nd for assertions which, if made
at all, should rest upon the most exact knowledge. "God" will be left
with nothing to do, and man will not for ever go on worshipping a God
whose sole recommendation is that he exists, nor will the common sense
of civilised people hold on to a hypothesis when there is nothing left
for that hypothesis to explain.

The single and outstanding characteristic of the conception of god at
all times and under all conditions is that it is the equivalent of
ignorance. In primitive times it is ignorance of the character of
natural forces that leads to the assumption of the existence of gods,
and in this respect the god-idea has remained true to itself throughout.
Even to-day whenever the principle of "God" is invoked a very slight
examination is enough to show that the only reason for this being done
is our ignorance of the subject before us. Why does anyone assume that
we must believe in God in order to explain the beginnings of life? Why
is "God" assumed to be responsible for the order of nature? Why must we
assume "God" to explain mind? The answer to these and to all similar
questions is that we do not know, in the sense that we know the cause of
planetary motions, how these things came to be. It is not what we know
about them that leads to the assumption of god, but what we do not know.
And the converse of that is that so soon as knowledge replaces ignorance
"God" will be dispensed with. It is never a case of believing in God
because of the actual knowledge we possess, but always the appeal to
weakness and ignorance. From this point of view the colloquial "God only
knows!" expresses the appeal to ignorance even more clearly than the
elaborate argument of the sophisticated apologist.

This aspect of the matter was well put by Spinoza. Believers in the
argument from design, he says, have a method of argument that is a
reduction, not to the impossible, but to ignorance. Thus,

If a stone falls from a roof on to someone's head and kills him,
they will demonstrate by their new method that the stone fell to
kill the man; for if it had not by God's will fallen with that
object, how could so many circumstances (and there are often many
concurrent circumstances) have all happened together by chance.
Perhaps you will answer that the event is due to the facts that the
wind was blowing, and the man was walking that way. "But why," they
will insist, "was the wind