Atheism and theism...

Preface

A conviction of the Divine existence is wrought in the mind by an observation of nature, and is a necessary conclusion from a consideration of our own being. " I am, and therefore thou must be," is a just inference from a settled fact, and one which commends itself to the judgment of every reflecting mind. I have not, therefore, entered into any elaborate argument to disprove the atheistic assumption, " There is no God," nor yet to prove the converse, that " There is a God." My design in this treatise has been simply, and in a concise manner, to show the folly of the atheist's denial of God, and its evil tendency in producing moral corruption, and to exhibit the reasonableness of a belief in the Being and attributes of God, and his government over the world as taught in the Bible : and to

treat the subject in a manner adapted to the

PREFACE.

edification of all persons who may give it their attention. And yet the treatise is argumentative as well as didactic, and furnishes a brief and compendious Christian Theodicy, — a vindication of the rectitude and benevolence of the Supreme Being in regard to the natural and moral evil existing in the world, and which, I humbly hope, may, under the Divine blessing, tend to remove the difficulties which so frequently perplex inquiring minds, and to lead all to a confiding trust in the Author of our being and the God of our salvation.

John G. Wilson.

Philadelphia, 1883.

Contents

PART PAGE

I.— Atheism 7

II. — The Divine Existence and Personality . 25 III. — The Attributes of God .... 43 IV. — The Government of God . . . .61

Part I. Atheism

It is maintained by some, who wish to be regarded as benefactors of the human family, that the idea of a Supreme Being had its origin in the ignorance of mankind in a rude and barbarous age ; and they think that to eradicate this idea, and liberate the mind from all sense of responsibility to a Higher Power, is to be the work of intellectual development, and will confer a great favor on the race. Upon this assumption it would be fair to infer that the belief in a God would be confined to the more ignorant nations, and that as they advanced in knowledge and intelligence they would become atheists. On this theory those who most profoundly feel their responsibility to God, and most devoutly worship and serve him, should be the most miserable of mankind, and that true happiness would be enjoyed only by those who live without hope and without God in the world. But the facts in the case establish the reverse of this. Those nations, if nations they maybe called, consisting of a few clannish herds of men and women, who have been discovered to have no conception of a Supreme Being, are described as most ignorant and degraded, but little elevated above the brute beasts around them. But as they ascend in the scale of improvement and intelligence mankind possess this knowledge and have clearer conceptions of the nature and character of God, and more fully believe in him. And the happiness of man has ever been found to consist in his subjection to the will and obedience to the commands of God.

The apostle Paul shows that a godless life is the result of ignorance, when he exhorts the believing Gentiles, " that they walk not as other Gentiles walk, in the vanity of their minds; having the understanding darkened, being alienated from the life of God, through the ignorance that is in them because of the blindness of their heart." Eph. iv. 17, 18. But our sceptical philosophers would have us to believe that they are the wisest of mankind, and that, with a few exceptions, themselves included, the most enlightened nations have not yet arrived to a sufficient degree of intellectual cultivation to enable them to cast off the fetters which ignorance had forged and fastened upon their minds. In other words, they think, and would like others to think so too, that all mankind are yet in leading-strings of ignorance and superstition, except the precious few who have reached that consummation of presumptuous folly and self-deception which asserts that "There is no God." What a marvellous conclusion to proceed from the heart, and be uttered by the lips of such an ephemeral and ignorant creature as man ! A creature whose existence began, as it were, but yesterday, and, as far as this life is concerned, will end tomorrow; a creature whose observation is limited to a small portion of the earth on which we live ; who, with the most profound research, is scarcely able, in a lifetime, to penetrate the surface of things ; who is unable to solve the mystery of his own existence, and finds in those objects of nature with which he is most familiar a thousand inexplicable wonders.

