Faith and reason -- Christianity; Immortality -- Christianity; Tragic, The -- Religious aspects -- Christianity
The question arises, on the other hand, whether a thing the idea of
which has been conceived but which has no real existence, does not exist
because God wills that it should not exist, or whether God does not will
it to exist because, in fact, it does not exist; and, with regard to the
impossible, whether a thing is impossible because God wills it so, or
whether God wills it so because, in itself and by the very fact of its
own inherent absurdity, it is impossible. God has to submit to the
logical law of contradiction, and He cannot, according to the
theologians, cause two and two to make either more or less than four.
Either the law of necessity is above Him or He Himself is the law of
necessity. And in the moral order the question arises whether falsehood,
or homicide, or adultery, are wrong because He has so decreed it, or
whether He has so decreed it because they are wrong. If the former, then
God is a capricious and unreasonable God, who decrees one law when He
might equally well have decreed another, or, if the latter, He obeys an
intrinsic nature and essence which exists in things themselves
independently of Him--that is to say, independently of His sovereign
will; and if this is the case, if He obeys the innate reason of things,
this reason, if we could but know it, would suffice us without any
further need of God, and since we do not know it, God explains nothing.
This reason would be above God. Neither is it of any avail to say that
this reason is God Himself, the supreme reason of things. A reason of
this kind, a necessary reason, is not a personal something. It is will
that gives personality. And it is because of this problem of the
relations between God's reason, necessarily necessary, and His will,
necessarily free, that the logical and Aristotelian God will always be a
contradictory God.
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