Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Religion
Systematic Theology (Volume 1 of 3)
Strong, Augustus Hopkins
Baptists -- Doctrines; Theology, Doctrinal
Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 276—“Reflection shows that
the community of individual intelligences is possible only through
an all-embracing Intelligence, the source and creator of finite
minds.” Science rests upon the postulate of a world-order. Huxley:
“The object of science is the discovery of the rational order
which pervades the universe.” This rational order presupposes a
rational Author. Dubois, in New Englander, Nov. 1890:468—“We
assume uniformity and continuity, or we can have no science. An
intelligent Creative Will is a genuine scientific hypothesis
[postulate?], suggested by analogy and confirmed by experience,
not contradicting the fundamental law of uniformity but accounting
for it.” Ritchie, Darwin and Hegel, 18—“That nature is a system,
is the assumption underlying the earliest mythologies: to fill up
this conception is the aim of the latest science.” Royce, Relig.
Aspect of Philosophy, 435—“There is such a thing as error; but
error is inconceivable unless there be such a thing as truth; and
truth is inconceivable unless there be a seat of truth, an
infinite all-including Thought or Mind; therefore such a Mind
exists.”
B. The more complex processes of the mind, such as induction and
deduction, can be relied on only by presupposing a thinking Deity who has
made the various parts of the universe and the various aspects of truth to
correspond to each other and to the investigating faculties of man.
We argue from one apple to the others on the tree. Newton argued
from the fall of an apple to gravitation in the moon and
throughout the solar system. Rowland argued from the chemistry of
our world to that of Sirius. In all such argument there is assumed
a unifying thought and a thinking Deity. This is Tyndall’s
“scientific use of the imagination.” “Nourished,” he says, “by
knowledge partially won, and bounded by coöperant reason,
imagination is the mightiest instrument of the physical
discoverer.” What Tyndall calls “imagination”, is really insight
into the thoughts of God, the great Thinker. It prepares the way
for logical reasoning,—it is not the product of mere reasoning.
For this reason Goethe called imagination “die Vorschule des
Denkens,” or “thought’s preparatory school.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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