se; but an
infinity of makers is unthinkable and extravagant: it is no harder to
believe in number one than in number fifty thousand or fifty million; so
why not accept number one and stop there, since no attempt to get behind
him will remove your logical difficulty? By your leave, said I, it is as
easy for me to believe that the universe made itself as that a maker of
the universe made himself: in fact much easier; for the universe visibly
exists and makes itself as it goes along, whereas a maker for it is a
hypothesis. Of course we could get no further on these lines. He rose
and said that we were like two men working a saw, he pushing it forward
and I pushing it back, and cutting nothing; but when we had dropped the
subject and were walking through the refectory, he returned to it for a
moment to say that he should go mad if he lost his belief. I, glorying
in the robust callousness of youth and the comedic spirit, felt quite
comfortable and said so; though I was touched, too, by his evident
sincerity.

These two anecdotes are superficially trivial and even comic; but there
is an abyss of horror beneath them. They reveal a condition so utterly
irreligious that religion means nothing but belief in a nursery bogey,
and its inadequacy is demonstrated by a toy logical dilemma, neither
the bogey nor the dilemma having anything to do with religion, or being
serious enough to impose on or confuse any properly educated child
over the age of six. One hardly knows which is the more appalling: the
abjectness of the credulity or the flippancy of the scepticism. The
result was inevitable. All who were strong-minded enough not to be
terrified by the bogey were left stranded in empty contemptuous
negation, and argued, when they argued at all, as I argued with Father
Addis. But their position was not intellectually comfortable. A member
of parliament expressed their discomfort when, objecting to the
admission of Charles Bradlaugh into parliament, he said 'Hang it all, a
man should believe in something or somebody.' It was easy to throw the
bogey into the dustbin; but none the less the world, our corner of the
universe, did not look like a pure accident: it presented evidences of
design in every direction. There was mind and purpose behind it. As the
anti-Bradlaugh member would have put it, there must be somebody behind
the something: no atheist could get over that.

PALEY'S WATCH

Paley had put the argument in an apparently unan