Page:The Necessity of Atheism (Brooks).djvu/298

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296
THE NECESSITY OF ATHEISM

which they had not become well acquainted with the ground, have proceeded to lend assurance that God is by subtracting so drastically from what is generally attributed to the conception of God, that there is nothing much left to what they conceive as what God means. They have stripped the conception of what has been heretofore regarded as fundamental, namely, the conception that God is a superhuman personality or mind.

In Mr. Whitehead's philosophy, God is spoken of as, "God is not concrete, but He is the ground for concrete actuality." I believe such confusion of language may have been in the mind of Dr. M. C. Otto when he remarked: "Some persons endeavor more than ever to make necessary distinctions to keep meanings as clear as possible; and to have an eye on the tendency of language to become its own object. Other persons repudiate these obligations. They act as if it were a virtue to love darkness rather than light if your intentions are good. Under their manipulations conceptions are dimmed or replaced by vague intimations. One boundary line after another is obliterated until the whole substance of things swims in mists."

History has illustrated that the greatest source of evil on this planet has arisen from the fact that physical phenomena for which our limited mental capacities were not able to formulate a logical solution, were ascribed to preternatural causes.

From this original stem arose religion and the Church, the two greatest obstacles which have been a burden to mankind for 2000 years and a barrier to all progress which has made life endurable and desirable.

The lower man is in the scale of civilization, the more does he call in the supernatural to explain all the happenings and experiences of his life. When he had been beset by an intellectual failure he had been thrown back