all men of all past times, and indeed of present times, have been thoroughly convinced of the existence of Deity, however oddly some of them may have given expression to the conviction in their imaginative and practical religious life; and that, in consequence, the thing must be fundamentally true. In other words, it is the witness of history that all men believe in God; therefore, God exists. The point of the argument may be put, somewhat flippantly, in the well known phrase, “You can’t fool all of the people all the time.” Now, what is the value of this argument? First, it may be objected that not all of the people have a belief in God. For there are a few emphatic persons in every age who make a very excitable business of rushing about denying God, or, to take them at their own word, making much ado about Nothing. In our own cultured period of history the energetic atheist seems to have made a specialty of appearing on public platforms, watch in hand, and allotting the non-existent Almighty two or three minutes in which to hurl a destructive thunderbolt or forever hold His peace. In some districts this practice has been considered very daring, and its logical force has been admitted as conclusive. Of course, it is obvious that, if the atheist is sincere, there is no daring in his action of inviting Nothing to do something ; and the logical force of the little prank is, in any case, manifestly nil. There can be question as to whether the atheist has really any religion; there can be none as to whether such an atheist has any logic or even common sense. But of the vagaries and contradictions of atheism we shall speak in another place. Here we wish merely to point out the fact that the comparatively few individuals who, in any age, profess belief in No-God rather than belief in God, does not come in conflict with our present argument. For the argument from history is an argument from the general, the normal, and the usual, conviction of mankind about the existence of God. In this case, it is literally true that exceptions prove the rule; and it is of the rule alone that we make use in our argument. Another objection may at once arise in the mind, and it may be put in something of this form, “You can fool all of the people. The whole human race, barring exceptional individuals here and there, believed for centuries that the earth is a relatively flat expanse of land, and that the sun actually travels around the earth every twenty-four hours.” It might be quickly retorted that this objection falls before the fact that the human race didn’t stay fooled, and that men now know better. But such an answer would be short-sighted. The true answer, like so many true answers, is to be discovered by making a very plain and necessary distinction. We must distinguish the different kinds of thing that men may know. They may recognize physical facts by their senses, and recognize them truly, and they may make snap-judgments on mere appearances about these facts and be wrong. Their senses do not deceive them; for what their senses report is there; only when, without sufficient evidence, they judge about the nature, the hidden and non-sensible character, of what is there, may they go wrong. Thus men judged wrongly about the nature of the movement called the daily travel of the sun; they were truly aware of movement, but in judging the sun, instead of the earth, as the moving body, they made a mistake. Therefore, in judgments based upon mere appearances of physical facts, men may go wrong, and even most men may go wrong for a long time. But there is the other side of our distinction to consider. Men may draw reasoned conclusions by legitimate deduction from certainly known data, and in this they cannot be wrong. All men can be wrong in judging the motion of the sun or the shape of the unexplored earth; they cannot be wrong in their conclusion that every movement requires a mover and ultimately a First Mover. All men may be wrong in judging that a certain figure is perfectly circular, basing their judgment on its appearance. They cannot be wrong in their reasoned judgment about the ratio of radius to circumference in any true circle. That men may be wrong in snap-judgments on physical appearances is due to a certain carelessness and inattention. But when reason is brought to bear accurately upon known data which involve some latent truth, then care and attention will insure a certainly known result, at least in direct and simply reasoned conclusions. If all men could be wrong in their reasoned conclusions from certainly known data, then all human knowledge is bankrupt and there is no use talking of certitude about anything. Of course, our whole discussion is about the things men may know by mediate evidence. There are selfevident truths, like the truth of one’s existence, or that of other people, that require no medium to recognize, but are luminous with inevitable truth in themselves. But, if the power and trustworthiness of human reason is called in question, even these inescapable self-evident truths would lose force. However, that is not our present concern. For the truth of God’s existence is a mediately known truth; it is a truth that is simply and quickly reasoned out; it is recognized by sound human reason working from the data of immediate experience, arguing from manifest effect to adequate first cause, from obvious motion to a first mover, from contingent being to necessary being, and so on. In such a truth, so reasoned out, it is impossible that all men of all times should go wrong, or that the generality of men should be in error. About such a truth, you can’t fool all of the people all the time. On this point the witness of history is of incontestable value. There used to be an opinion,—and certain explorers went to a great deal of trouble to find evidence for it,—that here and there whole tribes or races of men were without any notion of a supramundane Being more or less in charge of the universe. It was thought that certain peoples had no notion of God. But the opinion has ceased to be even entertaining, and no evidence for it was ever established. Some notion,—however dim, and indeed however monstrous,—of divinity and of God or gods, exists and manifestly has existed everywhere; some idea of religious duty appears to be absolutely connatural to normal man. The reasoned conclusion which men make about the existence of Deity is a very direct and simple inference, suggested by the commonest experience. When anything happens in casual daily life,—such as a sudden pain, or the ar- rival of a letter, or the disappearance of the teaspoons,—it does not take the brightest of minds to discover the fact that “something caused it,” “somebody wrote it,” “someone took the spoons.” And when the simplest of men comes face to face with the universe about him, it does not require a great effort of his mind to recognize the truth that “Something or somebody made it.” To carry the thought further, to reason clearly in the more complex domain of the character and attributes of that “Somebody or something” may be a tricky business for an untutored mind and may lead to strange and even grotesque conclusions. But about the first, direct, and cleanly reasoned truth, there can be no doubt or question. Here the voice of human reason speaks in simplest and plainest language, and if this language be deceiving, then no truth is knowable to man. We may present the historical argument for God’s existence in the following way: If all men of all times agree, by a judgment of reason working simply and directly from the manifest facts of commonest experience, that Deity exists, then the real existence of Deity must be admitted or one must lapse into the utterly self-contradictory and impossible condition of absolute skepticism. Now, history attests the fact that all men of all times do agree, by a judgment of reason working simply and directly from the manifest facts of commonest experience, that Deity exists. Therefore, the real existence of Deity must be admitted or one must lapse into the utterly self-contradictory and impossible condition of absolute skepticism. The alternative is unacceptable. Therefore, God exists.

