THE BUILDER August 1927

The Divine Attributes

By BRO. S. J. CARTER, New York

A THEOLOGIAN of our own day, the Rev. Dr. Robert MacIntosh, in a
discussion of theistic belief, has said that attention has been
confined almost entirely to the question: "Does God exist ?" and to
advancing proofs of the affirmative, while the further question:
"What is God?" is slurred over, if not ignored "as if there could
be no two opinions regarding that; whereas in truth there is two
hundred opinions," and as many more, it might be added, as there
are believers who think as well as believe.

The older divines allotted long chapters in their ponderous tomes
to the discussion of the "attributes of God," but they were not so
much concerned with proofs of His existence. Not that they omitted
them, for being systematists they covered every part of the field,
but in their day God and the devil and heaven and hell were taken
for granted by everyone. Even so late as 1750 Hume did not formally
deny the existence of God; he was called atheistic because his
philosophy left no place for a Deity.

The Deism of two hundred years ago undertook to account for
everything by reason, and to prove God's existence by a "natural"
theology. In this, the early Rationalists attempted nothing really
new, but their "orthodox" opponents felt that they tended in effect
to belittle revelation and to exalt human reason. The controversy
is of little interest today, for the descendants of the orthodox
stand in positions far more advanced (did they but know it) than
the Deists and Rationalists of the past.

WHAT IS ATHEISM

When a man calls himself an atheist the first thought of the
present writer is to inquire what he means exactly, for curious as
it may seem to those who have not examined closely--and, it may be
added, fearlessly --what their own beliefs imply, this is neither
obvious, nor in general easily defined. The atheist, even within
the memory of those who do not yet care to think of themselves as
old, was once regarded as something monstrous, inhuman, beyond the
pale. Indeed as something essentially and wilfully diabolical,
partaking of the character (and destined to the fate) of the
spirits of evil. He was a pariah, a moral leper, a thing apart,
amazing, inexplicable, repulsive, and yet an object of intense
interest, horrible and fascinating, like a drowned man, a hanging,
a fatal accident, or one the like things that draw a crowd and
excite the so-called morbid curiosity that is normal to 85 per cent
of the race, and probably suppressed in most of the remainder.

Just as sex novels now, two generations ago writers were putting
out stories about heroes and heroines who came through storm and
stress to the haven of faith, or through storm and stress made
shipwreck of it; of clergymen who were forced by an irresistible
passion for truth to give up their religious beliefs, or infidels
who, following the same guide, came back to the fold. These novels
were incomparably better written than their counterparts today, it
took more ability and more courage to do it well, yet they are
completely forgotten. Chiefly it would appear because the whole
mental atmosphere has so changed that the questions thus dealt with
now seem fantastic and unreal to the generality of the reading
public, and leave us wondering at what the world was like in those
days. Even our most fundamentally minded religious reactionaries
have built themselves mental and moral houses and planted
metaphorical vineyards on the very ground that was then being torn
up by the front-line fighting--if a military metaphor may be
permitted--and poisoned by mephitic clouds of abuse.

THE CHARACTER OF DEISM

It is true that the eighteenth century was characterized, at least
among the cultured and intellectual, by an essential infidelity;
but it was a superficial attitude, more than willing to conform to
custom and convention. To go to church was fashionable, to profess
plain disbelief was bad form. Instead of doing this men invented
Deism. God made the world, as a clockmaker makes a clock, he wound
it up, and went away and left it. Up to this time science was still
in the descriptive stage--what happened when an acid was put with
an alkali, or copper and zinc in salt water. Botany and zoology
were still only classifying orders and species. In history and
letters criticism was becoming methodized in the matter of texts
and documentation, and in the mass of the elementary work that
called to be done before further advance could be made, while the
more crucial questions had not even emerged--the questions of how
and why.

Sooner or later, if men went on, there was bound to be a conflict--
the conflict loosely and inaccurately, though conveniently, called
that of science and religion, really that between scientific
hypotheses and traditional religious formulas. The first great
battle (there had been preliminary skirmishes) was fought over
Darwin's theory of evolution--not, it should be noted, over
evolution itself, for that was no new idea--but its cause and mode
of operation. The eighteenth century had been an age of polite and
shallow philosophical doubt, the nineteenth was one of an earnest
but materialistic passion for truth. So much had been achieved by
slow patient gathering of tested facts, that by reaction and
contrast any conclusion not reached in this way was held to be
inadmissible, to be put on the docket as suspect if not sentenced
out of hand to rejection. It depended on temperament which
procedure was followed, but the tendency of the period was to deny
all that could not be proved by scientific methods, that is
subjected to repeated and controlled experiment and producing
results measurable with scale and balance. Today, what with
theories of relativity that dismiss time and space as mere
abstractions without essential reality, and physical hypotheses
that picture the atom, the ultimate unit of matter, as an
indefinitely minute but very complex solar system consisting of
still smaller, very much smaller ions, or particles of negative
electricity (if a particle of electricity is conceivable) revolving
at inconceivable velocities about a proton or particle of positive
electricity, the solid material universe that seemed so ultimate to
the preceding generation is well on the way to dissolving into the
substance of which dreams are made.

