ssness of science to explain or originate life
is a convenient weapon wherewith to fell a pseudo-scientific antagonist
who is dogmatising too loudly out of bounds; but it is not perfectly
secure as a permanent support.... Life in its ultimate elements and on
its material side is such a simple thing, it is but a slight extension
of known chemical and physical forces.... I apprehend that there is not
a biologist but believes (perhaps quite erroneously) that sooner or
later the discovery will be made, and that a cell discharging all the
essential functions of life will be constructed out of inorganic
material." ("Man and the Universe," Chap. I.).

CHAPTER IV.

THE ARGUMENT FROM EXISTENCE.

What, now, are the facts upon which the modern believer in deity
professes to base his belief and what are the arguments used to defend
the position taken up?

Premising that the reasons advanced for the belief in deity are more in
the nature of excuses than aught else, we may take first of all the
argument derived from the mere existence of the universe, with the
alleged impossibility of conceiving it as self-existent. Along with that
there may also be taken as a variant of the argument from existence, the
alleged impossibility of a natural "order" that should result from the
inherent properties of natural forces. Now it is at least plain that
whatever difficulty there is in thinking of the universe as either
self-existing or self-adjusting is in no degree lessened by assuming a
God as the originator and sustainer of the whole. The most that it does
is to move the difficulty back a step, and while with many "out of sight
out of mind" is as true of their attitude towards mental problems as it
is towards the more ordinary things of life, the policy can hardly be
commended in serious intellectual discussions. It is not a bit easier to
think of self-existence or self-direction in connection with a god than
it is in connection with the universe. And if we must rest ultimately
with an insoluble difficulty, it is surely better to stop with the
existence we know rather than to introduce a second existence which for
all we know may be quite mythical.

It is no reply to say that the idea of God involves self-existence. It
does nothing of the kind, or at least it can do so only by our making
yet another assumption that is as unjustifiable as the previous one. If
God is a personality, we have no conception of a personality that is
sel