I affirm, then, that God, if there is a God, does not resemble
the effigies which philosophers and priests have made of him;
that he neither thinks nor acts according to the law of analysis,
foresight, and progress, which is the distinctive characteristic
of man; that, on the contrary, he seems rather to follow an
inverse and retrogressive course; that intelligence, liberty,
personality in God are constituted not as in us; and that this
originality of nature, perfectly accounted for, makes God an
essentially anti-civilizing, anti-liberal, anti-human being.
I prove my proposition by going from the negative to the
positive,--that is, by deducing the truth of my thesis from the
progress of the objections to it.
1. God, say the believers, can be conceived only as infinitely
good, infinitely wise, infinitely powerful, etc.,--the whole
litany of the infinites. Now, infinite perfection cannot be
reconciled with the datum of a will holding an indifferent or
even reactionary attitude toward progress: therefore, either God
does not exist, or the objection drawn from the development of
the antinomies proves only our ignorance of the mysteries of
infinity.
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