c) Indirect Proofs

As we have seen, an indirect proof is one that establishes the truth of a position by showing the impossible character of its contradictory. Now, the contradictory of the theistic position (expressed in the terms, “God exists”) is the atheistic position (expressed in the terms, “God does not exist”). It is our present purpose, therefore, to show the impossible character of the atheistic position, thus indirectly proving the truth of the theistic position. We shall establish two points: first, that atheism in a pure form cannot be formulated as a doctrine or held as a philosophy; secondly, that atheism, in whatever qualified form it is professed, is a theory in flat conflict with reason, it takes the meaning from man’s finest tendencies, and it leads to absurd and impossible consequences.

I, Atheism in pure form cannot be formulated as a doctrine or held as a philosophy. For, as Karl Adam rightly observes, “Man cannot live by mere negation.” When a man has denied God, he has nothing further to say; his remarks on ultimate things and his deep explanations have all been made; they are all in that one little statement of denial, and he has come to a full stop. Of course, as a fact, the atheist does not come to a stop; he goes on almost endlessly making gods to take the place of the God he has denied. For the denial of God leads inevitably to the answering of a lot of questions; take away God and you knock all sorts of gaps into any consistent theory which seeks to interpret the universe or to assign place and character and function to man. And so the statement of the atheist is never a simple denial: it is always a substitution. It is so with the denial of any fundamental truth in theology, philosophy, or science. Those, for instance, who deny the existence of real substances in the world, always end by substantizing accidentals. And those who deny the existence of a life-principle in a living thing, end by assigning a separate life-principle to every cell of every living thing. And those who deny God end by multiplying gods. The universe, after all, is here before our eyes, and even if it be regarded as an unreal universe, a dream-universe or a ghost-universe, it still calls imperatively for some explanation, and for ultimate explanation. Even to deny the favorite explanation of the ghost is to assert that there is some other explanation for the ghost; the need of explaining the ghost is not in the least ghostly but a solid and real necessity. And whether or no the atheist professes to have the answer when he denies what the generality of mankind have always reasonably considered the right (and indeed the inescapable) answer, he professes at least to know that there is a right answer, and in so far he is not a pure atheist but a qualified atheist, that is, an atheist who is also a vague theist. Sometimes the atheist denies God and makes mankind divine, and then he is called a humanitarian, a terrible fate for any son of Adam. Sometimes the atheist wipes the image of God out of the cosmos, and then finds it at once in the mirror. Sometimes he denies God, and mumbles something half-witted about a superman and the universe tending to build up its god in the man of the future. Sometimes he worships the clock and the calendar and spends his time going about crying, “But this is the twentieth century.” Often he makes gods of vague names and labels, and speaks piously of forces, and energies, and impulses, and elans, and of Nature with the capital initial. It is absolutely impossible to frame a theory or doctrine in terms of simple denial, that is, of simple negation. Such is the structure of the human mind that it requires affirmation, thesis, positive statement of fact or theory. It is impossible to go on forever saying what a thing is not, and the mind has no use for such a process, even for a limited time, except in so far as it is a process of gradually weeding out error for the purpose of clarifying some central and obscured positive truth. And for this reason it is manifest that atheism in pure form is not to be formulated as a theory and cannot exist as a philosophy.

