Theologians ask, who created Nature? without adducing satisfactory
evidence that Nature was created, and without reflecting that if it is
difficult to believe Nature self-existent, it is much more difficult to
believe some self-existent Super-nature, capable of producing it. In
their anxiety to get rid of a natural difficulty, they invent a
supernatural one, and accuse Atheists of 'wilful blindness,' and
'obstinate deafness,' for not choosing so unphilosophic a mode of
explaining universal mystery. Call upon them to define their
'all-creative Deity,' and they know not what to answer. Ask them who,
what, or where He is, and at once you have them on the hip; at once you
spy their utter ignorance, and reduce them to a condition very similar
to that of Master Abraham Slender, when with stammering lips he 'sings
small like a woman.' To assume everything they are always ready; but to
prove anything concerning their Immense Supernatural, they are never
prepared. Regularly drilled to argue in a circle, they foolishly imagine
everybody else should do the same, and marvel at the man who rigidly
adheres to just rules of philosophising and considers experience of
natural derivation a far safer guide than their crude, undigested,
extravagant, contradictory notions about the confessedly _unknown_.
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