Modern Skepticism: A Course of Lectures Delivered at the Request of the Christian Evidence Society
Religion
Modern Skepticism: A Course of Lectures Delivered at the Request of the Christian Evidence Society
Church of England; Skepticism; Skepticism -- Controversial literature
Moreover, they are mental conceptions, not physical affections.
They are only possible, they have no meaning, except as the thoughts of
some mind. Here, then, we are brought back by an inevitable necessity
to an antecedent mind, the seat and origin of all the principles, the
plans the ideas, the ends, embodied in organized beings, and fulfilled
in their existence, growth, and perfection. In short, from whatever
side we contemplate the problems of nature, and whencesoever we take
our point of departure in their investigation, we find ourselves
brought face to face with creative mind. The things which are "seen and
temporal" lead us always inwards to "the things which are unseen and
eternal;" man and creaturely existence conduct us to the living God.
If any one would escape from the pressure of this argument by hardily
denying that living organization involves principle or plan, type or
idea, purpose or end, it can only follow that the living forms of the
universe are an infinite congeries of accidental combinations, that in
reality there are no such things as organs, that there can be no such
thing as development, and that there is no such thing as law. What men
call law is mere sequence that happens to follow regularly. The whole
universe has been constituted and regulated by the fortuitous concourse
of atoms. Against such a conclusion as this I do not need to argue. It
is the naked and repulsive atheism of which I spoke in the introduction
to this lecture. The line of argument which I have been pursuing seems
to force us to the conclusion that there is no logical resting-place
between such theism as Christianity teaches and such Democritean
atheism as that of which we have now had a glimpse.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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