Word: staces
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Princeton's Professor Walter T. Stace, 65, is a kindly and reflective teacher of philosophy, with an imposing academic reputation. In 1948 he wrote a scholarly article for the Atlantic Monthly, called "Man Against Darkness," expressing his pessimism about religion. Said Professor Stace: "There is, in the universe outside man, no spirituality, no regard for values, no friend in the sky, no help or comfort for man of any sort...
...burst of reader response tore a few holes in the professor's ivy. Publicly and in a flood of angry letters, he was denounced as an atheist or worse. Walter Stace, an Englishman, was shocked. He had never fancied himself an out & out enemy of religion. As a young man, he had studied briefly for the ministry while at Dublin's Trinity College. In 20 years as a British colonial officer in Ceylon, he had formed a lively admiration for Buddhism and the Hindu religions...
Since then Stace has thought through a personal conflict which his article only partially illumined-one between his intellectual "antireligious" belief and "a fundamental religious feeling" retained since childhood. In a book published this week, Time and Eternity (Princeton; $3), he shows the other side of the coin which he held up to his readers 3½ years ago. He calls it "a defense of religion"; more exactly, it is a philosopher's admission that there is a God independent of nature -although experience of Him need not be tied to a religious creed...
...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...