1. For the religious consciousness, God is not to be demonstrated by
argument, but is a fact of inner and outer experience. Whatever the origin
and nature of the cosmos may be according to natural science, the soul of
man follows its natural bent, as in the days of Abraham, to look through
nature to the Maker, Ordainer, and Ruler of all things, who uses the
manifold world of nature only as His workshop, and who rules it in freedom
as its sovereign Master. The entire cosmic life points to a Supreme Being
from whom all existence must have arisen, and without whom life and
process would be impossible. Still even this mode of thought is influenced
and determined by the prevalent monotheistic conceptions.
Far more original and potent in man is the feeling of limitation and
dependency. This brings him to bow down before a higher Power, at first in
fear and trembling, but later in holy awe and reverence. As soon as man
attains self-consciousness and his will acquires purpose, he encounters a
will stronger than his own, with which he often comes into conflict, and
before which he must frequently yield. Thus he becomes conscious of
duty—of what he ought and ought not to do. This is not, like earlier
limitations, purely physical and working from without; it is moral and
operates from within. It is the sense of duty, or, as we call it,
_conscience_, the sense of right and wrong. This awakened very early in
the race, and through it God’s voice has been perceived ever since the
days of Adam and of Cain.(155)
2. According to Scripture, man in his natural state possesses the
certainty of God’s existence through such inner experience. Therefore the
Bible contains no command to _believe_ in God, nor any logical
demonstration of His existence. Both the Creation stories and those of the
beginnings of mankind assume as undisputed the existence of God as the
Creator and Judge of the world. Arguments appealing to reason were
resorted to only in competition with idolatry, as in Deuteronomy,
Jeremiah, and Deutero-Isaiah, and subsequently by the Haggadists in
legends such as those about Abraham. Nor does the Bible consider any who
deny the existence of God;(156) only much later, in the Talmud, do we hear
of those who “deny the fundamental principle” of the faith. The doubt
expressed in Job, Koheleth, and certain of the Psalms, concerns rather the
justice of God than His existence. True, Jeremiah and the Psalms(157)
mention some who say “There is no God,” but these are not atheists in our
sense of the word; they are the impious who deny the moral order of life
by word or deed. It is the villain (_Nabal_), not the “fool” who “says in
heart, there is no God.” Even the Talmud does not mean the real atheist
when speaking of “the denier of the fundamental principle,” but the man
who says, “There is neither a judgment nor a Judge above and beyond.”(158)
In other words, the “denier” is the same as the Epicurean (Apicoros), who
refuses to recognize the moral government of the world.(159)
3. After the downfall of the nation and Temple, the situation changed
through the contemptuous question of the nations, “Where is your God?”
Then the necessity became evident of proving that the Ruler of nations
still held dominion over the world, and that His wondrous powers were
shown more than ever before through the fact of Israel’s preservation in
captivity. This is the substance of the addresses of the great seer of the
Exile in chapters XL to LIX of Isaiah, in which he exposes the gods of
heathendom to everlasting scorn, more than any other prophet before or
afterward. He declares these deities to be vanity and naught, but
proclaims the Holy One of Israel as the Lord of the universe. He hath
“meted out the heavens with the span,” and “weighed the mountains in
scales, and the hills in a balance.” Before Him “the nations are as a drop
of the bucket,” and “the inhabitants of the earth as grasshoppers.” “He
bringeth out the hosts of the stars by number, and calleth them all by
name,” “He hath assigned to the generations of men their lot from the
beginning, and knoweth at the beginning what will be their end.”(160)
Measured by such passages as these and such as Psalms VIII, XXIV, XXXIII,
CIV, and CXXXIX, where God is felt as a living power, all philosophical
arguments about His existence seem to be strange fires on the altar of
religion. The believer can do without them, and the unbeliever will hardly
be convinced by them.
4. Upon the contact of the Jew with Greek philosophy doubt arose in many
minds, and belief entered into conflict with reason. But even then, the
defense of the faith was still carried on by reasoning along the lines of
common sense.(161) Thus the regularity of the sun, moon, and stars,—all
worshiped by the pagans as deities—was considered a proof of God’s
omnipotence and rule of the universe, a proof which the legend ascribes to
Abraham in his controversy with Nimrod.(162) In like manner, the
apocryphal Book of Wisdom(163) says that true wisdom, as opposed to the
folly of heathenism, is “to reason from the visible to the Invisible One,
and from the cosmos, the great work of art, to the Supreme Artificer.”
5. Philo was the first who tried to refute the “atheistic” views of
materialists and pantheists by adducing proofs of God’s existence from
nature and the human intellect. In the former he pointed out order as
evidence of the wisdom underlying the cosmos, and in the latter the power
of self-determination as shadowing forth a universal mind which determines
the entire universe.(164) Still, with his mystical attitude, Philo
realized that the chief knowledge of God is through intuition, by the
inner experience of the soul.
6. Two proofs taken from nature owe their origin to Greek philosophy.
Anaxagoras and Socrates, from their theory of design in nature, deduced
that there is a universal intelligence working for higher aims and
purposes. This so-called _teleological_ proof, as worked out in detail by
Plato, was the unfailing reliance of subsequent philosophers and
theologians.(165) Plato and Aristotle, moreover, from the continuous
motion of all matter, inferred a prime cause, an unmoved mover. This is
the so-called _cosmological_ proof, used by different schools in varying
forms.(166) It occupies the foremost place in the systems of the Arabic
Aristotelians, and consequently is dominant among the Jewish philosophers,
the Christian scholastics, and in the modern philosophic schools down to
Kant. It is based upon the old principle of causality, and therefore takes
the mutability and relativity of all beings in the cosmos as evidence of a
Being that is immutable, unconditioned, and absolutely necessary, causa
sui, the prime cause of all existence.
