It may not be amiss to mention the fact that John Stuart Mill, the famous English philosopher of the middle of the nineteenth century, suggested that it would be truer to the experience of human beings to assume a God limited in power, though perfect in other respects. It is impossible, he thought, to harmonize the attributes of omnipotence and goodness in a divine agent, with the world as it is. This protest against the high, deductive faith of Christian monotheism was due to Mill's frank empiricism. Life must speak for itself, he held; it must justify hypotheses by their agreement with it. The traditional Christian method has been too dictatorial and too little inductive. It has started from a set of dogmas in regard to God and spun out their consequences, refusing to qualify these dogmas when the consequences did not fit the tragic character of life.
The treatment of the second logical possibility is familiar ground. Christian ethical monotheism followed { 164} Hebrew religious thought in its essentials. God is held to be an omnipotent agent who is also morally perfect. Theology knows two forms of this dogma, the Calvinistic or Augustinian, and the Arminian. Calvinism stands flatly on the thesis that God is just and that, therefore, what is done is just. Within this setting with its easy appeal to ignorance, it makes little difference whether events are right because God does them or whether God does them because they are right. Arminianism turns out, when examined, to be largely an attempt to soften the absolutism of Calvinism along certain lines. But these endless and, in the main, sterile theological controversies reveal the artificiality of the dogmas within which they are carried on. They are, when all is said, only ingenious modifications and redressings of the primary assumptions of the religious view of the world. I challenge any one to develop a really tenable system of theology, a system which is self-consistent and relevant to the world as we know it. I am certain that it cannot be done. As a student of ethics, my growing conviction has for some time been that these traditional controversies and modes of approach to human life are barren and irrelevant, because they cast absolutely no light upon human problems, social or personal. Modern ethics and theology have ceased to have any genuine commerce. The one is in touch with the sciences of biology, sociology, psychology and criminology; the other, by its very nature, can gain nothing from these sciences. Ethics is concrete and inductive. Theology is abstract and deductive.