it appears to me that while human thought is consecutive, Divine thought is
simultaneous, embracing at the same time and forever, in the past, the
present and the future, the most diversified relations among hundreds of
thousands of organized beings, each of which may present complications
again, which to study and understand even imperfectly--as for instance man
himself-- mankind has already spent thousands of years."[I-14] In thus
conceiving of the Divine Power in act as coetaneous with Divine Thought,
and of both as far as may be apart from the human element of time, our
author may regard the intervention of the Creator either as, humanly
speaking, done from all time, or else as doing through all time. In the
ultimate analysis we suppose that every philosophical theist must adopt one
or the other conception.
A perversion of the first view leads toward atheism, the notion of an
eternal sequence of cause and effect, for which there is no first cause--a
view which few sane persons can long rest in. The danger which may threaten
the second view is pantheism. We feel safe from either error, in our
profound conviction that there is order in the universe; that order
presupposes mind; design, will; and mind or will, personality. Thus
guarded, we much prefer the second of the two conceptions of causation, as
the more philosophical as well as Christian view--a view which leaves us
with the same difficulties and the same mysteries in Nature as in
Providence, and no other. Natural law, upon this view, is the human
conception of continued and orderly Divine action.
We do not suppose that less power, or other power, is required to sustain
the universe and carry on its operations, than to bring it into being. So,
while conceiving no improbability of "interventions of Creative mind in
Nature," if by such is meant the bringing to pass of new and fitting events
at fitting times, we leave it for profounder minds to establish, if they
can, a rational distinction in kind between his working in Nature carrying
on operations, and in initiating those operations.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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