Oh, is it not a marvellous thing that such a one should so far forget himself, and be so excessively puffed up, as to deny the Divine existence, and thus, virtually, arrogate to himself Divine attributes ? For how could any one be qualified to decide the question in the negative whether there is a God unless he himself were an omnipresent and omniscient being; one that is everywhere, and acquainted with all things? for if there was any subsistence in all the universe or beyond the universe which had escaped his notice, that subsistence might be God. I shall not now enlarge upon this thought. It must, I think, be apparent to any one of the most ordinary capacity that a more immodest, presumptuous, and arrogant declaration never fell from mortal lips than this atheistic dogma, " There is no God." It is such a monstrous folly and conceit in an intelligent being, with the evidence of the eternal power and Godhead of Jehovah, above, beneath, and all around him, to deny the existence of God, that many wise and good men have questioned whether there ever was or ever can be a conscientious atheist. It seems, indeed, almost impossible, in the face of such accumulated evidence as nature yields to the contrary, to settle down into such an absurd conclusion. And yet, if we may credit their testimony, there have been some who, by something like deliberate and thoughtful investigation, have set aside the evidence, and have adopted this vacant creed, and rested in this dark dogma, which excludes God from the universe, and consigns the world and all its inhabitants to the uncertainties of chance and the necessities of fate. And forasmuch as they do not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gives them over to strong delusion, that they should believe a lie, that they

ATHEISM. ii all might be condemned who obey not the truth, but have pleasure in unrighteousness. Sadly true it is that though light has emanated from the Divine One through his works of creation and wonders of providence and testimonies of revelation, teaching knowledge of God, yet men love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil : and perversely cling to error that they may justify themselves in wrong. Oh, sad defection of the human understanding !

The atheistic philosophers profess to be guided by reason, and boast of their ability to solve all mysteries by the touch of her magic wand. They talk learnedly and fluently of nature and of nature's laws, as if they perfectly understood the origin, progress, and destiny of all things, and thus impose upon the credulity of the simple, and beguile the unwary from the path of truth and virtue. And yet when asked to explain the origin of man and solve the phenomena of nature around them, these

" Sages, diving into science, have but a profundity of words;

They track, for some few links, the circling chain of consequence,

And, after doubts and disputations, are left where they began,

At the bald conclusion of a clown, things are because they are." — Tupper.

Or, on the other extreme, " ever the most credulous, catching at any foolish cause that maydispel their doubts," they suppose that man's origin is attributable to some strange freak of nature, by which, in an instant, man, both male and female, sprang from the earth, as the fabled Minerva is said to have sprung from the head of Jupiter ; or, that he is the production of a labored effort of nature to bring forth something, not knowing what, which through thousands or millions of transmigrations, for a long series of ages, beginning in some microscopic monad or animalcule, was enlarged and developed by successive degrees, until by chance it resulted in the first human pair, with whom nature has been so completely satisfied that she has since ceased from her labor to produce anything greater or higher in the scale of intelligences. In short, there is no conjecture too absurd for them to propound and believe if it but exclude the existence and agency of a God, verifying the sayings of Tupper, —

" The captious and cautious unbeliever is of all men weakest

to believe; Cut from the anchorage of God, his bark is a plaything of

the billows ; The compass of his principle is broken, the rudder of his

faith is unshipped ; Chance and fate in a stultified antagonism, govern all for him; Truth sprang from the conflict of falsities, and the multitude

of accidents hath bred design."

The denial of God indicates some mental obliquity, some perversion of the understanding ; and at first leads us rather to pity than to blame the victim of this delusion, which seems to be the result of a peculiar conjunction of disastrous influences upon the mind, obscuring the perceptions and rendering him incapable of reasoning from the acknowledged laws of evidence. It is almost universally admitted that there is a certain connection between cause and effect, and we know of no effect without an adequate cause. If, therefore, we see an ingenious piece of mechanism, a watch for instance, or a rare work of art, — a splendid painting, — we invariably infer the existence of intelligent agents by whom they were made. And if we see any change occur in the objects we are contemplating, we are led to infer a cause for the phenomenon. And on this acknowledged principle, lying at the foundation of all right reasoning concerning the existence of beings and events, we arrive indubitably to the conclusion that the universe must have had a creator; that there must be a Supreme Being whose infinite wisdom and power alone were adequate to the production of such a wonderful organism, and whose works in turn display his eternal power and Godhead. Whoever, therefore, begins by denying what is self-evident, discovers a hallucination of mind which incapacitates him for right reasoning, and makes him at best a proper object of your pity and your prayers.

" * There is no God,' the fool in secret said;

i There is no God that rules o'er earth or sky.' Tear off the bands that bind the wretch's head,

That God may burst upon his faithless eye ! Is there no God ? The stars in myriads spread,

If he look up, the blasphemy deny; While his own features, in the mirror read,

Reflect the image of Divinity.

Is there no God ? The stream that silver flows,

The air he breathes, the ground he treads, the trees, The flowers, the grass, the sands, each wind that blows,

All speak of God; throughout, one voice agrees, And, eloquent, his dread existence shows :

Blind to thyself, ah ! see him, fool, in these.''

