Existence of God

“ This primitive intuition of God and the ineradicable feeling of dependence on God, could only have been the result of a primitive revelation, in the truest sense of that word. Man, who owed his existence to God, and whose being centred and rested in God, saw and felt God as the only source of his own and of all other existence. By the very act of the creation, God had revealed Himself. ”

“ Therefore the existence of God requires that men also who are his thoughts or ideas exist, and since God eternally exists they must so exist. It is easily seen that in this we have a repetition of what was said of the relation of creation to God. ”

“ There winds its way through Christianity the question about the "existence of God," which, taken up ever and ever again, gives testimony that the craving for existence, corporeity, personality, reality, was incessantly busying the heart because it never found a satisfying solution. ”

“ And the end to which all these lives are moving, of every flower that blooms, of every bird that sings, is also the central principle of the entire evolution of the universe—the embodied Word of God. For the purpose of the whole is nothing other than the incarnation of the divine, the participation of the created in the eternal life of the uncreated, of which the God-man is the perfect revelation.... If God be indeed the end of all existence, he must needs fill all things with his being. ”

“ I glance first at the arguments by which dogmatic theology establishes God's existence, after that at those by which it establishes his nature. [6]
The arguments 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. ”

“ He must believe that God is, and that he is what he is, what he has revealed himself to be in the scripture, a Being of infinite perfections, subsisting in three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Observe, The practical belief of the existence of God, as revealed in the word, would be a powerful awe-band upon our souls, a bridle of restraint to keep us from sin, and a spur of constraint to put us upon all manner of gospel obedience. (2.) That he is a rewarder of those that diligently seek him. ”

“ God is the universe; beside him there is no existence; all that exists is God. What then, it will be asked, is matter? If God is a Spirit, and beside spirit there is no existence, what are these rocks and oceans? ”

“ The knowledge of God being manifested to all makes the reprobate without excuse. Universal belief and acknowledgment of the existence of God. ”

“ To believe in God is to long for His existence, and, furthermore, it is to act as if He existed. ”

“ Having thus established the doctrine of a self-sufficient, self-existent, and consequently all-powerful cause of all things, we ascribe an eternal existence to this cause of all causes and effects, whom we call God. And, inasmuch, as from the works of nature it is manifest, that God is possessed of almighty power, we from hence infer his eternal existence. ”

“ Is it necessary in this our day to argue for the existence of only one God? Do not all men admit it? They admit it as a general proposition in theory, but their theologies have not always been in accord either with reason or Scriptures in this regard. ”

“ When the Theist affirms that his God is an existence other than, and separate from, the so-called material universe, and when he invests this separate, hypothetical existence with the several attributes of personality, omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, eternity, infinity, immutability, and perfect goodness, then the Atheist in reply says: “I deny the existence of such a being;” ”

“ First, as the root of all, belief in God, "the author of all existence, the living, absolute thought, of which our world is a ray and the universe an incarnation"; "a sphere inviolable, eternal, supreme over all humanity, independent of chance or error or blind and interrupted operation." God, then, exists objectively, as maker 235 and ruler of the universe. ”

“ Let us have done with 'distressful enquiry into ultimate origins,' and 'bring our minds to the conception of a spontaneous and developing God'—one of whose existence and benevolence we are sure, since we made him ourselves. ”

“ And desiring God's existence and acting conformably with this desire, is the means whereby we create God—that is, whereby God creates Himself in us, manifests Himself to us, opens and reveals Himself to us. ”

“ The passage itself is a clear statement of the grounds of the charge, and requires our careful consideration. “Everybody may collect from the order and harmony of the physical universe the existence of a God; but in acknowledging a God, we do not thereby acknowledge this peculiar or doctrinal conception of a God. We see in the structure of nature a mind, a universal mind, but still a mind which only operates and expresses itself by law. Nature only does and can inform us of mind in nature; but in no other sense does nature witness to the existence of an omnipotent Supreme Being. ”

“ That vast literature of proofs of God's existence drawn from the order of nature, which a century ago seemed so overwhelmingly convincing, to-day does little more than gather dust in libraries, for the simple reason that our generation has ceased to believe in the kind of God it argued for. ”

“ Chapter XVIII God is life, wisdom, eternity, and every true good. --Whatever is composed of parts is not wholly one; it is capable, either in fact or in concept, of dissolution. In God wisdom, eternity, etc., are not parts, but one, and the very whole which God is, or unity itself, not even in concept divisible. ”

“ Farther, from my own being, and from the dependency I find in myself and my ideas, I do, by an act of reason, necessarily infer the existence of a God, and of all created things in the mind of God. ”

“ God’s bringing into existence and bringing into non-existence. This is a detailed statement; and a general statement would be that God’s Power has two connections—as is commonly accepted—a potential and an accomplished; but the accomplished is limited to actual bringing into existence and non-existence. ”

“ But all facts are particular facts, and the whole interest of the question of God's existence seems to me to lie in the consequences for particulars which that existence may be expected to entail. That no concrete particular of experience should alter its complexion in consequence of a God being there seems to me an incredible proposition, and yet it is the thesis to which (implicitly at any rate) refined supernaturalism seems to cling. ”

“ This Revelation, however, is nothing else but the action of God as Creator, giving and preserving to nature its existence, form, and life. Created things embody Divine Ideas, and are thus imitations of their antitypes, the Divine Perfections. The human intellect, in particular, is an image of the Divine Intellect: the Creator endows it with the power to infer, from visible nature, the existence and perfections of its Author; and, from its own spiritual nature, the spiritual nature of the Author of all things. ”