THE SUBSTANCE OF ATHEISM

It was said above that it is not really clear what atheism means.
It is quite true that most self-styled atheists think they know, as
do their theological opponents, nevertheless it is one of those
conceptions that the closer it is examined the more and more
indefinite and vague it becomes. There is the fool who has said in
his heart that there is no God, who is the same person, presumably,
barred by Freemasonry as a "stupid atheist." But this atheism is
not to be dignified as a mental attitude, it is merely an
expression of the wishes and desires of the pure materialist, who
sees nothing in life but selfish advancement and sensual enjoyment.
So far as Freemasonry is concerned his character bans him in any
case, he is not worth argument, but merely of classification.

What then is atheism from an intellectual standpoint ? We must
remember that through the ages many men have been so stigmatized
because they rejected conceptions of the Deity that were degraded
or mistaken; it is an easy way to get rid of an opponent whose
arguments are hard to answer, and whose conclusions are disturbing.
These men are not properly to be classed with those who profess
atheism, and it may be well to consider what these last are trying
to do. Only the half-hearted and those of little faith will fear
them.

An illuminating example is before us today. Certain good people
have been much exercised and horrified at the spread of an
organization among students in our universities for the propagation
of this creed--for this atheism is held with all the fervor of a
religious belief. Questioned as to what they seek to do the reply
is that they want to get rid of the idea of "a big man up above in
Heaven." One wonders what kind of religious instruction they have
come in contact with, but if that is what they are attacking in
this day and age, one can only say "In God's name let them get on
with it." Again, take Robert Ingersoll, once a name to conjure with
(both for blessing and cursing) but now almost forgotten. A winning
orator and a pleasing writer, his arguments were shallow, and in
truth effective only against the futilities and finalities that had
formed as excrescencies about the orthodoxies of the day. One can
believe that in the divine Providence he had his place and his
work. But again, with such as he we need not concern ourselves.

SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATIONS OF THE UNIVERSE

A much more weighty opponent to religion was Ernst Haeckle, whose
achievements in biology and whose weighty reasoning put him in an
altogether different class. He did not call himself an atheist, but
a monist. A monist is not necessarily an atheist, but a
materialistic monist is practically the same thing, so far as the
position of either can be made clear. It must be remembered that
when Haeckle wrote the books that have been translated and read in
so many languages, the newer physics had not come into being. The
atom was still the ultimate unit of matter, and it was still
regarded as an exceedingly minute body, impenetrable,
indestructible, having, so it was uncritically assumed, all the
properties of larger bodies. With these atoms alone he tried to
account for the universe, and life and generation, and will and
desire, and love and hate and thought and moral good and evil. It
was a great attempt, and convinced many and apparently satisfied
himself; but in reality it was a failure. For without telling his
readers, apparently, indeed, quite unknown to himself, he in the
course of his argument, here a little and there a little, imported
into his bare material atoms all the potentialities of life. Had he
only gone a step or two further his monism would have ended at
least in pantheism if not theism. Incidentally, from sundry
incidental glimpses he gives into his own spiritual history it is
fairly clear that his passionate enmity to religion was due to the
utterly impossible teaching he received in its name as a child.

Herbert Spencer took, in his own way, the step at which Haeckle
stopped short. He may be labeled as agnostic--a conception, by the
way, no more clear on examination, than atheist. To him God was the
Absolute--the unknowable origin of all things, agreeing thus far
with the theologians, and here he stopped short and parted company,
of no practical concern to mankind. For Spencer could not conceive
the Absolute being interested in ephemeral beings of time and
space. Space is here wanting to discuss his position, if not time
also, but with the same materials he showed it was logical to go on
to postulate the existence of some kind of Deity which the
biologist Haeckle had failed to see.

But we need concern ourselves no further with either writer,
influential as both have deservedly been, for the scientific
conceptions on which their systems were based have crumbled and in
their place we have the new physics. It is true that there is a
clinging to the past, and that present day scientists, as a class,
seem as alien from religion as ever, but the battleground is a new
one, and the strategy and tactics of both sides are changing
accordingly. Scientists as such still see no place in the universe
for God, but their ideas of the ultimate constitution of matter are
far more spiritual in truth than the spiritual conceptions of many
who pride themselves on their religious orthodoxy. But it must be
remembered (scientists themselves do not always remember though
more inclined to do so than in the past) that the scientific field
of investigation is a strictly limited one, and inevitably the
results are limited, too.

