Page:The Necessity of Atheism (Brooks).djvu/110

108 ... He is one to whom men can pray and do pray, and who answers prayer." This can be understood to be not greatly removed from the fundamentalists' conception of God, but when he continues to say, "God is that interaction between individuals, groups, and ages which generates and promotes the greatest possible mutuality of good," and "it responds to prayer and is precisely what answers prayer, when prayer is answered," the personal "He" has suddenly changed to the unpersonal "It." Emotions and intelligence are connected with nerve structures in all sentient beings that we have experience and knowledge of. How can we attribute these qualities to a being who is described to us as devoid of any nerve structure?

In former ages the theist saw God in the color and construction of a flower, in the starry heavens, and in a sunset or sunrise. The biologists have driven the theists from this misconception, the physicists have explained the phenomena of sunset and sunrise, and with the advance of astronomy the heavens no longer proclaim the glory of God, and the theistic arguments have shifted from worlds to atoms. At the present moment the vision of God has narrowed down to a perception of the divine intelligence noted in the design of the atom. Astronomy, physics, geology, chemistry, medicine, psychology, ethics, aesthetics, and the social sciences have left no room for a theistic explanation of the universe. The mystics who proclaim God in their intuitive trances are being crowded out into the light of reason by the researches of psychologists. There are still many gaps in our knowledge, and if the theist persists in finding the manifestation of a supreme being in these vague zones of our present ignorance, he is at the mercy of the science of the future. Science is concerned with mind as much as it is with the material aspects of atoms and stars, hence the sciences