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form of life; and so its emotion is part of the eternal ethical life of
God. Thus we see that the dilemma which is fatal to Deism, namely, that in
creation God lays Himself open to reaction, limitation, passivity, emotion,
and so to weakness and deficiency, is solved for us. These were no new things
to God: they did not appear to Him to detract from His glory; they existed
quite apart from creation; they were of His being, and in them He expresses
Himself. Consequently when He graciously created a world, into which He
entered in relation, and so allowed all the consequences of
relation—self-limitation, reactions, passivities, emotions—He was doing no new
thing; He was simply expressing His nature in time as He expresses it
eternally.
In regard to God's creating Nature, it might conceivably be maintained that
He did not in any way limit Himself, because He was creating something wholly
under His own hand, capable of being acted on, but not of acting nor even of
reacting, whose smallest motion was really God's doing. And, being entirely
mechanical, it would have no point of resemblance or similarity with its
Maker. But what shall we say of man, God's conscious, knowing, willing,
feeling creation? How can we escape the conclusion that here at any rate there
is a point of similarity between God's will and man's; between God as mind and
man as mind; between God as knower and man as knower. If not, how could God
communicate with man? There cannot be |
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CREATOR, INCARNATE, ATONER |
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intelligent communication unless the receiver is to some extent like the
sender. To the oxen the hieroglyphics were, are, and will be, mere marks. But
to us they are messages simply because there is a point of mental similarity
between us and those who wrote them. So prophecy itself involves this
similarity between God's mind and ours. But it is impossible for pure
tanzih to admit any such correspondence or similarity. Yet it attempts to
assert the possibility of communication. This is contradictory.
If Islam replies that the world, including man, is in every respect a tool
in the hand of God's power, we say that many of the former metaphysical
difficulties still remain (see above); and moreover that this makes impossible
the quality of love in God; no one loves a machine, though he have absolute
power over it. And of course it is even more impossible for a machine to love
its worker, even on the assumption that it is a conscious machine and one that
can understand the communications made to it by its Maker.
But even this
assumption (that the machine is somehow rational) must be denied on pure
tanzih principles. Why should tanzih deny reality to the will
of man as a free thing, that is self-exercised, yet allow to man's
intelligence that it is real and self-exercised. So here there is a dilemma:
either you allow that man's intelligence is real, self-exercised, that is,
capable of give and take, in which case you must say that the knowledge of |
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