82 HUMANISM 



IV 



into mist at various points ; it requires a certain atmo 

 sphere to be perceived. But a God who requires an 

 atmosphere has to be kept at a certain distance by his 

 worshippers, and so is conducive neither to intimacy of 

 communion nor to robustness of faith. This, however, 

 is a line of thought I must leave to theologians to work 

 out. 



The general philosophical conclusion which I would 

 draw from Lotze s lack of success in defining the con 

 ception of God is that of the futility of the a priori 

 proofs of God s existence. Their common weakness lies 

 in their being far too abstract. They are in consequence 

 applicable to the conception of a universe as such and 

 not to our particular world. Thus the ontological proof 

 argues that there must be a God from the fact that 

 there is a world at all ; the cosmological, from the fact of 

 causation taken in the abstract : the physico-theological, 

 even, is made to argue quite generally from order to a 

 designer thereof. Lotze s proof from interaction is of 

 an exactly similar character. It argues generally and 

 abstractly from the existence of interaction to a ground 

 of interaction. It is, in fact, a form of the ontological 

 proof, since interaction is the presupposition of there 

 being a world at all. 



Now the flaw in all these arguments is the same. 

 They fail because they attempt to prove too much. If 

 they hold at all, they hold quite generally and are 

 applicable to any sort of a world. In any world we 

 could argue from its existence to a God, from its change 

 to a First Cause, from its arrangement to a designer, 

 from its interaction to a single ground of its possibility ; 

 the argument is in each case quite unaffected by the 

 nature of the world about which it is used. It follows 

 that the God derived by such an argument must 

 similarly be catholic in his applicability and indifferent 

 to the contents of the world. The best and the worst of 

 thinkable worlds must alike have God for their cause and 

 for the ground of their interaction. The inference from 

 the world to God would be equally good, therefore, in 