Giovanni Cotta.

But it is not so much the weakness of the head as the wickedness of the heart that is the source of atheism. " The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." Ps. xiv. I. And the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. The constitutional inclinations of man's nature are to rectitude and happiness, but a false estimate of the capability of earthly and sensual things to give him pleasure, and which he is liable to form under the present circumstances of his being, may influence him to seek happiness in sinful indulgences at the expense of his sense of right, and so stifle the voice of conscience in seeking relief from a sense of responsibility by excluding God from all his thoughts. And the next step is to exclude God from the universe by adopting the atheistic theory, " There is no God/'— just as the silly ostrich thinks to annihilate its pursuers by burying its head in the sand and shutting out all sight and sound. The idea of God is painful to the wicked, because it is associated with a feeling of responsibility. It is this that troubles them. If they could have such a God as the fable says Jupiter gave the frogs, — a log of wood, — a god that could neither see nor hear nor feel, incapable of either rewarding or punishing them for their conduct, they would have no objection to such a God. For in the days w r hen atheism possessed the French mind and heart, during the reign of Robespierre, the convention in one of its most popular and authentic papers made the following announcement : " Provided the idea of a Supreme Being be nothing more than a philosophical abstraction, a guide to the imagination in the pursuit of causes and effects, a resting-place for the curiosity of inquiring minds, a notion merely speculative, and from which no practical consequences are to be applied to human life, there can be no great danger in such an idea; but if it is to be made the foundation of morality ; if it is to be accompanied by the supposition that there exists a God who presides over the affairs of the world and rewards and punishes men for their actions on earth according to some principle of speculative justice, there can be no opinion more prejudicial to society." If they entertained the idea of a God at all, they wished it to be such a one as would be no object of reverence or regard,— the belief of whose existence would impose no restraint upon their passions or pursuits; whom they need not fear to offend, nor desire to please ; and who was alike incapable of rewarding virtue or punishing vice. And if he would not consent to be this senseless abstraction, then, in order to get rid of all sense of responsibility and be allowed to live as they pleased, they must get rid of him by simply denying his existence.

The effect of atheism is to confirm that mental obliquity and strengthen that moral corruption which gave it birth. The mind having once consented to an imposing sophistry is led captive by it, and soon becomes entangled in the web of its own delusions, and lost in the mazes of its own folly. In the labyrinth of doubt it finds only amusing speculations and delusive hopes, until at last it is lost in the windings of

ATHEISM. i J despair. Its eternal series — its spontaneous universe of worlds and beings — its laws of motion and matter — confusion giving birth to order, and order tending to confusion — its fortuitous concurrence of atoms, and physical necessity, are among the dogmas which bewilder and ensnare the mind, until it becomes wrecked in unbelief; a melancholy exhibition of weakness and folly, — a vessel stranded upon the shoals of a spurious philosophy.

Its moral influence is to be inferred from its nature and design ; and gathered from its history in times past, and its present aspect. It fosters the worst passions of the human heart by removing all the restraints which religion imposes upon mankind, relieving the conscience of any sense of responsibility to God ; taking away the landmarks of virtue and vice, and making present gratification the chief object of pursuit. In denying God, atheism likewise denies a future state of existence to man, and all rewards and punishments beyond this life. It limits his existence to this life (in some instances it has even proceeded so far as to deny his existence altogether), and makes his happiness here the only proper motive to action. It teaches him that having no bond to society but that of convenience, he is justified in using it to secure for himself the means of enjoyment,

ATHEISM AND THEISM.

irrespective of the well-being of his fellow-creatures. And should he find himself after all unhappy and miserable, or should his laudable efforts to secure the means and objects of his own gratification in the indulgence of his appetites and passions unfortunately subject him to the penalties which society imposes, he may seek the relief of oppressed virtue by voluntarily retiring from existence, which fate imposed upon him and chance enables him to dispense with. Its design evidently is to relieve man from a sense of responsibility to God, and allow him to indulge his passions without restraint, provided he can manage to escape detection and punishment from his fellow-man. Or, judging from the announcement of the French Assembly, to give up society itself to unrestrained licentiousness and beastly gratification. Such being its nature and design, what must be its effects but disorder, crime, and misery? With such a creed, what may not a man dp if his passions and appetites demand it? With such a creed, the libertine may gloat upon unprotected and confiding innocence and beauty, and, without a blush, consign to infamy and ruin the victim of his lust. With such a creed, the robber and assassin may say, " Come, let us lay wait for blood ; let us lurk privily for the innocent without cause; let us swallow them up

