Page:The Conception of God (1897).djvu/168

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COMMENTS BY PROFESSOR HOWISON
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time? — and is there any meaning in the statement, taken literally, that a Mind pervades space, and fills time? Besides, in the strict sense, has Space any extent to be pervaded, or Time any duration to be filled?

3. Is such a doctrine of the “Divine Immanence in Nature” compatible with the real freedom of human beings? If not, does it leave such beings truly real? Does it not make the so-called God the sole real agent? If so, does it not make a Moral Order impossible?

4. Can a Being without a Moral Order and a moral government — that is, without associates indestructibly free — be a person at all? — much more, an Infinite Person, a God?

5. Can God, the Ideal of the Reason, the Being whose essence is moral perfection, be adequately conceived as being immanent in the creation, or as having the creation immanent in him, if this be taken to mean, in the one case, pervasively present and directly active within the entire creation, and, in the other case, directly embracing or enfolding it in his own life?

6. In what sense, only, can God rightly be said to be immanent in his creation? — is it not in this, that his Image, his nature or kind, not his own Person, is ever present there, as the effective result of his Creative Omniscience, so that his creation, too, in its inclusive unity, proceeds of itself as well as he?

7. Can a process of evolution, through Nature and in time, possibly give rise to a being really free, and personally immortal? — to a creation indeed self-active, and therefore indestructible?

8. Is an evolutional origin of man, then, compatible with a Divine creation? If so, in what sense, only, of the word “man”? Is it not man the phenomenon merely — man the experience-contents, physical (governed by Space) on the one hand, and psychical (governed by Time) on the other, instead of man the noumenon — the completely real man who is the Inclusive Active Unit that embraces and grounds all its being in its own active self-consciousness? — in short, is not the field of human evolution just the human body and the human states of mind?

9. What can the fact be, that has caused so many of the prominent minds of our time to stumble at the notion of an In-