THE WAY TO THEISM

The common sense of mankind insists that a cause must be found for
everything, and eventually a final first cause. The scientist is
apt to reply that to seek for a final cause is a meaningless
problem. It is, from the purely scientific point of view--but there
are wider prospects than that--there is life and human
relationships, for example, and like matters. From such standpoints
the question does have meaning, meaning of the utmost importance.
Scientists profess great contempt for metaphysics, but it might be
better for them if they knew more of philosophy, for they are now
beginning, rather crudely, to tackle particular cases of some of
the problems that metaphysicians have been discussing generally for
centuries, and on which they have reached at least as much
agreement as physicists have in their theories.

The scientist objects to religion that it is a matter of faith
based on human needs and intuitions and emotions, backed by
traditions and books of uncertain history written by men subject to
human limitations and liability to error. It is all uncertain,
compared to a chemical experiment or a proposition in Euclid. The
scientist seeks certainty; but he is not alone, for so does
everyone else. The easiest way to obtain it, and perhaps the only
way, is to manufacture it--that is to say, to believe. Really
nothing is certain. Once Euclid's propositions and chemical
experiments were supposed to be, but that day is past. There are,
it is true, practical certainties, and these are the more probably
certain in inverse ratio to their importance in human life.
Strictly speaking nothing can be proved, for we must always start
with something unproved that is taken for granted. Everything can
be proved if the appropriate postulates are laid down and accepted-
-we can prove the existence of space of the fourth, or the nth
dimension, and equally the existence of God. But the grounds of any
proof of anything can always be criticized, and are open to
rejection.

But human beings even scientists and philosophers --are chiefly and
primarily concerned, not with the world of magnetic fields of
force, or kinds of dimensional space, or the orbits of ions in the
atom, and quanta and such things, but with the world in which they
live and work, and with the elementary passions, desires, emotions,
and with thought and feeling and life and death, and that most
amazing and wonderful thing of all, love. Love, unselfishness,
benevolence, pity. In this world, so complex, so limitless, we have
to find our way, and our only guide is some kind of faith, some
kind of general hypothesis that postulates a meaning to it all, and
that meaning leads, by whatever way we go, to some conception of
God. That is if we follow it to the end.

ABSTRACT CONCEPTIONS OF GOD

Atheism then is really negligible. The juvenile excesses of college
clubs certainly are. Serious denial of some adequate origin and
spiritual environment of the things of most concern to us may be
said to be almost non-existent. But the orthodox are not satisfied,
however. They object to God being conceived as an abstract First
Cause, or an Absolute, or an originating Energy. God is more than
a bare abstraction they say. It is curious to note that such
objectors generally use other abstractions to express their own
conception even in the same breath as when condemning these. One
prosperous and growing religious body (not regarded as orthodox,
though) persistently (after its founder) calls God by the term
Principle. Principle might be called the very abstraction of an
abstraction. A principle of energy or force is more abstract than
force or energy taken by themselves. But truly no abstraction
remains bare when it is used as a term for God. Just as Haeckle
imported life and mind into bare dead matter so other qualities
creep into Energy or Cause or whatever it may be when regarded as
the ultimate origin of the world. Truth is as much a bare
abstraction as Force, and it is freely used by the orthodox as a
term for God, and with some scriptural warrant.

The scholastic theologians laid down different ways of arriving at
the divine attributes--one they called via negative, the way of
negation. God being infinite could not be this or that, because
every term of qualification is also a limit. By itself, this leads
to the Absolute of the philosophers, which is bare enough and
abstract enough, and the Ain Soph of the Kabbalah, Who, or perhaps
Which, is beyond thought and even existence. But the method of
Negation was balanced by that of Eminence. God is everything
preeminently, the most Holy, most Perfect, most Just, most
Merciful, beyond all human conception. True the two sets of
conceptions are not easy to reconcile in a logical scheme, but then
nothing is easy to systematize once we get beyond the apparent
solidities and accepted verities of every-day life.

