There cannot be perfect
intelligence without understanding; but following Coleridge,
“understanding is the faculty of judging according to sense.” The
faculty of whom? Of some person, judging according to that person’s
senses. But has “God” senses? Is there anything beyond “God” for God to
sensate? There cannot be perfect intelligence without reason. By reason
we mean that phase of the mind which avails itself of past and present
experience to predicate more or less accurately of possible experience
in the future. To God there can be neither past nor future, therefore to
him reason is impossible. There cannot be perfect intelligence without
will; but has God will? If God wills, the will of the all-powerful must
be irresistible; the will of the infinite must exclude all other wills.
God can never perceive. Perception and sensation are identical. Every
sensation is pleasurable or painful. But God, if immutable, can neither
be pleased nor pained. Every fresh sensation involves a change in mental
and perhaps in physical condition. God, if immutable, cannot change.
Sensation is the source of all ideas, but it is only objects external to
the mind which can be sensated. If God be infinite there can be no
objects external to him, and therefore sensation must be to him
impossible. Yet without perception where is intelligence?
God cannot have memory nor reason—memory is of the past, reason for the
future, but to God immutable there can be no past, no future. The words
past, present, and future imply change: they assert progression of
duration. If God be immutable, to him change is impossible. Can you have
intelligence destitute of perception, memory, and reason? God cannot
have the faculty of judgment—judgment implies in the act of judging a
conjoining or disjoining of two or more thoughts, but this involves
change of mental condition. To God the immutable, change is impossible.
Can you have intelligence, yet no perception, no memory, no reason, no
judgment? God cannot think. The law of the thinkable is, that the thing
thought must be separated from the thing which is not thought. To think
otherwise would be to think of nothing—to have an impression with no
distinguishing mark, would be to have no impression. Yet this separation
implies change, and to God, immutable, change is impossible. In memory,
the thing remembered is distinguished from the thing temporarily or
permanently forgotten. Can God forget? Can you have intelligence without
thought? If the Theist replies to this, that he does not mean by
infinite intelligence as an attribute of Deity, an infinity of the
intelligence found in a finite degree in humankind, then he is bound to
explain, clearly and distinctly, what other “intelligence” he means; and
until this be done the foregoing statements require answer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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