Basic Ideas in Religion; Or, Apologetic Theism (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IX THE WITNESS OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT TO THE INFINITE AND PERFECT BEING THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT We began with the objective study of the universal faith of mankind in God, which is the expression of an intuition, vague but real, of the divine. This religious instinct, which anthropology considers a characteristic of man, demands, like all other instincts, a corresponding reality as its source and end, an environment of spirit. We confirmed this intuition and distinguished more clearly its contents by means of the witness of Nature to her Maker, and the testimony of man's threefold consciousness to similar attributes in God. Now we proceed to the analysis of this intuition itself, the so-called Ontological Argument. This line of reasoning is not properly an argument, being mystical or intuitive rather than intellectual or logical; it is the reverent study of the witness of God to Himself, that To yvwarov Tov Ocov which God has revealed in the heart of man. It is common to all devout minds, but seldom formulated. To the ideas of God, confirmed by preceding " proofs," it adds the conception of infinity and perfection. It is a priori in that the conception of the Infinite from which it starts is not the a posteriori result of experience, but is given in our spiritual nature itself. Many writers begin Apologetics with this argument, but this is not the logical order, for religion is clearer if we first study its own witness to itself in history, and then pass on to its evidences in nature and man. This intuitive " feeling" of God results from our own spiritual being. Spirits cannot but be conscious of the Spirit in whom they have their being. That this vision is so dim andwavering in most men is the consequence of sin, dulling the spiritual vision. Men are " aliena...