Pfleiderer, Philos. of Religion, 1:88—“The ground of moral obligation is found neither in the subject nor in society, but only in the universal or divine Will that combines both.... 103—The idea of God is the unity of the true and the good, or of the two highest ideas which our reason thinks as theoretical reason, but demands as practical reason.... In the idea of God we find the only synthesis of the world that is—the world of science, and of the world that ought to be—the world of religion.” Seth, Ethical Principles, 425—“This is not a mathematical demonstration. Philosophy never is an exact science. Rather is it offered as the only sufficient foundation of the moral life.... The life of goodness ... is a life based on the conviction that its source and its issues are in the Eternal and the Infinite.” As finite truth and goodness are comprehensible only in the light of some absolute principle which furnishes for them an ideal standard, so finite beauty is inexplicable except as there exists a perfect standard with which it may be compared. The beautiful is more than the agreeable or the useful. Proportion, order, harmony, unity in diversity—all these are characteristics of beauty. But they all imply an intellectual and spiritual Being, from whom they proceed and by whom they can be measured. Both physical and moral beauty, in finite things and beings, are symbols and manifestations of Him who is the author and lover of beauty, and who is himself the infinite and absolute Beauty. The beautiful in nature and in art shows that the idea of God's existence is logically independent and prior. See Cousin, The True, the Beautiful, and the Good, 140-153; Kant, Metaphysic of Ethics, who holds that belief in God is the necessary presupposition of the belief in duty.
To repeat these four points in another form—the intuition of an Absolute Reason is (a) the necessary presupposition of all other knowledge, so that we cannot know anything else to exist except by assuming first of all that God exists; (b) the necessary basis of all logical thought, so that we cannot put confidence in any one of our reasoning processes except by taking for granted that a thinking Deity has constructed our minds with reference to the universe and to truth; (c) the necessary implication of our primitive belief in design, so that we can assume all things to exist for a purpose, only by making the prior assumption that a purposing God exists—can regard the universe as a thought, only by postulating the existence of an absolute Thinker; and (d) the necessary foundation of our conviction of moral obligation, so that we can believe in the universal authority of right, only by assuming that there exists a God of righteousness who reveals his will both in the individual conscience and in the moral universe at large. We cannot prove that God is; but we can show that, in order to show the existence of any knowledge, thought, reason, conscience, in man, man must assume that God is.
As Jacobi said of the beautiful: “Es kann gewiesen aber nicht bewiesen werden”—it can be shown, but not proved. Bowne, Metaphysics, 472—“Our objective knowledge of the finite must rest upon ethical trust in the infinite”; 480—“Theism is the absolute postulate of all knowledge, science and philosophy”; “God is the most certain fact of objective knowledge.” Ladd, Bib. Sac., Oct. 1877:611-616—“Cogito, ergo Deus est. We are obliged to postulate a not-ourselves which makes for rationality, [pg 062]as well as for righteousness.” W. T. Harris: “Even natural science is impossible, where philosophy has not yet taught that reason made the world, and that nature is a revelation of the rational.” Whately, Logic, 270; New Englander, Oct. 1871, art. on Grounds of Confidence in Inductive Reasoning; Bib. Sac., 7:415-425; Dorner, Glaubenslehre, 1:197; Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungen, ch. “Zweck”; Ulrici, Gott und die Natur, 540-626; Lachelier, Du Fondement de l'Induction, 78. Per contra, see Janet, Final Causes, 174, note, and 457-464, who holds final cause to be, not an intuition, but the result of applying the principle of causality to cases which mechanical laws alone will not explain.
Pascal: “Nature confounds the Pyrrhonist, and Reason confounds the Dogmatist. We have an incapacity of demonstration, which the former cannot overcome; we have a conception of truth which the latter cannot disturb.” “There is no Unbelief! Whoever says. ‘To-morrow,’ ‘The Unknown,’ ‘The Future,’ trusts that Power alone. Nor dares disown.” Jones, Robert Browning, 314—“We cannot indeed prove God as the conclusion of a syllogism, for he is the primary hypothesis of all proof.” Robert Browning, Hohenstiel-Schwangau: “I know that he is there, as I am here, By the same proof, which seems no proof at all, It so exceeds familiar forms of proof”; Paracelsus, 27—“To know Rather consists in opening out a way Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape Than in effecting entrance for a light Supposed to be without.” Tennyson, Holy Grail: “Let visions of the night or day Come as they will, and many a time they come.... In moments when he feels he cannot die, And knows himself no vision to himself, Nor the high God a vision, nor that One Who rose again”; The Ancient Sage, 548—“Thou canst not prove the Nameless, O my son! Nor canst thou prove the world thou movest in. Thou canst not prove that thou art body alone, Nor canst Thou prove that thou art spirit alone, Nor canst thou prove that thou art both in one. Thou canst not prove that thou art immortal, no, Nor yet that thou art mortal. Nay, my son, thou canst not prove that I, who speak with thee, Am not thyself in converse with thyself. For nothing worthy proving can be proven, Nor yet disproven: Wherefore be thou wise, Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith.”
III. Other Supposed Sources of our Idea of God's Existence.
Our proof that the idea of God's existence is a rational intuition will not be complete, until we show that attempts to account in other ways for the origin of the idea are insufficient, and require as their presupposition the very intuition which they would supplant or reduce to a secondary place. We claim that it cannot be derived from any other source than an original cognitive power of the mind.
1. Not from external revelation,—whether communicated (a) through the Scriptures, or (b)through tradition; for, unless man had from another source a previous knowledge of the existence of a God from whom such a revelation might come, the revelation itself could have no authority for him.
(a) See Gillespie, Necessary Existence of God, 10; Ebrard, Dogmatik, 1:117; H. B. Smith, Faith and Philosophy, 18—“A revelation takes for granted that he to whom it is made has some knowledge of God, though it may enlarge and purify that knowledge.” We cannot prove God from the authority of the Scriptures, and then also prove the Scriptures from the authority of God. The very idea of Scripture as a revelation presupposes belief in a God who can make it. Newman Smyth, in New Englander, 1878:355—We cannot derive from a sun-dial our knowledge of the existence of a sun. The sun-dial presupposes the sun, and cannot be understood without previous knowledge of the sun. Wuttke, Christian Ethics, 2:103—“The voice of the divine ego does not first come to the consciousness of the individual ego from without; rather does every external revelation presuppose already this inner one; there must echo out from within man something kindred to the outer revelation, in order to its being recognized and accepted as divine.”
Fairbairn, Studies in Philos. of Relig. and Hist., 21, 22—“If man is dependent on an outer revelation for his idea of God, then he must have what Schelling happily termed [pg 063] ‘an original atheism of consciousness.’ Religion cannot, in that case, be rooted in the nature of man,—it must be implanted from without.” Schurman, Belief in God, 78—“A primitive revelation of God could only mean that God had endowed man with the capacity of apprehending his divine original. This capacity, like every other, is innate, and like every other, it realizes itself only in the presence of appropriate conditions.”Clarke, Christian Theology, 112—“Revelation cannot demonstrate God's existence, for it must assume it; but it will manifest his existence and character to men, and will serve them as the chief source of certainty concerning him, for it will teach them what they could not know by other means.”