All religious principles are founded upon the idea of a God, but it is
impossible for men to have true ideas of a being who does not act upon
any one of their senses. All our ideas are but pictures of objects which
strike us. What can the idea of God represent to us when it is evidently
an idea without an object? Is not such an idea as impossible as an
effect without a cause? An idea without a prototype, is it anything but
a chimera? Some theologians, however, assure us that the idea of God is
innate, or that men have this idea from the time of their birth. Every
principle is a judgment; all judgment is the effect of experience;
experience is not acquired but by the exercise of the senses: from which
it follows that religious principles are drawn from nothing, and are not
innate.
V.--IT IS NOT NECESSARY TO BELIEVE IN A GOD, AND THE MOST REASONABLE
THING IS NOT TO THINK OF HIM.
No religious system can be founded otherwise than upon the nature of God
and of men, and upon the relations they bear to each other. But, in
order to judge of the reality of these relations, we must have some idea
of the Divine nature. But everybody tells us that the essence of God is
incomprehensible to man; at the same time they do not hesitate to assign
attributes to this incomprehensible God, and assure us that man can not
dispense with a knowledge of this God so impossible to conceive of. The
most important thing for men is that which is the most impossible for
them to comprehend. If God is incomprehensible to man, it would seem
rational never to think of Him at all; but religion concludes that man
is criminal if he ceases for a moment to revere Him.