ATHEISM. ig alive as the grave; and whole, as those that go down to the pit : we shall find all precious substance ; we shall fill our houses with spoil." Prov. i. n-13. With such a creed, what bonds could be regarded as sacred ? what conditions inviolable? What confidence could be placed in the friendship, the honor, the justice, the integrity of him whose creed is a denial of all the obligations of virtue and goodness? What is there to make seduction, or robbery, or murder, or fraud criminal in his eyes ? No matter what he does, he offends not against God, for he says, There is no God. And he recognizes no obligations to society. He knows no law but those of his passions and propensities, and no God but himself.

The history of atheism, in the lives and con^ duct of its votaries, confirms the inferences drawn from its nature and design. Although it may be admitted that there have been and still are some professed atheists of virtuous life and character, yet it may be safely asserted that this has been owing to an early religious training, or to the restraints of society, or the circumstances of their condition, and in despite of the pernicious tendency of their principles. - But, in general, atheists are blasphemers, lewd, dissipated, and immoral. And if it be asked, who are they that outrage all the decencies of life, that make a mock of sin, that riot in debauchery and crime? it will be found that they are not the religious portion of the community, who believe in God and worship him according to his ordinances ; but that they are either avowed unbelievers or practical atheists who live without hope and without God in the world.

Attempts have been made over and over to prove that atheism could insure human happiness upon a system of socialism, but in every instance they have failed. All such organizations, destitute of the foundations of virtue and religion upon which alone communities can stand, have speedily come to naught. There is nothing in atheism to bind society together. Its elements are all repulsive. " In the midst of millions the atheist would find himself in a desert. His situation would be that of a hermit; his character that of a fiend." All societies formed on atheistic principles would have speedily to disband, change, or perish. The members of such societies have been saved only by mingling again with their fellow-men under governments wherein God was recognized and our responsibility to him was felt.

We have one great practical illustration of these things on a national scale. Some years ago atheism prevailed in France. Its philosophers, descanting on the perfectibility of human nature, and attributing all the evils of society to the imperfection and abuses of the existing government, promised the people a perfect paradise of joy if they were only freed from the tyranny of priests and kings and governed by the simple and benevolent laws of nature alone. The seed was sown broadcast and the minds of the people were perverted. The way was paved for the goddess of reason to drive her car in triumph over France and begin her benignant reign. The powers of legislation and government fell into the hands of the philosophers themselves. The golden age dawned in which it was to be shown that man needed neither God, nor Bible, nor Sabbath, nor Priesthood, nor Church, nor Religion. It was "a grand experiment on human nature." The revolutionary leaders, in the height of their impiety, not only sought to destroy every vestige of Christianity by abolishing the Sabbath, altering the calendar, plundering and shutting up or converting into warehouses the various churches ; but in the climax of their guilt they brought the convention to yield to the cry that the era had come when man should cease to fear the Eternal, and, in the person of a strumpet, enthroned, with heathen orgies, the goddess of reason as the object of national worship.

Surely this was sufficient. The system shall have a fair trial. The triumph of atheism was complete ; and the result is before us. The reign of atheism was the reign of terror. The God they denied withdrew his Spirit from them, and left them to themselves. France was converted into a great prison, and its inhabitants into criminals. The sword, the bayonet, the sucking boat, and the guillotine were the ordinary instruments of execution. Day by day new victims were demanded to satisfy the popular frenzy, and the executioners of one period were the victims in the next, until, in the short period of ten years, it is estimated that not less than three millions of human beings perished in this way. The atrocities committed in this waste of human life were unparalleled in the history of nations. France was baptized with the blood of her inhabitants, and the people at .last recoiled in horror from the infamous and destructive system.

The trial was complete. It was proved that society could not exist under such a system ; that where the Great Ruler of the universe is disowned, the foundations of the earth are out of course, the bulwarks of virtue are destroyed, the checks of vice are removed, and the most horrid crimes are perpetrated in the name of liberty.

The trial was sufficient. The convention which had disowned the Most High and proclaimed death to be an eternal sleep was constrained to recognize again, by public enactment, the existence of God and a future state. Thus publicly recanting their former folly, and admitting that even a perverted religion is better than none at all.

