there is no God," and other similar passages. In its improved
form, this argument uses the human concept of an infinitely perfect God as
evidence, or, at least, as postulate that such a Being exists beyond the
finite world of man.(169)

Another argument, rather naive in character, which was favored by the
Stoics and adopted by the Church fathers, is called _de consensu gentium_,
and endeavored to prove the reality of God's existence from the
universality of His worship. It speaks well for the sound reasoning of the
Jewish thinkers that they refused to follow the lead of the Mohammedans in
this respect, and did not avail themselves of an argument which can be
used just as easily in support of a plurality of gods.(170)

9. All these so-called proofs were invalidated by Immanuel Kant, the great
philosopher of Koenigsberg, whose critical inquiry into the human intellect
showed that the entire sum of our knowledge of objects and also of the
formulation of our ideas is based upon our limited mode of apperception,
while the reality or essence, "the thing in itself," will ever remain
beyond our ken. If this is true of physical objects, it is all the more
true of God, whom we know through our minds alone and not at all through
our five senses. Accordingly, he shows that all the metaphysical arguments
have no basis, and that we can know God's existence only through _ethics_,
as a postulate of our moral nature. The inner consciousness of our moral
obligation, or duty, implies a moral order of life, or moral law; and
this, in turn, postulates the existence of God, the Ruler of life, who
assigns to each of us his task and his destiny.(171)

10. It is true that God is felt and worshiped first as the supreme power
in the world, before man perceives Him as the highest ideal of morality.
Therefore man will never cease looking about him for vestiges of divinity
and for proofs of his intuitive knowledge of God. The wondrous order,
harmony, and signs of design in nature, as well as the impulse of the
reason to search for the unity of all things, corroborate this innate
belief in God. Still more do the consciousness of duty in the
individual--conscience--and the progress of history with its repeated
vindication of right and defeat of wrong proclaim to the believer
unmistakably that the God of justice reigns. But no proof, however
convincing, will ever bring back to the skeptic or unbeliever the God he
has lost, unless his pangs of anguish