Modern British and American Philosophers
In Great Britain and America the idea of God has undergone many vicissitudes. In the period of Deism, 1650-1800, the doctrine of God was profoundly affected by certain modern questions which were already emerging: the scientific view of nature as a unity, the denial of the principle of external authority, the right and sufficiency of reason, and the ethical as compared with the religious value of life. The deists yielded to none of their contemporaries in affirming that God was personal, the cause of the fixed providential order of the world, and of the moral order with its rewards and punishments both here and hereafter. The cosmological was the only theistic argument. God's wisdom and power were expressed neither in supernatural revelation nor in miracle. His nature was perfectly apprehensible to man's reason. He was, however, absolutely transcendent, i.e., not merely distinct from but removed from the world, an absentee God. This process of thought reached its negative skeptical result in David Hume; the being of God could be proved neither by rational considerations nor by the prevailing sensationalist theory of knowledge. Outside of the deists, the demonstration of the being and attributes of God by Samuel Clarke was thoroughly representative of the time. Something must have existed from eternity, of an independent, unchangeable nature, self-existent, absolutely inconceivable by us, necessarily everlasting, infinite, omnipotent, one and unique, intelligent and free, infinitely powerful, wise, good, and just, possessing the moral attributes required for governing the world. Bishop Butler (Analogy of Religion) held as firmly as the deists the transcendence of God, and if he made less of the cosmic, ethical, and mysterious than of the redemptive side of the divine nature, this is to be referred not to his underestimate of the redemptive purpose of God, but to the immediate aim of his apologetic. Accepting the fundamental tenet of Matthew Tindal, i.e., the identity of natural and revealed religion, he shows that the mysteries of revealed religion are not more inexplicable than the facts of universal human experience. Thus he seeks to open a door for God's activity in revelation-prophecy, miracles, and redemption A new tendency in the idea of God appears in William Paley. The proof of the existence and attributes of the deity is teleological. Nature is a contrivance of which God is the immediate creator. The celebrated Bridgewater Treatises follow in the same path, proving the wisdom, power, and goodness of God from geology, chemistry, astronomy, the animal world, the human body, and the inner world of consciousness. Chalmers sharply distinguishes between natural and revealed theology, as offering two sources for the knowledge of God. In this entire great movement of thought, therefore, God is conceived as transcendent. God and the world are presented in a thoroughly dualistic fashion. God is the immediate and instantaneous creator of the world as a mechanism. The principal divine attributes are wisdom and power; goodness is affirmed, but appears to be secondary: its hour has not yet come.
In America during the same period Jonathan Edwards is the chief representative of the idea of God. His doctrine centers in that of absolute sovereignty. God is a personal being, glorious, transcendent. The world has in him its absolute source, and proceeds from him as an emanation, or by continuous creation, or by perpetual energizing thought. As motive for the creation, he added to the common view-the declarative glory of God-that of the happiness of the creature. On the basis of causative predestination he maintains divine foreknowledge of human choice-a theory pushed to extreme limits by later writers, Samuel Hopkins and Nathanael Emmons. His doctrine of the divine transcendence was qualified by a thorough-going mysticism, a Christian experience characterized by a profound consciousness of the immediate presence, goodness, and glory of God. His conception of the ethical nature of God contained an antinomy -which he never resolved; the Being who showed surpassing grace to the elect and bestowed unnumbered common favors on the nonelect in this life, would, the instant after death, withdraw from the latter every vestige of good and henceforth pour out upon them the infinite and eternal fury of his wrath. Edwards' doctrine of God and its implications later underwent, however, serious modifications. In the circle which recognized him as leader, his son reports that no less than ten improvements had been made, some of which, e.g. concerning the atonement, directly affected the idea of God. Predestination was affirmed, but, instead of proceeding from an inscrutable will, following Leibniz, rested on divine foreknowledge of all possible worlds and included the purpose to realize this, the best of all possible worlds (A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology, New York, 1900; S. Harris, God, the Creator and Lord of All, ib., 1896). The atonement was conceived as sufficient but 'not efficient for all (C. Hodge, Systematic Theology, Philadelphia, 1865), or, on the other hand, as expressing the sincere purpose of God to redeem all sinners (A. E. Park, The Atonement; Introductory Essay, Boston, 1859). Divine sovereignty was roundly affirmed; for some it contained the secret of a double decree, for others it offered a convincing basis for the larger hope.
Nineteenth-Century Developments
During the nineteenth century a new movement appeared in English thought. Sir William Hamilton held that God was the absolute, the unconditioned, the cause of all (Philosophy of the Unconditioned, in Edinburgh Review, Oct. 1829). But since all thinking is to condition, and to condition the unconditioned is self-contradictory, God is both unknown and unknowable. Following in the same path H. L. Alansel (Limits of Religious Thought, London, 1867) found here the secret by which to maintain the mysteries of the faith of the church in the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, and other beliefs. Revelation was therefore required to supplement men's ignorance and to communicate what-human intelligence was unable to discover. Hence the 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. 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.
