05. Can Man Come to Know God?

Can Man Come to Know God? But even though no man can think God out of existence, can we know anything about Him?

Herbert Spencer, high priest of agnostics, said that God is both unknown and unknowable, entirely ignorant, apparently, that he was guilty, in that assumption, of that ridiculous blunder in logic of assuming in advance as impossible or in-capable of proof that which remains to be proved.

Saying that man cannot reach up to a knowledge of God, he followed that assumption with the non sequitur—the conclusion that does not follow, that God must therefore forever remain unknown and unknowable. But it remained yet to be proved whether man may not come into a knowledge of God which may be absolutely demonstrated to be a revelation of Himself sent down to man, by which man may of a certainty come into personal acquaintance with God. That possibility cannot be assumed in advance as incapable of proof without violating the simplest rules of logical thinking. And Spencer furnishes the perfect illustration in himself of the outcome of this impossible logic.

He insists on the axiom that anything we cannot help believing, or the opposite of which is wholly inconceivable, we must hold to be true. Then he refuses the scientific use of his own axiom by insisting on being an agnostic. He first asserts that we must accept our necessary beliefs, and then denies that these beliefs compel us to accept an intelligent Personal First Cause whom man can come to know.

Using his remarkable mental powers to their utmost to rid himself of the knowledge of God, it is most amazing that in formulating the very statement of his belief that God is unknowable, his intellect compelled him to write such a creed of so-called agnosticism as contained an acknowledgment of four of God’s fundamental attributes, and an admission, by inference, of two others.

Thomas Hill, former President of Harvard University, wrote concerning him: “Spencer says that our belief in an Omnipresent Eternal Cause of the universe has a higher warrant than any other belief; that is, that the existence of such a Cause is the most certain of all certainties, but asserts that we can assign to it no attributes whatever, and that it is unknown and unknowable. Yet in his very statement of its existence, he assigns to the Ultimate Cause four attributes: Being, Causal Energy, Omnipotence, and Eternity. And afterwards he implicitly assigns to it two others—repeatedly expressing his faith that the Cosmos is obedient to law, and that this law is of beneficent result, which is an implicit ascription of wisdom and love to the Ultimate Cause. All thinkers concede that human reason is competent to discover the existence of the Ultimate Cause, to form inductions of its Being, its Causal Energy or Power, its Omnipotence and Eternity.”

Here, then, is one of the keenest minds of recent times trying to think the nature of God out of the realm of human knowledge, and yet compelled, by the very laws of his intellect, to acknowledge the dominant attributes of the character he says cannot be known, and thus denying his agnosticism in the very act of putting it into words! No more conclusive proof can be needed that the fact of God is inescapable, and the fundamental attributes of His nature axioms, from the light of which it is impossible to escape, even though, ostrich-like, we try to hide our heads in the shifting sands of an unscientific, unphilosophic, unscholarly and unreasoning agnosticism.

Yes, God is, and He not only can be known, but the moment we begin to think in terms of the moral realm, we find that we cannot escape Him, the fundamental facts of His Being coming into consciousness as a thing inevitable. Even the atheist is compelled to face at least the thought of God in the very act of denying His existence.