Everything in philosophy depends on where we begin, whether with nature or with self, whether with the necessary or with the free. In one sense, therefore, we should in practice begin with the Anthropological Argument, and then use the Cosmological and Teleological Arguments as warranting the application to nature of the conclusions which we have drawn from man. As God stands over against man in Conscience, and says to him: “Thou”; so man stands over against God in Nature, and may say to him: “Thou.” Mulford, Republic of God, 28—“As the personality of man has its foundation in the personality of God, so the realization by man of his own personality always brings man nearer to God.” Robert Browning: “Quoth a young Sadducee: ‘Reader of many rolls, Is it so certain we Have, as they tell us, souls?’ ‘Son, there is no reply!’ The Rabbi bit his beard: ‘Certain, a soul have I—We may have none,’ he sneered. Thus Karshook, the Hiram's Hammer, The Right-hand Temple-column, Taught babes in grace their grammar, And struck the simple, solemn.”
It is very common at this place to treat of what are called the Historical and the Biblical Arguments for the existence of God—the former arguing, from the unity of history, the latter arguing, from the unity of the Bible, that this unity must in each case have for its cause and explanation the existence of God. It is a sufficient reason for not discussing these arguments, that, without a previous belief in the existence of God, no one will see unity either in history or in the Bible. Turner, the painter, exhibited a picture which seemed all mist and cloud until he put a dab of scarlet into it. That gave the true point of view, and all the rest became intelligible. So Christ's coming and Christ's blood make intelligible both the Scriptures and human history. He carries in his girdle the key to all mysteries. Schopenhauer, knowing no Christ, admitted no philosophy of history. He regarded history as the mere fortuitous play of individual caprice. Pascal: “Jesus Christ is the centre of everything, and the object of everything, and he that does not know him knows nothing of nature, and nothing of himself.”
IV. The Ontological Argument, or Argument from our Abstract and Necessary Ideas.
This argument infers the existence of God from the abstract and necessary ideas of the human mind. It has three forms:
1. That of Samuel Clarke. Space and time are attributes of substance or being. But space and time are respectively infinite and eternal. There must therefore be an infinite and eternal substance or Being to whom these attributes belong.
Gillespie states the argument somewhat differently. Space and time are modes of existence. But space and time are respectively infinite and eternal. There must therefore be an infinite and eternal Being who subsists in these modes. But we reply:
Space and time are neither attributes of substance nor modes of existence. The argument, if valid, would prove that God is not mind but matter, for that could not be mind, but only matter, of which space and time were either attributes or modes.
The Ontological Argument is frequently called the a priori argument, that is, the argument from that which is logically prior, or earlier than experience, viz., our intuitive ideas. All the forms of the Ontological Argument are in this sense a priori. Space and time are a priori ideas. See Samuel Clarke, Works, 2:521; Gillespie, Necessary Existence of God. Per contra, see Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 364: Calderwood, Moral Philosophy, 226—“To begin, as Clarke did, with the proposition that ‘something has existed from eternity,’ is virtually to propose an argument after having assumed what is to be proved. Gillespie's form of the a priori argument, starting with the proposition [pg 086] ‘infinity of extension is necessarily existing,’ is liable to the same objection, with the additional disadvantage of attributing a property of matter to the Deity.”
H. B. Smith says that Brougham misrepresented Clarke: “Clarke's argument is in his sixth proposition, and supposes the existence proved in what goes before. He aims here to establish the infinitude and omnipresence of this First Being. He does not prove existence from immensity.” But we reply, neither can he prove the infinity of God from the immensity of space. Space and time are neither substances nor attributes, but are rather relations; see Calderwood, Philos. of Infinite, 331-335; Cocker, Theistic Conception of the World, 66-96. The doctrine that space and time are attributes or modes of God's existence tends to materialistic pantheism like that of Spinoza, who held that “the one and simple substance” (substantia una et unica) is known to us through the two attributes of thought and extension; mind = God in the mode of thought; matter = God in the mode of extension. Dove, Logic of the Christian Faith, 127, says well that an extended God is a material God; “space and time are attributes neither of matter nor mind”; “we must carry the moral idea into the natural world, not the natural idea into the moral world.” See also, Blunt, Dictionary Doct. and Hist. Theol., 740; Porter, Human Intellect, 567. H. M. Stanley, on Space and Science, in Philos. Rev., Nov. 1898:615—“Space is not full of things, but things are spaceful.... Space is a form of dynamic appearance.” Prof. C. A. Strong: “The world composed of consciousness and other existences is not in space, though it may be in something of which space is the symbol.”