The Fundamentals - Torrey - XXXIII - Chapter 8 (Is there a God?)

Required reading
The Fundamentals edited by R. A. Torrey (Available from Amazon or free here) - Read Chapter 8 (Is there a God?).

My summary
This week Whitelaw critiques different worldviews.

Firstly Whitelaw makes some observations about atheism:
(i) belief that there is no God does not amount to a demonstration that no God is;
(ii) such a demonstration is from the nature of the case impossible;
(iii) denial of the divine existence is not warranted by inability to discern traces of God's presence in the universe;
(iv) the majority of mankind from the beginning of the world onward have believed in the existence of a Supreme Being;

Secondly Whitelaw makes some objections against agnosticism:
(i) it entirely ignores the spiritual factor in man's nature;
(ii) it takes for granted that things cannot be adequately known unless they are fully known;
(iii) it virtually undermines the foundations of morality;

Thirdly Whitelaw makes some remarks about materialism:
(i) it is at best only an inference or working hypothesis which may or may not be true and which certainly cannot claim to be beyond dispute;
(ii) it has been repudiated by scientists of the highest repute;
(iii) conceding all that evolutionists demand, the question remains, whether this excludes or renders unnecessary the intervention of God as the prime mover in the process.

Fourthly Whitelaw makes very brief comments about the fool who says 'I wish there was no God'.

Fifthly Whitelaw speaks about the Christian worldview:
(i) without a God the material universe around the Christian is and remains a perplexing enigma;
(ii) without a God the Christian cannot explain to himself the Person of Jesus;
(iii) without a God the Christian cannot understand the facts of his own conscience.

What grabbed me
I liked this point about agnosticism: 'It [Agnosticism] takes for granted that things cannot be adequately known unless they are fully known. This proposition, however, cannot be sustained in either Science or Philosophy, in ordinary life or in religious experience. Science knows there are such things as life (vegetable and animal), and force (electricity and magnetism for example), but confesses its ignorance of what life and force are as to their essence all that is understood about them being their properties and effects. Philosophy can expound the laws of thought, but is baffled to unriddle the secret of thought itself, how it is excited in the soul by nerve-movements caused by impressions from without, and how it can express itself by originating counter movements in the body. In ordinary life human beings know each other adequately for all practical purposes while aware that in each there are depths which the other cannot fathom, each being shut off from the other by what Prof. Dods calls "the limitations of personality." Nor is the case different in religious experience. The Christian, like Paul, may have no difficulty in saying, "Christ liveth in me," but he cannot explain to himself or others, how. Hence the inference must be rejected that because the finite mind cannot fully comprehend the infinite, therefore it cannot know the infinite at all, and must remain forever uncertain whether there is a God or not. Scripture, it should be noted, does not say that any finite mind can fully find out God; but it does say that men may know God from the things which He has made, and more especially from the Image of Himself which has been furnished in Jesus Christ, so that if they fail to know Him, they are without excuse.'

A great argument against postmodernism before the term postmodernism was even coined.

Next week's reading
Read Chapter 9 (God in Christ the only revelation of the fatherhood of God).

Now it's your turn
Please post your own notes and thoughts in the comments section below.