nts for God's existence have stood for hundreds of years with
the waves of unbelieving criticism breaking against them, never totally
discrediting them in the ears of the faithful, but on the whole slowly
and surely washing out the mortar from between their joints. If you
have a God already whom you believe in, these arguments confirm you. If
you are atheistic, they fail to set you right. The proofs are various.
The "cosmological" one, so-called, reasons from the contingence of the
world to a First Cause which must contain whatever perfections the
world itself contains. The "argument from design" reasons, from the
fact that Nature's laws are mathematical, and her parts benevolently
adapted to each other, that this cause is both intellectual and
benevolent. The "moral argument" is that the moral law presupposes a
lawgiver. The "argument ex consensu gentium" is that the belief in God
is so widespread as to be grounded in the rational nature of man, and
should therefore carry authority with it.

As I just said, I will not discuss these arguments technically. The
bare fact that all idealists since Kant have felt entitled either to
scout or to neglect them shows that they are not solid enough to serve
as religion's all-sufficient foundation. Absolutely impersonal reasons
would be in duty bound to show more general convincingness. Causation
is indeed too obscure a principle to bear the weight of the whole
structure of theology. As for the argument from design, see how
Darwinian ideas have revolutionized it. Conceived as we now conceive
them, as so many fortunate escapes from almost limitless processes of
destruction, the benevolent adaptations which we find in Nature suggest
a deity very different from the one who figured in the earlier versions
of the argument.[294] The fact is that these arguments do but follow
the combined suggestions of the facts and of our feeling. They prove
nothing rigorously. They only corroborate our preexistent partialities.

[294] It must not be forgotten that any form of DISorder in the world
might, by the design argument, suggest a God for just that kind of
disorder. The truth is that any state of things whatever that can be
named is logically susceptible of teleological interpretation. The
ruins of the earthquake at Lisbon, for example: the whole of past
history had to be planned exactly as it was to bring about in the
fullness of time just that particular arrangement of debris of m