Word: staces
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Philosopher Stace, to be sure, uses "the devil" in a purely metaphorical context...
...Devil Laughs. "Religion," Philosopher Stace begins, "is the hunger of the soul for the impossible, the unattainable, the inconceivable . . . Either God is a mystery or He is nothing at all." Stace holds that God is such a mystery that any attempt to reason about him, e.g., to prove that God is the Creator of the Universe, is doomed to fail. "To ask for a proof of the existence of God is on a par with asking for a proof of the existence of beauty . . . If God does not lie at the end of any telescope, neither does...
...Stace rejects any literal interpretation of religious belief: "The devil* laughs with joy when he finds that the saint takes his beliefs to be facts, because he knows that he has then an easy prey." His reasoning, which sometimes runs through pretty deep water, is that an Infinite God can have no connection with the natural order of things, since everything in the universe or connected with it must by definition have some limitations of time or space...
...Professor Stace's substitute for theology, God and man live in entirely separate worlds-an "eternal order" and a "natural order." Man cannot discover the eternal order by his reasoning power, or through any system of belief. He can only experience it. "The mystic," writes Stace, "lives in both orders"; all men, however, have within them a consciousness of God which needs only to be developed. This sense of the eternal world, which Stace calls "moral intuition"-plus the testimony of the mystics-has given man his sense of moral values, which a purely natural explanation of the universe...
Utterly Other. Philosopher Stace is happy that most modern Christians (except Roman Catholics) tend to play down the rational proofs of God. "Attempts at proof not only fail of their own purpose and so do no good to religion, but . . . they positively degrade it. For their effect is to drag down the divine and the eternal from their own sphere into the sphere of the natural and the temporal...