The Atheist’s God by Earle Albert Rowell

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 26, 1911

The Atheist’s God

By Earle Albert Rowell

EARLE ALBERT ROWELL

Has the atheist a god? you ask. He does not worship the God of the Bible. He does not worship sticks and stones. But the command divinely given, “Thou shalt worship,” is instinct in his soul; and try as he may, he can not eradicate it.

The materialist Spiller substitutes for God what he calls “the universal ether,” which, he says, “is the creator of heaven — i. e., the heavenly bodies — and the earth. It also created us men; it governs the whole world; it is eternal; it is all-wise; it is just; it never errs, and is alone infallible because it acts without self-consciousness and without any fixed purpose.”

The philosopher von Hartmann has a different idol. He calls it “the Unconscious One.” “The Unconscious One is never weary. He does not waver nor doubt, requires no time for consideration, and never errs. He possesses no memory; yet in him will and idea are bound up in indissoluble unity. The Unconscious One is almighty, all-present, all-knowing, and all-wise.”

But this is by no means all. The famous German atheist and scientist, Professor Haeckel, has outdistanced them all in imagination. He tells us that the atom has an immortal soul. “The motion of the atoms in the formation and dissolution of a chemical combination is only intelligible if we ascribe to them feeling and will. . . . If every atom is endowed with feeling and will, the plastidule (or organic molecule) is distinguished from them by possessing memory. All plastidules possess memory.”

Now, scientists tell us that a pin-head contains so many atoms that it would take 250,000 years for one to count them. What an amount of feeling and will a pin-head must contain, not to mention the whole pin! And how much memory in the billions and billions of molecules in a strawberry!

These are the men who ridicule Christians for believing in an Almighty God who created the heavens and the earth and all that in them is. They deny an intelligent God, and then give the universal unconscious ether, or the Unconscious One who knows nothing, yet is “all-wise” (!), or the plain invisible atom the attributes of God. They deny that it is possible for man to live forever, by any means whatever, but “the atom-soul,” says Haeckel, “is eternal and immortal.”

Is it not the irony of fate when the great scientists and agnostics of the world, who scorn the Christian God, put in his place an infinitesimal idol, the smallest particle of matter that is conceivable? This is the fruit of skepticism, of science without God. Thank God we know whom we have believed, and in whom we trust. We must worship. The principle is implanted in our natures. We may choose whether it be an atom or “my Lord and my God.”

Portland, Ore.