RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
God
dogmas concerning God which had been found repugnant or opaque to reason were philosophically reinstated and became once more authoritative for faith. In his System of Synthetic Philosophy Herbert Spencer (First Principles, London, 1860-62) maintains on the one hand an ultimate reality which is the postulate of theism, the absolute datum of consciousness, and on the other hand by reason of the limitations of knowledge a total human incapacity to assign any attributes to this utterly inscrutable power. In accordance with his doctrine of evolution he holds that this ultimate reality is an infinite and eternal energy from which all things proceed, the same which wells up in the human consciousness. He is neither materialistic nor atheistic. This reality is not personal according to the human type, but may be super-personal. Religion is the feeling of awe in relation to this inscrutable and mysterious power. With an aim not unlike that of Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold sought to reconcile the conflicting claims of religion, agnosticism, evolution, and history, by substituting for the traditional personal God the " Power not ourselves that makes for righteousness." Side by side with this movement appeared another led by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, based upon a spiritual philosophy, which found in the moral nature a revelation of God (Aids to Reflexion, London, 1825). This has borne fruit in many directions: in the great poets, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Browning; in preachers like Cardinal Newman, Dean Stanley, John Tulloch, Frederick William Robertson, and Charles Kingsley; in philosophical writers, as John Frederic Denison Maurice and James Martineau (qq.v.). The idea of God is taken out of dogma and the category of the schools and set in relation to life, the quickening source of ideals and of all individual and social advance. Religious thought in America has fully shared in these later tendencies in Great Britain, as may be seen by reference to John Fiske, Idea of God (Boston, 1886), unfolding the implications of Spencer's thought, and, reflecting the spirit of Coleridge, William Ellery Channing, Works (6 vols., Boston, 1848), W. G. T. Stead, "Introductory Essay " to Coleridge's Works (New York, 1884), and Horace Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, and Sermons (in Centenary edition of his Works, New York, 1903). An idea of God based on idealism, represented in Great Britain by John Caird, Philosophy of Religion (London, 1881), Edward Caird, The Evolution of Religion (ib. 1893), in Canada by John Watson, God's Message to the Human Soul (New York, 1907), has received impressive statement by Josiah Royce, The Conception of God (ib., 1897), and The World and the Individual (2 vols., 1899-1901). God is a being who possesses all logical possible knowledge, insight, wisdom. This includes omnipotence, self-consciousness, self-possession, goodness, perfection, peace. Thus this being possesses absolute thought and absolute experience, both completely organized. The absolute experience is related to human experience as an organic whole to its integral fragments. This idea of God which centers in omniscience does not intend to obscure either the ethical qualities or the proper personality of the absolute.
Turning from the historical survey to specific aspects of the idea of God which have in more recent times engrossed attention, there 4. Theistic come into view the theistic arguments, Arguments, the immanence, the personality, the Fatherhood of God, and the Trinity. Those writers who have not acknowledged the force of Kant's well-known criticism of the theistic arguments maintain the full validity of these proofs (cf. R. Flint, Theism, new ed., New York, 1890; J. L. Diman, The Theistic Argument, Boston, 1882). Others, as John Caird (ut sup.), conceive of the cosmological and teleojogjcal arguments as stages through which the human spirit rises to the knowledge of God which attains fulfilment in the ontological, the alone sufficient proof; yet Caird accords a real validity to the teleological argument interpreted from the point of view of evolution. Still others would restate the first and second arguments so that the cosmological argument, would run as follows: The world of experience is manifold and yet unified in a law of universal and concomitant variation among phenomena caused by some one being in them which is their true self and of which they are in some sense phases. As self-sufficient, this reality is absolute; as not subject to restrictions from without, it is infinite; as explanation of the world, it is the world-ground. The teleological argument would first inquire if there is in the world of experience activity toward ends, and secondly, when found, refer this to intelligence. Other forms of the theistic argument are drawn from the fact of finite intelligence, from epistemology (in reply to agnosticism), from metaphysical considerations in which purposeful thought is shown to be the essential nature of reality, and from the moral order which involves freedom and obligation to a personal source and ideal (cf. E. Caird, Critical Philosophy of Kant, 2 vols., Glasgow, 1889; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, 4th ed., London, 1899).
The idea of divine immanence is variously presented. Its true meaning is that God is the inner and essential reality of all phenomena, 5. Im- but this is susceptible of two very
manence. different interpretations. On the one hand, a pantheistic or metaphysical immanence, in which the One is identified with the many. This, however, destroys the relative independence of the human consciousness, eliminates the ethical value of conduct, and breaks down the very idea of God (cf. for criticism of metaphysical immanence, J. Caird, ut sup.; J. Royce, The World and the Individual, vol. ii.). Other notions of immanence are: First, God is present by his creative omniscience, so that the creation is in his image, and with a degree of independence, proceeds of itself and realizes the divine ideals (G. H. Howison, in Royce's Conception of God, New York, 1897). Secondly, the immanence of God is made picturesque by the analogy of the outside physical phenomena of the brain and the inner psychical phenomena of consciousness in which the true self appears. In like manner the veil of nature hides a person, complete, infinite, self-existent (J. LeConte, also in Royce, ut sup.). Thirdly, God is personally present as energy in all things and particularly in all per-
God Godliness