A Few Words About the Devil, and Other Biographical Sketches and EssaysBradlaugh, Charles
Religion
A Few Words About the Devil, and Other Biographical Sketches and Essays
Bradlaugh, Charles
Free thought
or less accurately, experience in the future, and to affirm truths which
sense perceives, experiment verifies, and experience confirms. To
God there can be neither past nor future, therefore to him reason is
impossible. There can not be perfect intelligence without will, but
has God will? If God wills, the will of the all-powerful must be
irresistible; the will of the infinite must exclude all other wills.
God can never perceive. Perception and sensation are identical. Every
sensation is accompanied by pleasure or pain. But God, if immutable, can
neither be pleased nor pained. Every fresh sensation involves a change
in mental and perhaps in physical condition. God, if immutable, can not
change. Sensation is the source of all ideas, but it is only objects
external to the mind which can be sensated. If God be infinite there can
be no objects external to him, and therefore sensation must be to him
impossible. Yet without perception where is intelligence?
God can not have memory or reason--memory is of the past, reason for the
future, but to God immutable there can be no past, no future. The words
past, present, and future, imply change; they assert progression of
duration. If God be immutable, to him change is impossible. Can you have
intelligence destitute of perception, memory, and reason? God can not
have the faculty of judgment--judgment implies in the act of judging
a conjoining or disjoining of two or more thoughts, but this involves
change of mental condition. To God, the immutable, change is impossible.
Can you have intelligence, yet no perception, no memory, no reason, no
judgment? God can not think. The law of the thinkable is that the thing
thought must be separated from the thing which is not thought. To think
otherwise would be to think of nothing--to have an impression with no
distinguishing mark, would be to have no impression. Yet this separation
implies change, and to God, immutable, change is impossible. Can you
have intelligence without thought? If the Theist replies to this that
he does not mean by infinite intelligence as an attribute of Deity an
infinity of the intelligence found in a finite degree of humankind,
then he is bound to explain, clearly and distinctly, what other
"intelligence" he means, and until this be done the foregoing statements
require answer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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