WORLD HOPES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 455, 12 March 1948, Page 5

WORLD HOPES

Sir,-Charles Langton, in saying that: "We attribute personality to God for this reason: We are persons," completely sustains my contention that we become embroiled and befogged with our own personalities so soon as we begin to think of a personal Deity. If a crocodile had similar mental capacities to ours it might conclude that the Deity must be a crocodile. Mr. Langton is sure the universe cannot have come out of nothing, for he says "nothing can give what it has not got." Let us agree, and mildly enquire: "Where did God come from?" If, as. is contended, He existed before all else, it seems reasonable to submit that nothing must have produced God. If that is not admitted, we find ourselves involved in the question: "Out of whom or out of what did God come?" and go on ad infinitum asking out of whom or out of what did God’s ancestors come? "G.H.D." illustrates what I mean when I say that God is a term used in an endeavour to express the inexpressible and the inconceivable. He says that "St. Thomas was aware that for the human intellect the Deity is incomprehensible." But just before that he quotes St. Thomas as saying that "God’s essence contains every perfection." This is a contradiction since it is clear that the incomprehensible must be the unknown and nobody knows what the unknown contains. W. B, Olphert charges me with trying "to set a boundary to religious development which is essentially boundless." No such aim ever entered my head. I doubt very much whether the human mind can really conceive boundlessness. In an irrational universe it is a bold assumption that the Creator is rational. The Hebraic portrait presented in the Old Testament exhibits the Deity as displaying many of humanity’s worst attributes. Modern theologians write elegant articles to explain to us the nature of God and His reasons for making the universe as it is-just as if they had had afternoon tea with the Deity and got to know all about it. It comforts many to conceive a sort of amorphous glorification of man as author of the universe. It fits in with our grand hallucination that the world and all therein was created specially for man. But it is possible to realise

that we come from we don’t know where; are here for we don’t know why; and go to we don’t know where; and yet live a rational and happy life. One only needs to grow old enough not to be afraid of the dark and of the unknown, and for it to be unnecessary, spiritually, to be holding anyone’s hand. A harmonious and quiet mind can lie open to inspirations that come from we don’t know where but are as real and beautiful as the tones froma violin under a master hand. There may be one Supreme Being, and there may a thousand Deities-nobody knows. We know that there is a struggle between what we call good and what we call evil, and the universe has never yet known the complete supremacy of either.

J. MALTON

MURRAY

(Oamaru)

(This correspondence is now closed.-Ed.)