John Stuart Mill, for no better reason than that nature
sometimes drowns men and burns them, and that childbirth is a painful
process, maintained that God could not possibly be infinite. I shall not
say what I think of the shallowness and self-conceit displayed by such an
argument. What it proves is not the finiteness of God, but the littleness
of man. The mind of man never shows itself so small as when it tries to
measure the attributes and limit the greatness of its Creator."
But the argument--or rather the truism--in question is an attempt to do
neither the one nor the other; it simply asserts the patent fact that, if
God is omnipotent, and so had an unlimited choice of means whereby to
accomplish the ends of "animal perfection," "animal enjoyment," and the
rest; then the fact of his having chosen to adopt the means which he has
adopted is a fact which is wholly incompatible with his beneficence. And on
the other hand, if he is beneficent, the fact of his having adopted these
means in order that the sum of ultimate enjoyment might exceed the sum of
concomitant pain, is a fact which is wholly incompatible with his
omnipotence. To a man who already believes, on independent grounds, in an
omnipotent and beneficent Deity, it is no doubt possible to avoid facing
this dilemma, and to rest content with the assumption that, in a sense
beyond the reach of human reason, or even of human conception, the two
horns of this dilemma must be united in some transcendental reconciliation;
but if a man undertakes to reason on the subject at all, as he must and
ought when the question is as to the _existence_ of such a Deity, then
clearly he has no alternative but to allow that the dilemma is a hopeless
one.
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