Accepting the universe : $b Essays in naturalismBurroughs, John
Philosophy
Accepting the universe : $b Essays in naturalism
Burroughs, John
Natural history; Natural history -- Philosophy; Philosophy; Science
When we say that there is no God, we only mean that there is no
being that we can define or conceive of in terms of man. Nothing in
the finite can help us in dealing with the infinite. The Infinite,
the Omnipotent, the Omnipresent, cannot be a being without sharing
the limitations of being, or without being subject to the bounds
of time and space. If God is everywhere, He is nowhere; if He is
all-powerful, his power has no contrary, and hence ceases to exist.
One after another the human and personal attributes we ascribe to Him
disappear when we try to conceive of Him in terms of the infinite.
The infinite is equivalent to negation. There are no terms in which
we can define the ether; it is the negative of all things that have
length and breadth and thickness, or motion or rest or substance, or
friction or cohesion, or place or power. An infinite being is as much
a contradiction of terms as a square or plane sphere would be. If
God is a person, with human-like attributes and emotions,--though we
call them divine,--it is legitimate to ask, Where is He? where was He
before the solar systems took form? where will He be after they have
again become formless?
Our inevitable anthropomorphism prefigures the Infinite as superman;
He is man magnified to infinity. He is the supreme king or ruler of
the universe. We dream of seeing Him face to face; He has eyes, ears,
hands, feet, and the emotions of love, anger, pity, and the like. Man
thus imposes his own form upon the power that is and upholds the
cosmos. He carves it into his own image, and then seeks to propitiate
it and influence it as He Himself is propitiated and influenced.
Praise is sweet to it, honor is sweet, revenge is sweet, because
these things are sweet to man.
When we call this force Nature, we bring it near to us and can see
and feel our direct relation to it. We are bone of its bone and
flesh of its flesh. We see its impersonal or unpersonal character.
We get light on the vexed problem of good and evil which is such an
insoluble enigma to the theologians.
Nature embraces all; she fathers and mothers all; has no
partialities, knows no exceptions, no miracles, no deputied
atonements, no evil apart from the good and no good apart from the
evil, no life without death and no death without life.
IX. THE INSOLUBLE
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