2. Atheism conflicts with reason; it balks man’s finest tendencies; it leads to impossible consequences. First, atheism conflicts with reason. Reason demands an explanation of things, and it wants an explanation that really goes back to beginnings. In outlining our direct demonstration for the existence of God, we have presented the careful and incontrovertible findings of reason, and with these atheism is in open conflict. No normal man who has the use of reason can be in ignorance of the fact that the visible world around him, and he himself as part of that world, are contingent things, things that do not have to be here; but, as a fact, they are here, and their presence requires an accounting. And the moment an accounting is made, a god is set up. And when the careful and strictly reasoned accounting is made, the one True God is recognized. This is the status of reason on the point, whether one regards reason in its own nature or takes the record of what it does from history. And with this status of reason atheism is in conflict. Therefore, atheism conflicts with reason. Secondly, atheism balks man’s finest tendencies. The tendency of man towards happiness, which, as we have seen, is an elemental and essential and necessary human tendency, is made illusory and cruel if the atheistic denial have any value. Man tends, by heart and will, towards goodness and happiness, and out of this tendency rightly and reasonably controlled, come all the acts of devotion and of heroism, all the lives of nobility, all that approaches to what normal and decent men acknowledge as ideal. But the tendency is meaningless if its ultimate Object is taken away, as it is taken away by atheism. Atheism in its chill denial, and in its dead substitutions, has nothing of lasting value to offer to human hearts and wills. Therefore, atheism balks man’s finest tendencies. Thirdly, atheism leads to impossible consequences. For atheism takes away the only foundation for decency and good moral conduct. If man is not responsible to a Supreme Judge, his morality amounts to little more than a set of rules of etiquette and to what Bill Nye calls “a rugged fear of the police.” Atheism makes pure tyranny of all human governments, since “all authority is from God,” and a human government is always based upon the concept of some higher and invisible authority which will back it up; this is true even of bad governments and of such caricature-governments as we find today in Russia and Red Spain. Now, if the moral law and human law are only conveniences that bind externally, their force cannot long endure, and the human race is doomed to early destruction. Towards this unthinkable end atheism clearly points. For this reason we assert that atheism leads to impossible consequences.

Summary Of The Article

In this Article we have explained and set forth the moral proof for the existence of God, showing how man’s awareness of a moral law binding upon him points unmistakably to a First Lawgiver. We have considered the historical proof, and have found that the reasoned conviction of all men of all ages cannot be fallacious in its indication of the existence of God. We have presented an indirect proof for our position by showing that the contradictory position (that is, atheism) is impossible in theory, for it cannot even be formulated in pure form and it is in conflict with man’s reason and finest tendencies ; and that it is impossible in practice, for it would turn the world into chaos and destroy the human race if its practical consequences were allowed to develop.

In the First Book we established the truth of God’s existence; here, in the Second Book, we are to discuss God’s nature and attributes. We have learned and demonstrated the truth that God is; we turn now to the study of what God is, in a far more detailed way than was requisite for the establishing of His existence. The present Book is divided into two Chapters: Chapter I. The Essence of God Chapter II. The Attributes of God This Chapter presents a study of what God is in His inmost Being, His actual and infinite Self. It also studies what special note in the concept of God is the root in which are contained all the perfections predicable of the Divine Being. In a word, the Chapter studies the physical essence and the metaphysical essence of God. The Chapter is accordingly divided into two Articles: Article i. The Physical Essence of God Article 2. The Metaphysical Essence of God