Is There One or Many Gods?
Deity - The Supreme Being of Beings
Is There One or Many Gods - Who Can Know the Unknowable - May not the Known Lead up to What Has Been Deemed the Unknowable?
It is easier for the imagination to rest upon the idea of one God than many, and still more natural for the soul of man to accept of Polytheism than Atheism.
The utter insufficiency of any argument which attempts to shut out an idea because its magnitude baffles the finite mind, has never been more completely demonstrated than when man, the puny, shadowy phantom who flits through a few sand grains of time, and then disappears for an eternity, attempts to argue against the existence of any higher being than himself, simply because he, by his sensuous perception, cannot apprehend it.
No man can, by sensuous perception, apprehend the existence of his own soul. Socrates well understood this truth when he said, "I respect my soul though I cannot see it," and the Apostle Paul equally well appreciated its force when he declared that the spiritual man alone could judge of the things of the spirit.
From the revelations of spirits who are in the experience of spiritual entities, and the sublime imaginings of those who in the childlike faiths of antiquity were nearer to God than are the mammon-worshippers of today, we will erect our scheme of the Divine Godhead, surrounding the noble temple with such a scaffolding of testimony as will enable every reader to climb to the highest pinnacle of a thought which the finite mind can reach.
That "God is a Spirit," and the eternal, uncreated, self-existent, and infinite realm of Spirit is God, none can deny who profoundly analyze the depths of being pointed to in our first two Sections; but as to the mode in which God can be apprehended, or whether there be one or many Gods, remain questions open to much broader fields of speculation.
Were it not more in the order of these writings to present the results of vast mental struggles, and the conclusions drawn from researches which have only permitted the panting Soul to pause for breath at the gates which lead from one stage of infinity to another, we should precede our own definitions of Godhead, by the opinions of the authorities we propose to cite; but the responsibility of affirmation is ours, and surrounded as we are "by a cloud of witnesses," who wave the lustrous banners of spiritual truths above our page, how can we hesitate, or, in the cold world's materialistic phrase, why fear to commit ourselves to opinions we know in our Soul to be Divine truth?
The Solar System of which our earth is a part, moves around the physical sun as a centre of light, heat, and attraction.
By well defined astronomical laws we know that this Solar System forms only a part of a larger and far grander aggregation of starry worlds, called the Astral System.
The exact centre of this system is not arrived at, yet all the observations of astronomy point to such a pivotal centre, and the known laws of Science determine that in the visible universe, all motions proceed in and are sustained by the dual modes of centrifugal and centripetal force. That the stars discovered by astronomical Science are only a part of an array of systems which occupy the spaces of infinity, is an axiom universally acknowledged; hence, indeed, the terms "infinity" and "boundless," as applied to the sidereal heavens; but in the midst of that unknowable which stretches away into vistas where the glass of the astronomer cannot penetrate, and the mind of the most aspirational becomes palsied, even there, the steadfast helm of physical science guides the ship and prophesies of an inevitable port of knowledge yet to be reached.
"The law which rounds a dew-drop shapes a world," and the principles which inhere in one System prevail throughout space. We cannot find a telescope that will pierce into the Astral Centre nor resolve all the floating masses of nebulae that crowd the galaxy into blazing Suns; but we know by analogy that that Centre and those Suns exist, and that the only horizon that shuts them out from human discovery, is human ignorance and incapacity.
In the midst of all our baffled wisdom and enlightened ignorance, physical Science and spiritual revelation supplementing each other, assure us there is one grand central Sun of being.
Physical Science tells us it must be so. Spiritual revelation affirms it is so. That central Sun is God. This perfection of being exists in the form of a globe, the only point of union between mathematics and geometry, and occupies the centre, the only position whereby revolving universes can live, move, and have their being and life, be born, sustained and renewed.
God is the dispenser of heat and light, the two elements in being which account for generation and revelation, love and wisdom, life and sense. This Spiritual Sun throws off from the centre the elements of new-created worlds by centrifugal force, and draws them back and keeps them in determinate orbits by centripetal force. Its nature is Spirit; its attribute, Will; its manifestations, Love, Wisdom, Power. This is God.
Comments
Unfortunately, the author starts out this particular chapter with a false assumption. "It is easier for the imagination to rest upon the idea of one God than many..." Why would this blatantly false assumption be stated as fact? If Deity is a reflection of nature, then there are, at the very least, male and female. Even the imaginations of ancient peoples such as the very Hindus who were cited in previous chapters seemed perfectly capable to wrap their brains around the idea of multiple gods.
In the next attempt to convince us of his argument, the author sets up a straw man of atheism and proceeds to vanquish it by implying that only silly people are atheists who merely argue against the existence of a higher being because they lack the intelligence to do so. This, of course, is a sad attempt to win an argument.
Sadder still is the author's attempt to analogize the concept of one God to the "one grand central Sun of being." As was known even in 1898, there are multiple solar systems, multiple stars which are suns, and multiple galaxies surrounding them. The pseudo science for "proving" that there is only "one God" was quite nauseating, and would have stopped me from finishing the rest of the book except that I figured there must be something in here that was worthwhile, else why would my grandmother have given me the book. Given that she is mostly christian and of the opinion that it doesn't really matter what we call God since they are all the same thing, perhaps this was what she was trying to convince me of. Hopefully there is something more in this book. This chapter was most definitely disappointing.
Posted by: Mikki | May 20, 2004 04:20 PM