Note 32 — Chapter VI · THE FAILURE OF THEISTIC ARGUMENTS

There are Theists who candidly admit the perplexities of the situation. On the horns of a dilemma they have no option but to fall back upon the primitive theory: All unaccountable evil is the work of a hostile and evil power which seeks continually to frustrate the benevolent intentions of the Creator. “Speaking for myself,” says the author of Pro Fide,32 “I am unable to believe that hideous and excruciating diseases, such as cancer, which affect both men and animals, and which cannot, in the case of animals at least, be explained as a moral discipline, are the work of a good and benevolent God. I endorse absolutely the words of Dr. E. A. Abbott. ‘I cannot think,’ he says, ‘of diseases and pain, and the conflict in the animal world for life and death, as being, so to speak, part of God’s first intention.’” Disease, suffering, the struggle for existence, and the law of prey are then, after all, the Devil’s handiwork, and so is also, presumably, the law of the survival of the fittest. (Christian evolutionists, take note! In exonerating and extolling the evolutionary processes, you are exonerating and extolling the works of the Devil!) “The Zoroastrian view,” he continues, “must be rejected because it postulates two first principles, which is a plain metaphysical impossibility.” The view which is not open to this or any other objection, and which he calls the Theistic view, “supposes that a large share of the government of the material universe was committed, at the creation, to a personal spirit, of great, but not unlimited, power and intelligence, who, having been originally created good, subsequently fell, and introduced evil and disorder into the world.... This hypothesis of a personal devil has many advantages. It explains the whole of the facts; it avoids the postulation of two first causes; it vindicates the moral perfection of the Deity; and it allows the optimistic hope to be entertained that in the end good will triumph over evil.” All this is highly instructive. For it means that, in the opinion of an erudite apologist of the Church of England, flourishing a.d. 1906, the moral perfection of the Deity can only be vindicated on the hypothesis of a personal devil! Doubtless this hypothesis—and, remember, it is nothing more than a hypothesis, and one that is now generally discredited—fits in admirably; but the question is, Are we to accept it, however imaginary and opposed to the facts of science, just because it is so suitable?