d. He declares these deities to be vanity and naught, but
proclaims the Holy One of Israel as the Lord of the universe. He hath
"meted out the heavens with the span," and "weighed the mountains in
scales, and the hills in a balance." Before Him "the nations are as a drop
of the bucket," and "the inhabitants of the earth as grasshoppers." "He
bringeth out the hosts of the stars by number, and calleth them all by
name," "He hath assigned to the generations of men their lot from the
beginning, and knoweth at the beginning what will be their end."(160)
Measured by such passages as these and such as Psalms VIII, XXIV, XXXIII,
CIV, and CXXXIX, where God is felt as a living power, all philosophical
arguments about His existence seem to be strange fires on the altar of
religion. The believer can do without them, and the unbeliever will hardly
be convinced by them.

4. Upon the contact of the Jew with Greek philosophy doubt arose in many
minds, and belief entered into conflict with reason. But even then, the
defense of the faith was still carried on by reasoning along the lines of
common sense.(161) Thus the regularity of the sun, moon, and stars,--all
worshiped by the pagans as deities--was considered a proof of God's
omnipotence and rule of the universe, a proof which the legend ascribes to
Abraham in his controversy with Nimrod.(162) In like manner, the
apocryphal Book of Wisdom(163) says that true wisdom, as opposed to the
folly of heathenism, is "to reason from the visible to the Invisible One,
and from the cosmos, the great work of art, to the Supreme Artificer."

5. Philo was the first who tried to refute the "atheistic" views of
materialists and pantheists by adducing proofs of God's existence from
nature and the human intellect. In the former he pointed out order as
evidence of the wisdom underlying the cosmos, and in the latter the power
of self-determination as shadowing forth a universal mind which determines
the entire universe.(164) Still, with his mystical attitude, Philo
realized that the chief knowledge of God is through intuition, by the
inner experience of the soul.

6. Two proofs taken from nature owe their origin to Greek philosophy.
Anaxagoras and Socrates, from their theory of design in nature, deduced
that there is a universal intelligence working for higher aims and
purposes. This so-called _teleological_ proof, as worked out in detail by
Plato, was the unfailing reliance of subsequent philosophers and