“ And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."
{70} The matter of the universe, it is felt, must be in existence before the movement which vivifies it. The dead inert stuff must be created before it can receive the breath of life. And if God the creator is conceived as living before the matter which He has created, it is as an external principle, the relation of which to the creation is by most religious minds thought to transcend the power of the finite understanding to conceive. ”

“ Certain it is, that any supposed obstructions, concerning the quality or temperature of any or every one of those worlds, could not have been any bar in the way of God Almighty, with regard to his replenishing his universal creation with moral agents. The unlimited perfection of God could perfectly well adapt every part of his creation to the design of whatever rank or species of constituted beings, his Godlike wisdom and goodness saw fit? to impart existence to; ”

“ And when we have attained to this point in our course of thought, the first leading fact of God’s revelation meets us. Here it is: “There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness; the Maker and Preserver of all things, both visible and invisible. And in unity of this Godhead there be three Persons, of one substance, power, and eternity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” ”

“ I must take up humbler ground, and limit my ambition to showing that a God, whether existent or not, is at all events the kind of being which, if he did exist, would form the most adequate possible object for minds framed like our own to conceive as lying at the root of the universe. ”

“ But I am filled with amazement, when I am told, that, in this enlightened age and in the heart of the Christian world, there are persons who can witness this daily manifestation of the power and wisdom of the Creator, and yet say in their hearts, "There is no God." ”

“ In regard to the last, the thousand varied forms which we every day behold, and the thousand beautiful and minute grades by which matter is led from the simple clod to the most perfect of our conceptions, proves evidently the will of the Deity to vary and employ all that which is within the immensity of his power. To admit that there is a God, is to admit that there is a spirit. ”

“ In what authoritative statement of Christian doctrine God is defined as not being everywhere, or 'an individual of limited extension in space, or even of human form,' we are unaware. There is apparent misunderstanding in the supposition that we have to take our choice between God as entirely severed from the world, and God existing in the world. ”

“ But the two concepts are strictly correlated. To conceive, for instance, absolute reality as containing no God, means simply that an absolutely all-embracing experience, if there were one, would find nothing Divine in the world. ”

“ If there is no God but the universe, we have a universe without a God. Worship is meaningless, Faith is a mockery, Hope is a delusion. If the universe is God, all things in the universe are of necessity Divine. ”

“ Of the nature of the Divine Essence we know nothing; yet that God is a real, living entity, we do know. My own conviction is that the divine essence and the divine life are identical; that God, a spirit, is necessary, infinite, conscious Vitality—the voluntary Originator of all existencies besides himself. But as to what is the essential nature of this vitality—this eternal spirit-life—we can have no conception, only that this life is God. ”

“ Every spot on earth, on which a man tarries for a moment, becomes the house of God, and the gate of heaven. You understand what I mean. I am speaking of the omnipresence of God. Reason and faith both proclaim to us this great truth of the universal presence of God. He is present by His immensity to all creatures in the universe, whether living or inanimate. When God created the world, He did not leave it to itself. He sustains it by His presence and power, and it is in Him that we live and move and have our being. ”

“ By the Deity we mean—and I suppose everyone means—the all-controlling consciousness of the universe as well as the infinite, unfathomable, and unknowable abyss of being beyond. By divinity we mean the essence of the nature of the immanent God, the innermost and all-determining quality of that nature; we have already seen that according to the Christian religion the innermost quality of the divine nature is perfect love. ”

“ But let us once more turn from all the poetical and imaginative illustrations of the relation of God to the world, which can at best be only provisional, and only applicable at certain points, to the more general aspect of the problem. Religion itself consists in this: believing and experiencing that in time the Eternal, in the finite the Infinite, in the world God is working, revealing Himself, and that in Him lies the reason and cause of all being. ”

“ That which He reveals, He makes in revealing it.' In other words, Christ, and the God whom He reveals, are a power or force rather than a fact. 'A God who has nothing to become has nothing to do.' God is not the idea of ideas, but the being of beings and the life of our life. ”

“ Just as our soul as it is in itself needs to have a body through which it can manifest itself to the world, so the Infinite God, Essential Being, needed to have a body or proceeding in form in order to make Himself manifest in time and space. But let us bear in mind that Essential God and God-Coming-Forth-to- View would not be two Gods, but merely two phases of the one only God. ”

“ Other Gods of Nature; and the conclusion to which the whole leads—"that the human mind, such as it is, and unassisted by any miracles except the eternal miracles of nature, did arrive at the concept of God in its highest and purest form, did arrive at some of the fundamental doctrines of our own religion. Whatever ' the impregnable rock of Scripture truth ' may be, here we have the 'impregnable rock of eternal and universal truth.' 'There is a God above all other gods,' whatever their names, whatever their concepts may have been in the progress of the ages and in the growth of the human mind. ”

“ We conceive God as an eternal, immense, omnipotent, personal Being. These and other attributes of Divinity, as conceived by us, constitute our notion of God; and this notion is as unfolded as is consistent with the limits of the human mind. But to “unfold” the conception of Divinity by suppressing omnipotence, wisdom, eternity, goodness, and all other perfections of the divine nature, so as to leave nothing “thinkable” in it, is not to unfold our conception, but to suppress it altogether. ”