2. In scientific theology, atheism is opposed to the- ism. The doctrine of Christian theism is that God is absolute, self-conscious personal spirit, the beneficent creator and upholder of the universe. Every system of philosophy or religion must be built upon this prin- ciple or its opposite ; that is, must be either theistic or atheistic. Hence a great deal of what passes for De- ism and Pantheism is in fact Atheism. Christianity apprehends God not as entirely apart from the world and exerting no providence (Deism), nor as existing only in the world (Pantheism), but as existing apart from creation, but himself creator and controller (i. c.
Providence). On this theory of a living and personal God Christianity undertakes to explain the phenome- na of the universe. Those who seek to explain these phenomena by substituting other ideas for this idea of God are, in the view of Christian theology, atheists. The term should be applied to none who profess to be- lieve in a personal, self-conscious, spiritual God. Athe- ism is divided into positive or dogmatic, which ab- solutely declares that there is no God, and negative or sceptical, which declares either (a) that, if there be a God, we cannot know either the fact or the nature of his existence, and therefore it is no concern of ours, or (b) that, if there be a God, we can only know of him by tradition or by faith, and can never have proof satisfactory to the intellect of his existence. Some Christian writers and philosophers have incautiously attempted to stand upon this latter ground. The.so- j called Positive Philosophy stands upon the first ground (a), but logically leads (in spite of Mr. J. S. Mill's de- j nial, in his Exposition of Comte) to dogmatical atheism. J To state that we only know, and only can know phe- ; nomena, is to exclude God ; for God is not only no ! phenomenon, but is, in the Christian sense, the abso- j lute ground of all phenomena. The theories which at- ; tempt to explain phenomena without the idea of God | may be classed as (1) the Idealistic, which substitutes for the absolute, self-conscious Spirit, a so-called ' world-spirit ; not a living, personal being, but an un- conscious and abstract one — in a word, a mere concep- tion of ideal being as the abstract totality of all indi- vidual conceptions ; (2) the Materialistic, which sub- stitutes for a personal God the forces inherent in mat- ! ter, and holds that these sufficiently explain all phe- nomena ; (3) the Subjective-idealistic, which asserts that phenomena are nothing but the creations or mod- ifications of the thinking mind or subject, and that thought creates not only matter, so called, but God. To the first and third of these classes belong Fichte, Hegel, and (during his early life) Schelling, among the Germans, and their followers in England and Ameri- ca. To the second class belong Comte, and the so- called Positive philosophers in general. It is true that Lewes (Philosophy of the Sciences, p. 24) denies that Comte was an atheist ; and Wallace (Art, Scenery, and Philosojihy in Europe), while admitting Comte's indi- vidual atheism, denies that atheism is a characteristic of Positivism. But these denials are vain, so long as the very aim of the Positive method is to eliminate mind and will from the universe. A science of pure phenomenalism can never coexist with Christian the- ism. Perhaps the most open declarations of atheism in modern times are to be found in D'Holbach's Sys- thne de la Nature (1770), the ultimate fruit, in athe- istic materialism, of the sensational philosophy. Even Voltaire pronounced it "abominable" (see note to Brougham, Biscourse on Natural Theology; Itenouvier, Philosophic Moderne, bk. v, § 2). The doctrine of the book is that nothing, in fact, exists but matter and motion, which are inseparable. "If matter is at rest, it is only because hindered in motion, for in its essence it is not a dead mass. Motion is twofold, attraction and repulsion, and the different motions we see are the products of these two; and through these arise the different connections and the whole manifoldness of things, under laws which arc eternal and unchangea- ble. It flows from these positions, first, that man is material, and, secondly, that the belief in Cod is a chimera. Another chimera, the belief in the being of a God, is the twofold division of man into body and soul. This belief arises like the hypothesis of a soul-substance, because mind is falsely divided from matter, and nature is thus made twofold. The evil which men experienced, and whose natural cause they could not discover, they assigned to a deity which they imagined for the purpose. The first notions of a God have their source, therefore, in sorrow, fear, and uncertainty. We tremble because our forefathers
ATHEISM
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ATHEISM