Nobody thought of saying that
the ultimate problem of existence, being clearly insoluble and even
unthinkable on causation lines, could not be a causation problem. To
pious people this would have been flat atheism, because they assumed
that God must be a Cause, and sometimes called him The Great First
Cause, or, in still choicer language, The Primal Cause. To the
Rationalists it would have been a renunciation of reason. Here and there
a man would confess that he stood as with a dim lantern in a dense fog,
and could see but a little way in any direction into infinity. But he
did not really believe that infinity was infinite or that the eternal
was also sempiternal: he assumed that all things, known and unknown,
were caused.
Hence it was that I found myself one day towards the end of the
eighteen-seventies in a cell in the old Brompton Oratory arguing with
Father Addis, who had been called by one of his flock to attempt my
conversion to Roman Catholicism. The universe exists, said the father:
somebody must have made it. If that somebody exists, said I, somebody
must have made him.
Pages:
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63