But there are inadequate conceptions of God, it is objected. Truly
there are. All conceptions are inadequate; but we naturally hold
our own to be more adequate than those we object to. The old
theologians, who were no fools for all their dullness and
prolixity, claimed that every attribute of God could be deduced
from any one of them; if a man hold but one he potentially holds
all, and may arrive at them if he goes on thinking. Nevertheless
there are certain well defined kinds of belief about God,
pantheism, theism, dualism, pluralism. But here again the borders
are vague. The Christian doctrine of Divine Immanence verges
closely on Pantheism and it takes very close and rather artificial
definition to keep them apart. Much Christian theology, too, is
dualistic in its fear to face the problem of evil. If men had more
Christian charity and less conceit of their own definitions there
would be less disagreement. But just as we build houses and shut
ourselves within four walls and a roof, so we construct
orthodoxies, and hold by formulas to shut our fellow believers in
and our opponents out. God as working in all men throughout all the
ages is too large a conception for us, and we seek refuge from this
blinding vision of infinity in our own precise definitions and
limitations, pitifully inadequate as they necessarily and
inevitably must be.

The practical atheist we have - ever with us. He is to be found in
our churches in the most prominent pews, sometimes in the pulpit
and at the altar. He is to be found in Masonic Lodges in spite of
all formulas and professions of faith. To the man who denies God in
his life, profession comes easily enough when it serves his
purpose--and he may all the time regard himself as a pillar of the
faith, as a perfectly squared stone in the temple. The theoretical
atheist is a man seeking the truth; and if he keeps on seeking he
will find, when he least expects it, that he has been walking with
God all the time, and that God was guiding him. A hard doctrine, my
masters, for what becomes of our comfortable formulas of creed and
doctrine? Nevertheless it was the Lord himself who said "He that
receiveth a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall
receive a righteous man's reward." Truth is not an easy guide to
follow, and we all make compromises with error.

THE UNCAUSED CAUSE

But if everyone in the name of common sense must suppose some
Origin, some Cause, the question is whether such terms so used
signify the same Existence or Being that religion calls God. And
here the way is indeed confusing, a very labyrinth. One thing is
sure, one man may mean much more by a First Cause than another does
by God. The Cause originating the universe must in some way be the
Cause of everything in it--and immediately the broad paths of
Pantheism and Dualism open out before us; and the problem of free
will, and the origin of evil and the bases of morality. Here we
must all walk delicately in a fog of possibilities--that is if we
think. Those who attach themselves, or are attached, to some system
of belief and doctrine find the way clear enough, and they are
usually bitter in reprehending thought and doubt and criticism in,
exact proportion as they are in their own hearts doubtful of the
ground on which they stand. To discuss all these possibilities
whole libraries have been written, but there is one short cut just
as safe as any. The practical atheist is he who lives a selfish,
self-seeking immoral life. The practical theist is he who in spite
of doubt and uncertainty sees and prefers and follows after the
good. Not the man who proclaims his virtue, but rather he who does
not realize he has any yet esteems it in others. It is true that
Christian doctrine teaches that works are dead without faith. But
he who follows the good, not sure whether it has a permanent place
in the universe, unable to account for it, but believing that it is
there and determined that he will cling to it, that man is not far
from God.

In the world as we know it there is something that is ignored by
the exact and physical sciences--necessarily ignored, for we can
only think in compartments --neither is it pertinent in biology;
and that is personality. Unimportant as men may be in the scale of
cosmic distances and the magnitudes of nature, yet in our existence
this fact of personality outweighs them, all; or rather it is
incommensurable with them, being on another plane of existence. Yet
it, too, calls for an origin and some proper place, some
environment of its own kind. God cannot be personal, it is said,
because personality, as we know it, implies limitation. Yet there
must be that in His being which accounts for personality and
corresponds to it. Edouard Le Roy, a French student of philosophy,
in a little book entitled What Is Dogma? insists that, though
couched in the form of a statement addressed to the intellect, a
dogma is essentially a rule of conduct. The dogma that God is a
person means that we should so conduct ourselves in all things as
if He were a person, that the relationship between the individual
and God may be all that a personal one is--and perhaps more.

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL

This conception meets some difficulties, doubtless it leads to its
own; for we walk in a twilight of uncertainties and irreconcilable
facts, the obscurity of the cave in Plato's allegory, where only
the shadows of things were seen. But ignoring the difficulties and
objections, and accepting, let us say, the superpersonality of the
Deity as well as His power or energy, what of His nature? Here
again a new confusion, yet another labyrinth. For in bulk the evil
in the world seems to overwhelm good as matter outweighs mind.
Mankind has a strong tendency always to concentrate difficulties
into an uncriticized postulate. Thus the rationalist philosophy of
a generation or so ago accounted for everything very neatly on the
basis of the science of the day, simply lumping everything that did
not fit into the scheme by the theory, dogmatically asserted and
defended with the true odium theologicum, that consciousness was an
epiphenomenon, an illusion, of no more account than the noise of
the whistle is to the running of a locomotive, which was Huxley's
metaphor. Similarly in many religious systems, including much
systematic Christian theology, the problem of the existence of evil
was all concentrated in hell, in Satan, in Ahriman, or some other
fiend or devil. The difficulty was still there, however.

