Produced by Marilynda Fraser-Cunliffe, Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net THEISM OR ATHEISM THE GREAT ALTERNATIVE By CHAPMAN COHEN THE PIONEER PRESS, 61, Farringdon Street, ----E.C.4---- 1921. Contents. Part I. AN EXAMINATION OF THEISM. PAGE Chapter I. What is God? 9 Chapter II. The Origin of the Idea of God 20 Chapter III. Have we a Religious Sense? 37 Chapter IV. The Argument from Existence 49 Chapter V. The Argument from Causation 59 Chapter VI. The Argument from Design 69 Chapter VII. The Disharmonies of Nature 85 Chapter VIII. God and Evolution 94 Chapter IX. The Problem of Pain 110 Part II. SUBSTITUTES FOR ATHEISM. Chapter X. A Question of Prejudice 131 Chapter XI. What is Atheism? 138 Chapter XII. Spencer and the Unknowable 151 Chapter XIII. Agnosticism 169 Chapter XIV. Atheism and Morals 181 Chapter XV. Atheism Inevitable 194 PREFACE. Shrouded in the cloak of philosophy, the question of the existence of God continues to attract attention, and, I may add, to command more respect than it deserves. For it is only by a subterfuge that it assumes the rank of philosophy. "God" enters into philosophy only when it is beginning to lose caste in its proper home, and then in its new environment it undergoes such a transformation as to contain very little likeness to its former, and proper, self. It disowns its parentage and claims another origin, and, like so many genealogists devising pedigrees for the parvenu, certain philosophers attempt to map out for the newcomer an ancestry to which he can establish no valid claim. Nothing would, indeed, surprise the ancestor more than to be brought face to face with his descendant. He would not be more astonished than would the ancient Eohippus on meeting with a modern dray-horse. In anthropology or history the idea of God may fairly claim a place, but it has no place in philosophy on any sensible meaning of the word.