Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/301

276 duce it by my own fiat plus the necessary physical acts, even so the conceived Deity in the conceived case, though needing no other means save his fiat, has yet needed that, and has found his fiat a sufficient cause of this external change from darkness to light. But just as my success in making light needs explanation by the laws of an external world, so God’s success in making it also needs explanation, in the case thus conceived, although his means are supposed to have been less complex than mine have to be. He too is put by this conception in a world of law external to himself, the laws of this world being such as require that, in order to produce light as an external fact he shall perform a certain act, the fiat. These laws secure him success, in the supposed case, under just these conditions. The fiat may itself be whatever process you will.

But how then did these conditions arise? How is it that God is able to make light as an existence external to himself? The external conditions on which his present success depends may indeed have been again created by himself. Even so a man could now possibly make some ingenious mechanism, com- pounded of telephones and what else you will, so as to be able to light a whole building by the impulse produced by some very simple act, e.g., by speaking the words, “Let there be light,” against some prepared membrane. But then we are involved in just the same difficulties. As the man’s mechanical skill would imply a conformity to laws of nature preceding his present power to make light by the word of his mouth, even so, if God’s creative power has pre-