Daniel 6:27

He worketh signs and wonders in heaven and in earth.

The Idea of God as affected by Science

The picture formed of the Creator of the world has varied according to the strength or culture of the age through which the idea is passing. To the American Indian God is only a good spirit, the owner of a happy hunting ground larger than their own forests or plains To the Hindoo, God is a great, idle, luxurious prince, passing his time in pleasure or sleep. The Greek Zeus, or the Latin Jupiter, was only a great statesman, and warrior, and judge combined. The greater an age became in its mental and moral development, the richer its offerings to the character of its Deity. The idea of God is always the store-house in which each nation treasures up all its slow accumulations of the true, the beautiful, and the good. It does not follow from this that God is only an intellectual image, a shadow of man’s mind seen externally, just as man may see the shadow of his body in a glass. There are those who declare the idea of God to be only this external projection of human thought. The ever-changing ideas which the human race cherishes as to its deity, prove only that man passes through many gradations of thought, a fact which no more blots out the Heavenly Father than it blots out the stars or the ocean. The modifications which the conceptions of the divine nature constantly undergo ought to be expected, and confessed as perfectly legitimate, in a world where all truth is approached by gradual advances, and where nothing is seen to-day in the colours of yesterday. That each tribe has cherished a peculiar conception of God, and heaven and hell weighs no more against the absolute fact of these entities than the notion of Plutarch that the moon were a bunch of vapour, would destroy belief in the moon as an absolute external reality. The God is unchanging. Man passes from infancy to manhood in the search of the truth. Reflect then upon the wonderful works of God. It touched the spirit of Darius that there was a Being who could accomplish such strange things on earth or in heaven. In the classic ages there seems to have been little conception of divine power. The earth was the centre of a little system, and the stars not far away. So humble was the public estimate of God, that one of the Roman emperors asked the people to declare him a god. It is possible that there was less atheism in early periods than in the present, resulting from the fact that the ideal of God lay nearer to the ideal of man. The gigantic studies of all science and inquiry of late centuries have widened the gulf between man and God by declaring that there is but one God, and that he is measureless, formless, unthinkable. Under the revelations of science the name of God becomes daily laden with power, and indeed has wholly outgrown the grasp, and even the highest imagination, of minds, either scientific or theological. If the universe is so measureless, equally measureless must be its Creator. He must be a God of wonderful work also in the world of spirit. To man, another life seems difficult; to many, it seems impossible. The mystery of futurity is no greater than the mystery of the past. For ages men have been trying to find how life came into the insensate world. The gateway to life is just as impossible as the gateway to a second existence. The Testament has given us a Heavenly Father, science has given us an Almighty. So far, all well. Now the result we fear is, that science is teaching us God is doing all his wonders in regions apart from the soul. Never did any age so need the Christ as our era now clamours for His life and teachings. (David Ewing.)