Reason is obliged to confess the hypothesis of a Creative Will, although it does not admit that man has in any way perceived it. But is this hypothesis, which is essential to science, to be left in the position of Mahomet's coffin? Is it not to be investigated? For if atheism is irrational, agnosticism is not scientific—"it is precisely a refusal to apply the scientific method itself beyond a certain point, and that a point at which there is no reason in heaven or earth to stop."
To speak about an immanent purpose is very good sense; but to speak about a purpose behind which there is no Will is nonsense.
People, he says, become so much occupied with the consideration of what they know that they entirely forget "the perfectly astounding fact that they know it." Also they overlook or slur the tremendous fact of spiritual individuality; "because I am I, I am not anybody else." But let the individual address to himself the question he puts to the universe, let him investigate his own pressing sense of spiritual individuality, just as he investigates any other natural phenomenon, and he will find himself applying that principle of Purpose, and thinking of himself in relation to the Creator's Will.
If there is Purpose in the universe there is Will; you cannot have Purpose or intelligent direction, without Will. But, as we have seen, "to speak about an immanent will is nonsense":
It is the purpose, the meaning and thought of God, that is immanent not God Himself. He is not limited to the world that He has made; He is beyond it, the source and ground of it all, but not it. Just as you may say that in Shakespeare's work his thoughts and feelings are immanent; you find them there in the book, but you don't find Shakespeare, the living, thinking, acting man, in the book. You have to infer the kind of being that he was from what he wrote; he himself is not there; his thoughts are there.
He pronounces "the most real of all problems," the problem of evil, to be soluble. Why is there no problem of good? Note well, that "the problem of evil is always a problem in terms of purpose." How evil came does not matter: the question is, Why is it here? What is it doing? "While we are sitting at our ease it generally seems to us that the world would be very much better if all evil were abolished. . . . But would it?"
Surely we know that one of the best of the good things in life is victory, and particularly moral victory. But to demand victory without an antagonist is to demand something with no meaning.
If you take all the evil out of the world you will remove the possibility of the best thing in life. That does not mean that evil is good. What one means by calling a thing good is that the spirit rests permanently content with it for its own sake. Evil is precisely that with which no spirit can rest content; and yet it is the condition, not the accidental but the essential condition, of what is in and for itself the best thing in life, namely moral victory.
His definition of Sin helps us to understand his politics:
Sin is the self-assertion either of a part of a man's nature against the whole, or of a single member of the human family against the welfare of that family and the will of its Father.