A handbook of Freethought : $b containing in condensed and systematized form a vast amount of evidence against the superstitious doctrines of Christianity
Religion
A handbook of Freethought : $b containing in condensed and systematized form a vast amount of evidence against the superstitious doctrines of Christianity
Christianity -- Controversial literature; Free thought
But will you say that this something, this self-existent, eternal
everything, is God? Very well. Then nothing but God could be. Then
he must be the all of everything existing everywhere. Then where
is your universe? You see you cannot have a universe if you have
a God. We have the universe; hence you cannot have a God. "But he
created the universe," you say. Very well; from what did he create
it? Nothing? Omnipresent God alone extending on, and on, and forever
on through all the everywheres, cramming all the immensities full of
his essential self. He could not have created the universe beyond
himself, since there was no beyond. There could have been no place
in which to put it outside of himself when created, since there was
no outside. If created, it must have been from his own essence; and
then it would not have been a creation of anything, but a changing of
himself into something different; and that was not possible, since
he was self-existent, and must necessarily exist the same forever,
since he was eternal, and must exist unchangeable. So the universe
could not have been made from nothing, since all the spaces everywhere
were crammed completely full of everything, and hence there was no
unoccupied premises where the raw material could have been stored
away. It could not have been created from God-substance, since that
already was; it could not have been formed from God's pre-existing
self, since that would have been to change the eternally unchangeable
into something else--to annihilate himself as God by working himself
over into the universe. You see that there can be but one Eternal
All. You cannot have both--a God and the universe. And since we have
the universe, that is, everything eternally existing everywhere,
we need no God, there is no room for a God, and there has never been
anything for a God to do. Therefore, there is no God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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