Is There a God?
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4. The majority of mankind, not in Christian countries only, but also in heathen lands, from the beginning of the world onward, have believed in the existence of a Supreme Being. They may frequently, as Paul says, have “changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds and four-footed beasts and creep- ing t h i n g s b u t deeply seated in their natures, debased though these were by sin, lay the conception of a Superhuman Power to whom they owed allegiance and whose favor was indis- pensable to their happiness. I t was a saying of Plutarch that in his day a man might travel the world over without finding a city without temples and gods; in, our day isolated cases have been cited of tribes—t he Andaman Islanders by Sir John Lubbock, and the Fuegians, by Admiral Fitzroy-—w ho have exhibited no signs that they possessed a knowledge either of God or of religion. But it is at least open to question whether the investigators on whose testimony such instances are ad- vanced did not fail to discover traces of what they sought either through want of familiarity with the language of the natives, or through starting with the presupposition that the religious conceptions of the natives must be equally exalted with their own. In any case, on the principle that exceptions prove the rule, it may be set down as incontrovertible that the vast majority of mankind have possessed some idea of a Supreme Being; so that if the truth or falsehood of the proposition, “There is no God,” is to be determined by the counting of votes, the question is settled in the negative, that is, against the atheist’s creed. II . THE CONFESSION OF THE AGNOSTIC “ l CANNOT TELL WHETHER THERE IS A GOD OR NOT” Without dogmatically affirming that there is no God, the Agnostic practically insinuates that whether there is a God or not, nobody can tell and it does not much matter—t hat man with his loftiest powers of thought and reason and with his
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