The trial vindicated the truth of God's word, which thus graphically describes the effects of the atheistic theory: "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. Corrupt are they, and have done abominable iniquity ; there is none that doeth good. God looked down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there were any that did understand, that did seek God. Every one of them is gone back ; they are altogether become filthy; there is none that doeth good; no, not one." Ps. xiv. 1-3. Such is atheism, a system of mere negation without any evidence ; a presumptuous folly without any reason ; the religion of fools, if religion it may be called, which denies all religion, discards all moral obligation, and adopts for its motto, " Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die."

The effects of atheism are as I have described. The tree is known by its fruits. Men do not gather grapes of thorns nor figs of thistles. The fruits of atheism are according to its nature; just such as we might expect. This poisoned fountain sends forth bitter waters which blight all that is fair and lovely in the world, and spread devastation and death all around. Of all the phases of infidelity this is the worst and perhaps the most rare. It certainly is difficult for the human mind to maintain belief in a godless creed. Man's condition and necessities often force him to acknowledge the existence and seek the help of God. Voltaire could find a God in a storm, and many who, while in health, never speak his name but to blaspheme, pour out a prayer when trouble comes, and entreat his mercy in the day of their calamity.

" < There is no God,' the foolish saith, — But none, * There is no sorrow ;' And Nature oft the cry of Faith

In bitter need will borrow.

Eyes, which the preacher could not school,

By wayside graves are raised ; And lips say, * God be merciful,* That ne'er said, ' God be praised.' "

Miss Barrett.

Part II. The Divine Existence And Personality

No formal proof of the existence of God is to be reasonably expected in a revelation from God. A ruler in making a proclamation to his subjects does not deem it necessary to prove that he exists. The knowledge of his existence and consent to his authority are presupposed. And so with the omnipresent and demonstrative evidence of the eternal power and Godhead of the Creator before him, it is presumed that man must believe in his existence and acknowledge his sovereignty. To have offered proof of his existence would seem like an admission of the insufficiency of the evidence afforded by his works and the excusableness of those who do not adore and serve him. The opposite of which is asserted by Paul in Rom. i. 19, 20 : " Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them ; for God hath showed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse. ,,

The denial of the Divine Existence, or atheb 3 ism, has been considered, and its nature, character, and effects exhibited. It was shown to be the offspring of folly and wickedness, and its fruits disorder, misery, and death; yet I merely glanced at the difficulties which throng this theory of negation, and noticed one or two of the absurd and ridiculous speculations respecting the origin of things which have been broached by its advocates in the imbecility of their unbelief. Suppose now we were to admit the possibility of one of these conjectures respecting the origin of man, his development from a simple monad or animalcule, by some process which nature has since ceased to employ, through thousands of transmigrations and an indefinite number of years ; still, atheism would be at as great a loss to account for the origin of the monad as to account for that of man. And if, to evade this difficulty, it should be said that the monad was the production of nature, this must be understood of a spontaneous production of something out of nothing, or of giving new form and vitality to what was in existence in some inanimate state before ; and nothing is thereby gained; for nature is not an intelligent agent on even the atheistic theory, but simply matter operated on by certain physical laws, and is, therefore, incapable of creating anything. Nature originates nothing, and the inquiry arises,

DIVINE EXISTENCE AND PERSONALITY. 2J

Whence came matter? and how came these laws to exist? It is evident that matter could not originate itself, nor establish the laws by which it is governed. Pushed at last to the extremity of his theory, the atheist says, " Matter is eternal ; matter is unoriginate ; matter is self-existent; matter originated itself; matter sprung into existence spontaneously and organized itself into suns and worlds, and these assumed for themselves given distances, and centripetal and centrifugal forces and distinctive gravitation, and gave birth to all the wonderful varieties of vegetable and animal organisms." Now, there is no greater difficulty in believing in an eternal, self-existent, and intelligent being than there is in believing in the eternity of matter or in its spontaneous production. Atheism has in its theory a material universe uncaused, while the Bible or Christianity has in its theory an intelligent Being, the Creator of all things, uncaused. Which is the most rational idea, that of a material universe uncaused, or springing into existence spontaneously, or that of a material universe, the production of an all-wise and all-powerful Being, who is self-existent and eternal ? Surely the latter. But, says the atheist, we have evidence of the existence of matter, while we have none of the existence of such a being as God. Herein the great mistake of atheism lies. It supposes that there is no evidence of the existence of anything but what is cognizable by our senses, — that is, of what we can see and hear and taste and smell and feel.