7. The Mohammedan theologians added a new element to the discussion. In
their endeavor to prove that the world is the work of a Creator, they
pointed as evidence to the multiformity and composite structure, the
contingency and dependency of the cosmos; thus they concluded that it must
have been created, and that its Creator must necessarily be the one,
absolute, and all-determining cause. This proof is used also by Saadia and
Bahya ben Joseph.(167) Its weakness, however, was exposed by Ibn Sina and
Alfarabi among the Mohammedans, and later by Abraham ibn Daud and
Maimonides, their Jewish successors as Aristotelians. These proposed a
substitute argument. From the fact that the existence of all cosmic beings
is merely possible,—that is, they may exist and they may not exist,—these
thinkers concluded that an absolutely necessary being must exist as the
cause and condition of all things, and this absolutely unconditioned yet
all-conditioning being is God, the One who _is_.(168) Of course, the God
so deduced and inferred is a mere abstraction, incapable of satisfying the
emotional craving of the heart.
8. While the cosmological proof proceeds from the transitory and imperfect
nature of the world, the _ontological_ proof, first proposed by Anselm of
Canterbury, the Christian scholastic of the XI century, and further
elaborated by Descartes and Mendelssohn, proceeds from the human
intellect. The mind conceives the idea of God as an absolutely perfect
being, and, as there can be no perfection without existence, the
conclusion is that this idea must necessarily be objectively true. Then,
as the idea of God is innate in man, God must necessarily exist,—and for
proof of this they point to the Scriptural verse, “The fool hath said in
his heart, there is no God,” and other similar passages. In its improved
form, this argument uses the human concept of an infinitely perfect God as
evidence, or, at least, as postulate that such a Being exists beyond the
finite world of man.(169)
Another argument, rather naïve in character, which was favored by the
Stoics and adopted by the Church fathers, is called _de consensu gentium_,
and endeavored to prove the reality of God’s existence from the
universality of His worship. It speaks well for the sound reasoning of the
Jewish thinkers that they refused to follow the lead of the Mohammedans in
this respect, and did not avail themselves of an argument which can be
used just as easily in support of a plurality of gods.(170)
9. All these so-called proofs were invalidated by Immanuel Kant, the great
philosopher of Königsberg, whose critical inquiry into the human intellect
showed that the entire sum of our knowledge of objects and also of the
formulation of our ideas is based upon our limited mode of apperception,
while the reality or essence, “the thing in itself,” will ever remain
beyond our ken. If this is true of physical objects, it is all the more
true of God, whom we know through our minds alone and not at all through
our five senses. Accordingly, he shows that all the metaphysical arguments
have no basis, and that we can know God’s existence only through _ethics_,
as a postulate of our moral nature. The inner consciousness of our moral
obligation, or duty, implies a moral order of life, or moral law; and
this, in turn, postulates the existence of God, the Ruler of life, who
assigns to each of us his task and his destiny.(171)
10. It is true that God is felt and worshiped first as the supreme power
in the world, before man perceives Him as the highest ideal of morality.
Therefore man will never cease looking about him for vestiges of divinity
and for proofs of his intuitive knowledge of God. The wondrous order,
harmony, and signs of design in nature, as well as the impulse of the
reason to search for the unity of all things, corroborate this innate
belief in God. Still more do the consciousness of duty in the
individual—conscience—and the progress of history with its repeated
vindication of right and defeat of wrong proclaim to the believer
unmistakably that the God of justice reigns. But no proof, however
convincing, will ever bring back to the skeptic or unbeliever the God he
has lost, unless his pangs of anguish or the void within fill his desolate
world anew with the vivifying thought of a living God.
11. Among all the Jewish religious philosophers the highest rank must be
accorded to Jehudah ha Levi, the author of the _Cuzari_,(172) who makes
the historical fact of the divine revelation the foundation of the Jewish
religion and the chief testimony of the existence of God. As a matter of
fact, reason alone will not lead to God, except where religious intuition
forms, so to speak, the ladder of heaven, leading to the realm of the
unknowable. Philosophy, at best, can only demonstrate the existence of a
final Cause, or of a supreme Intelligence working toward sublime purposes;
possibly also a moral government of the world, in both the physical and
the spiritual life. Religion alone, founded upon divine revelation, can
teach man to find a God, to whom he can appeal in trust in his moments of
trouble or of woe, and whose will he can see in the dictates of conscience
and the destiny of nations. Reason must serve as a _corrective_ for the
contents of revelation, scrutinizing and purifying, deepening and
spiritualizing ever anew the truths received through intuition, but it can
never be the final source of truth.
12. The same method must apply also to modern thought and research, which
substituted historical methods for metaphysics in both the physical and
intellectual world, and which endeavors to trace the origin and growth of
both objects and ideas in accordance with fixed laws. The process of
evolution, our modern key with which to unlock the secrets of nature,
points most significantly to a Supreme Power and Energy. But this energy,
entering into the cosmic process at its outset, causing its motion and its
growth, implies also an end, and thus again we have the Supreme
Intelligence reached through a new type of teleology.(173) But all these
conceptions, however they may be in harmony with the Jewish belief in
creation and revelation, can at best supplement it, but can certainly
neither supplant nor be identified with it.