In my early youth, when first I began to be puzzled by these eternal
problems, I read in a book, the author of which I have no wish to
recall,[39] this sentence: "God is the great X placed over the ultimate
barrier of human knowledge; in the measure in which science advances,
the barrier recedes." And I wrote in the margin, "On this side of the
barrier, everything is explained without Him; on the further side,
nothing is explained, either with Him or without Him; God therefore is
superfluous." And so far as concerns the God-Idea, the God of the
proofs, I continue to be of the same opinion. Laplace is said to have
stated that he had not found the hypothesis of God necessary in order to
construct his scheme of the origin of the Universe, and it is very true.
In no way whatever does the idea of God help us to understand better the
existence, the essence and the finality of the Universe.
That there is a Supreme Being, infinite, absolute and eternal, whose
existence is unknown to us, and who has created the Universe, is not
more conceivable than that the material basis of the Universe itself,
its matter, is eternal and infinite and absolute. We do not understand
the existence of the world one whit the better by telling ourselves that
God created it. It is a begging of the question, or a merely verbal
solution, intended to cover up our ignorance. In strict truth, we deduce
the existence of the Creator from the fact that the thing created
exists, a process which does not justify rationally His existence.
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