We see, then, that the mind is so constituted that a philosophy of meaninglessness is accepted only at the suggestion of the passions and is persisted in only by those whose heredity and upbringing make it possible for them to live as though the world were at least partially meaningful. The fact that the mind has a certain difficulty in accepting the philosophy of meaninglessness is significant, if only to the extent that it raises the question whether truth and goodness may not be somehow correlated in the nature of things. Nor is the old Stoic appeal to the consensus gentium by any means entirely negligible. That so many philosophers and mystics, belonging to so many different cultures, should have been convinced, by inference or by direct intuition, that the world possesses meaning and value is a fact sufficiently striking to make it worth while at least to investigate the belief in question.
Let us begin the investigation by considering the stock arguments used in support of theism. Of these the argument from design was at one time the most popular. To-day it no longer carries conviction. To begin with, we are no longer certain that the design, upon which Paley and the earlier thinkers based their arguments, is more than the appearance of design. What looks as though it had been planned in advance may be in fact merely the result of a long-drawn process of adaptation. The relationship existing between X and Y may be the kind of relationship that an intelligent being would have planned. But that is no reason for supposing that an intelligent being did in fact plan it. Such a relationship may equally well be the result of natural selection working blindly to produce a state of equilibrium between two originally discordant and mutually unadapted entities. Moreover, even if the evidence for design is taken at its face value (as it was taken by Kant), there is still no reason for supposing that the designer was a single supreme being. Upon this point the arguments adduced by Hume and Kant are decisive.
The ontological argument is even less convincing than the argument from design. Anselm was decisively refuted by Aquinas and Descartes by Kant. In recent years, the verbal foundations of logic have been subjected to the most searching analysis, as the result of which the ontological argument seems still less satisfactory than it did even in Kant’s day.
The cosmological proof of the existence of God is based upon the argument that if contingent beings exist there must exist a necessary being; and that if there is an ens necessarium it must be at the same time an ens realissimum. In his earlier writings Kant produced a very elaborate speculative proof of God’s existence, based upon the argument that the possible presupposes the actual. Later, when he had developed his Critical Philosophy, he rejected this proof and sought to show that all the arguments for natural theology, including the cosmological, were unsound. In the course of his later refutation of the cosmological proof, Kant has to dispose of the natural theologian’s argument that the existence of causally related events implies the existence of a First Cause. He does this by arguing that causality is merely a principle for ordering appearances in the sensible world, therefore cannot legitimately be used for transcending the world of sense.
This argument has been revived, in a less pedantic form, by Brunschvicg in his Progrès de la Conscience (ii. 778): ‘En toute évidence, ceux-là même qui invoquent le principe de la causalité comme une loi fondamentale de la raison humaine, ne peuvent y obéir strictement que s’ils en font usage pour relier de l’unité d’un iugement deux objets dont l’existence leur est préalablement certifiée. C’est la loi elle-même qui s’oppose à ce qu’ils aillent forger de leur autorité privée le terme qui manque pour la mise en œuvre effective du principe: l’application transcendentale de la causalité revient à la pétition d’un objet imaginaire.’ The question arises: what are the objects which can be legitimately connected by the principle of causality? Kant involved himself in extraordinary difficulties by limiting causality to events in the world of sense. But the only form of causality with which we have direct acquaintance is our own voluntary activity. We know directly that our will is the cause of our performing a given action in the world of sense.
It is no doubt true, as Brunschvicg says, that we have no right to apply the principle of causality except to objects of which we already know, either by direct acquaintance or by inference, that they exist. Acting on this principle, we may legitimately postulate a causal connection between one sense object and another sense object and also between a sense object and a mental state which is not a sense object. Whether in fact there can be mental states which do not belong to individual human beings or animals is another question. All that we can say in this particular context is that, if such mental states exist, there seems to be no reason why (supposing them to be analogous to our own mental states) they should not be causally related to events in the world of sense.
The moral argument for theism may be very briefly summed up as follows. Moral action aims at the realization of the highest good. The highest good cannot be realized except where there is a virtuous rational will in persons and a world in which this virtuous rational will is not thwarted—a world where virtue is united with happiness. But it is a matter of brute empirical fact that, in the world of phenomena, the most virtuous are not necessarily the happiest, and that the rational will is not always that which gets itself done. It follows therefore that the union of virtue and happiness, without which the highest good cannot be realized, must be effected by some power external to ourselves, a power which so arranges things that, whatever partial and temporary appearance may be, the total world order is moral and demonstrates the union of virtue with happiness.
Those who oppose this argument do so, first, on the ground that it is merely a piece of ‘wishful thinking,’ and, second, that words like ‘virtue,’ ‘the good’ and all the rest have no definite meaning, but change from one community to another.
We discredit thoughts which have wishes as their fathers; and in very many circumstances, we are certainly right in doing so. But there are certain circumstances in which wishes are a reliable source of information, not only about ourselves, but also about the outside world. From the premiss, for example, of thirst we are justified in arguing the existence of something which can satisfy thirst. Nor is it only in the phenomenal world that such wishful arguments have validity. We have, as I have pointed out in an earlier paragraph, a craving for explanation. This craving is satisfied by the reduction of diversity to identity, so much so that any theory which postulates the existence of identity behind diversity seems to us intrinsically plausible. Like philosophy and religion, science is an attempt systematically to satisfy the craving for explanation in terms of theories which seem plausible because they postulate the existence of identity behind diversity.
But here an interesting and highly significant fact emerges: observation and experiment seem to demonstrate that what the human mind regards as intrinsically plausible is in fact true and that the craving for explanation, which is a craving for identity behind diversity, is actually satisfied by the real world; for the real world reveals itself as being in effect a unity in diversity. The craving for explanation was felt by men thousands of years before the instruments, by means of which that craving could be scientifically satisfied, had been invented. The old philosophers of nature assuaged that craving by postulating the existence of some single substance, material or mental, underlying the apparent diversity of independent existents, or by proclaiming that all matter must be built of identically similar atoms, variously arranged. Within the last half-century investigation by means of instruments of precision has actually demonstrated that these cosmological theories which, up till then, could only be described as pieces of wishful thinking designed to satisfy the inborn craving for explanation, were in fact remarkably consonant with the facts of the empirical world. The craving for righteousness seems to be a human characteristic just as fundamental as the craving for explanation.
The moral argument in favour of theism is certainly a piece of wishful thinking; but it is no more wishful than the arguments in favour of the atomic theory propounded by Democritus and Epicurus, or even by Boyle and Newton. The theory by means of which these natural philosophers tried to satisfy their craving for explanation was found to be in tolerably close accord with the facts discovered by the later investigators, equipped with more effective instruments for exploring physical reality. Whether it will ever be possible to verify the theories of the moral philosophers by direct observation and experiment seems doubtful. But that is no reason for denying the truth of such theories. Nor, as we have seen, is the fact that they originate in wishes. ‘Tu ne me chercherais pas si tu ne me possédais,’ wrote Pascal. ‘Ne t’inquiète donc pas.’ The theories devised to satisfy the craving
