MOST people cling to the supernatural. If they give up one God, they
imagine another. Having outgrown Jehovah, they talk about the power that
works for righteousness.
What is this power?
Man advances, and necessarily advances through experience. A man wishing
to go to a certain place comes to where the road divides. He takes the
left hand, believing it to be the right road, and travels until he finds
that it is the wrong one. He retraces his steps and takes the right hand
road and reaches the place desired. The next time he goes to the same
place, he does not take the left hand road. He has tried that road, and
knows that it is the wrong road. He takes the right road, and thereupon
these theologians say, "There is a power that works for righteousness."
A child, charmed by the beauty of the flame, grasps it with its dimpled
hand. The hand is burned, and after that the child keeps its hand out of
the fire. The power that works for righteousness has taught the child a
lesson.
The accumulated experience of the world is a power and force that works
for righteousness. This force is not conscious, not intelligent. It has
no will, no purpose. It is a result.
So thousands have endeavored to establish the existence of God by the
fact that we have what is called the moral sense; that is to say, a
conscience.
It is insisted by these theologians, and by many of the so-called
philosophers, that this moral sense, this sense of duty, of obligation,
was imported, and that conscience is an exotic. Taking the ground that
it was not produced here, was not produced by man, they then imagine a
God from whom it came.
Man is a social being. We live together in families, tribes and nations.
The members of a family, of a tribe, of a nation, who increase the
happiness of the family, of the tribe or of the nation, are considered
good members. They are praised, admired and respected. They are regarded
as good; that is to say, as moral.
The members who add to the misery of the family, the tribe or the
nation, are considered bad members.
They are blamed, despised, punished. They are regarded as immoral.
The family, the tribe, the nation, creates a standard of conduct, of
morality. There is nothing supernatural in this.