The Existence of God | Page 3

things invisible through the
visible."

SECT. III. Why so few Persons are attentive to the Proofs Nature
affords of the Existence of God.
If a great number of men of subtle and penetrating wit have not
discovered God with one cast of the eye upon nature, it is not matter of
wonder; for either the passions they have been tossed by have still
rendered them incapable of any fixed reflection, or the false prejudices
that result from passions have, like a thick cloud, interposed between
their eyes and that noble spectacle. A man deeply concerned in an affair
of great importance, that should take up all the attention of his mind,
might pass several days in a room treating about his concerns without
taking notice of the proportions of the chamber, the ornaments of the
chimney, and the pictures about him, all which objects would
continually be before his eyes, and yet none of them make any
impression upon him. In this manner it is that men spend their lives;
everything offers God to their sight, and yet they see it nowhere. "He
was in the world, and the world was made by Him, and nevertheless the
world did not know Him"--In mundo erat, et mundus per ipsum factus
est, et mundus eum non cognovit. They pass away their lives without
perceiving that sensible representation of the Deity. Such is the
fascination of worldly trifles that obscures their eyes! Fascinatio
nugacitatis obscurat bona. Nay, oftentimes they will not so much as
open them, but rather affect to keep them shut, lest they should find
Him they do not look for. In short, what ought to help most to open
their eyes serves only to close them faster; I mean the constant duration
and regularity of the motions which the Supreme Wisdom has put in
the universe. St. Austin tells us those great wonders have been debased
by being constantly renewed; and Tully speaks exactly in the same
manner. "By seeing every day the same things, the mind grows familiar
with them as well as the eyes. It neither admires nor inquires into the
causes of effects that are ever seen to happen in the same manner, as if
it were the novelty, and not the importance of the thing itself, that
should excite us to such an inquiry." Sed assiduitate quotidiana et
consuetudine oculorum assuescunt animi, neque admirantur neque
requirunt rationes earum rerum, quas semper vident, perinde quasi
novit as nos magis quam magnitudo rerum debeat ad exquirendas
causas excitare.

SECT. IV. All Nature shows the Existence of its Maker.
But, after all, whole nature shows the infinite art of its Maker. When I
speak of an art, I mean a collection of proper means chosen on purpose
to arrive at a certain end; or, if you please, it is an order, a method, an
industry, or a set design. Chance, on the contrary, is a blind and
necessary cause, which neither sets in order nor chooses anything, and
which has neither will nor understanding. Now I maintain that the
universe bears the character and stamp of a cause infinitely powerful
and industrious; and, at the same time, that chance (that is, the blind
and fortuitous concourse of causes necessary and void of reason)
cannot have formed this universe. To this purpose it is not amiss to call
to mind the celebrated comparisons of the ancients.
SECT. V. Noble Comparisons proving that Nature shows the Existence
of its Maker. First Comparison, drawn from Homer's "Iliad."
Who will believe that so perfect a poem as Homer's "Iliad" was not the
product of the genius of a great poet, and that the letters of the alphabet,
being confusedly jumbled and mixed, were by chance, as it were by the
cast of a pair of dice, brought together in such an order as is necessary
to describe, in verses full of harmony and variety, so many great events;
to place and connect them so well together; to paint every object with
all its most graceful, most noble, and most affecting attendants; in short,
to make every person speak according to his character in so natural and
so forcible a manner? Let people argue and subtilise upon the matter as
much as they please, yet they never will persuade a man of sense that
the "Iliad" was the mere result of chance. Cicero said the same in
relation to Ennius's "Annals;" adding that chance could never make one
single verse, much less a whole poem. How then can a man of sense be
induced to believe, with respect to the universe, a work beyond
contradiction more wonderful than the "Iliad," what his reason will
never suffer him to believe in relation to that poem? Let us attend
another comparison, which we owe to St. Gregory Nazianzenus.