Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: n DOES GOD EXIST? We have agreed on our first proposition, that a thinking man must believe in something, since every statement must be true or false, and it remains for us to marshal our doubted beliefs, our faiths that have ceased to deserve the name, and investigate the grounds on which they rest. We will begin with the most fundamental question of all religions, — does God exist or does He not ?—because on its answer depends all that is to follow. If there is no God, ethical questions may still remain, but religion strictly speaking has ceased to exist, and religious observance is a meaningless ceremony. We may approach this question directly or by a more roundabout road, and in such a discussion as this, the latter is the more obvious way. That is, instead of considering first the proof of His existence, we will criticise the evidence usually advanced for His non-existence, and later can judge on which side we have more convincing data. We must place ourselves at the outset in a state of impartial doubt, that is, -we must admit the possibility that He is, or that He is not, or, in other words, doubt His non-existence as well as the opposite. The first reason usually given for disbelief in a God is, that we must accept the evidence of the senses, and since we do not see, feel, or hear God, why should we assume that there is one? It is an unwarrantable superstition, with no experimental basis. A second reason is that the qualities that inhere in the concept of Godhead are so incomprehensible that the mind reels before them, and that anything which is so confessedly beyond being understood, becomes a meaningless string of phrases with no savor of reality. The moment God becomes a clearly explained credible being, there is no use for Him in the world. As incomprehe...