ecessary in order to
construct his scheme of the origin of the Universe, and it is very true.
In no way whatever does the idea of God help us to understand better the
existence, the essence and the finality of the Universe.

That there is a Supreme Being, infinite, absolute and eternal, whose
existence is unknown to us, and who has created the Universe, is not
more conceivable than that the material basis of the Universe itself,
its matter, is eternal and infinite and absolute. We do not understand
the existence of the world one whit the better by telling ourselves that
God created it. It is a begging of the question, or a merely verbal
solution, intended to cover up our ignorance. In strict truth, we deduce
the existence of the Creator from the fact that the thing created
exists, a process which does not justify rationally His existence. You
cannot deduce a necessity from a fact, or else everything were
necessary.

And if from the nature of the Universe we pass to what is called its
order, which is supposed to necessitate an Ordainer, we may say that
order is what there is, and we do not conceive of any other. This
deduction of God's existence from the order of the Universe implies a
transition from the ideal to the real order, an outward projection of
our mind, a supposition that the rational explanation of a thing
produces the thing itself. Human art, instructed by Nature, possesses a
conscious creative faculty, by means of which it apprehends the process
of creation, and we proceed to transfer this conscious and artistic
creative faculty to the consciousness of an artist-creator, but from
what nature he in his turn learnt his art we cannot tell.

The traditional analogy of the watch and the watchmaker is inapplicable
to a Being absolute, infinite and eternal. It is, moreover, only another
way of explaining nothing. For to say that the world is as it is and not
otherwise because God made it so, while at the same time we do not know
for what reason He made it so, is to say nothing. And if we knew for
what reason God made it so, then God is superfluous and the reason
itself suffices. If everything were mathematics, if there were no
irrational element, we should not have had recourse to this explanatory
theory of a Supreme Ordainer, who is nothing but the reason of the
irrational, and so merely another cloak for our ignorance. And let us
not discuss here that absurd proposition that, if all the type in a
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