equipment of our souls is in convictions which the demonstrations of a
physicist can as little reach as an inch worm, clambering up the
Himalayas, can measure the distance to the sun.
III
A man to whom the Christian life has come to be preeminently valuable,
and who is asking whether it is intellectually justifiable, is set
free, by such considerations as we just have noted, to seek assurance
where religious assurance may properly be found. For one thing, he may
find help by _trying out the creed of no-God_. Many a man is a
wavering believer, makes little excursions into doubt and returns
hesitant and unhappy, because he never has dared to see his doubts
through to their logical conclusion and to face the world with God
eliminated.
One may sense the general atmosphere of the world, under the no-God
hypothesis, by saying, _In all this universe there is no mind
essentially greater than mine._ The import of such a statement
grows weightier the more one ponders it. All human minds are
infinitesimal in knowledge; endless realities must lie beyond our
reach; "our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea." Yet human
knowledge is all that anywhere exists, if the no-God hypothesis is
true. There is no knower who knows more, and the infinite reality
beyond our grasp is not known by any mind at all. No one ever thought
it or will think it through eternity. Then, let a man add, _In all
this universe there is no goodness essentially greater than mine._
Human goodness is pitiably partial; it is but prophecy of what
goodness ought to mean; "Man is a dwarf of himself," as Emerson said.
But human goodness is all that anywhere exists, if the no-God
hypothesis is true. There never will be any better goodness anywhere,
and when the earth comes to its end in a solar catastrophe, there will
be no goodness left at all. Certainly the hypothesis of no-God raises
more questions than it easily can quell.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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