But it was suggested above that the apparent preponderance of
matter over mind was due to not perceiving that the two things are
not in the same class, are on a different level, and not properly
to be compared. Perhaps good and evil are likewise on different
planes. Evil may be a function of the relationship of organisms, of
living entities somehow embodied, with the dead world of matter.
The good may be the proper functioning of these living entities
apart from the physical and material. The colorless word entity has
been used, but obviously it here expresses what is known as the
spiritual, the soul. It is true the scientific mind objects that we
have no conception of the soul, that the meaning of the word, if
meaning there be, is a complex of confused ideas, images and
projections. Nevertheless there is something over and above
physicochemical explanations, or even psychological, that requires
a name. It is there whether named or not, and its plane of
existence is the good, and perhaps also the beautiful.

So coming back to our abstract Origin or First Cause, we must
ascribe to It not only the essentials of personality without the
limitations, which ascription makes the personal pronoun more
appropriate, but we also must see in It, or Him, the source of
good--the good which is so much more than evil that but one
instance of it shines through all the world like a candle in the
night.

But (never do we find anything clear-cut and definite, except as we
make it so by names - and limitations) what is the Good ? We know
it well enough when we meet it, but what is it? How describe it,
how fit it in to the logical scheme ? The lists of virtues are
rather haphazard, traditional, affairs; many that have names are no
more than embodiment of quite human conventions. God is the holy--
but the holy is but an idealized version of the taboo. He is
righteous--another name for the good. He is the just--another
composite term of purely human and temporal reference. Is there
anything that is more fundamental? Anything that underlies the
rest? As has been said, theologians claim that all the attributes
of God are deducible from any one of them; and if these are, as it
would seem from this, but different applications or manifestations
of the divine nature in the world, we can see how this should be
so. But there is one attribute, one quality, or perhaps more
accurately, not an attribute but a predicate, that seems more
fundamental than holy, or true, or just and the rest, although the
theologians as a rule do not bring it out very clearly. It was
first expressed by the second of the two patrons of Masonry, St.
John the Evangelist, in his first epistle general, in the fourth
chapter and the eighth and sixteenth verses. Those inclined to the
occult way may note the Pythagorean sequence, the square, the cube
and the fourth power of the dyad. As American Masons so value the
Great Light there will be no need to quote the passage, though it
is but three short words.

A summing up may now be made. At the present time, whatever it
might have been in the past or may be in the future, atheism as an
intellectual factor is practically non-existent. The postulation of
some cause, some originating energy, some all embracing absolute is
now generally made. The terms used are abstract, as they must be,
but the more such abstract conceptions are made to include in the
concrete world, the greater and more varied potentialities must be
explicitly or implicitly imported into them; and sooner or later
the honest thinker will see and make explicit what is implied in
his postulates. Thus all roads lead eventually to God--if only the
adventurer travel far enough. That men do not always go far enough
is too evident from every-day experience, but it is not the fault
of the road but of the traveler. We are hindered by all kinds of
irrelevant matters, prejudices, reactions, habits, wishes, inertia,
and sheer stupidity and obtuseness.

To the orthodox Christian this will not seem sufficient, very
naturally. And reason and thought cannot, by itself, lead to
Christian belief. If Christianity be true--the proviso is made
advisedly--it is in a real and significant sense a revelation. It
is in fact a new complexity to add to an already complex universe.
That is no argument against it, it is only what a revelation would
be. Nor does it mean that it cannot be fitted into some
intelligible scheme as well as electricity or radio-activity. It
may even support (as so many have thought) the theistic conclusions
based on reflection upon, and reasoning from, the every-day facts
of the world. However this may be it does not call to be discussed
here, for Freemasonry does not require acceptance of Christianity.
It has been thus far notice however, because of the tendency of
many good Mason in the past as in the present, to more or less
consciously import Christian ideas and beliefs into Masonry.

In the past it was supposed that no atheist could be a good man.
Experience upsets this naive belief, for many men so labeled were
found to be virtuous, just moral and upright. It would be safer to
reverse the proposition and say no good man is really an atheist
whether so labeled or not. A simple test was once laid down; "by
their fruits ye shall know them." He who brings forth good fruit in
his life has a practical faith in the good, in which is also
implicit an intellectual belief in the source of good--that is in
God, as the highest good men can conceive.

