The Argument from Sustainment.

NO one thing is sustained of itself it seems but each thing isolated by thought reveals a dependency on others. The mind tends naturally to draw horizontal chains of cause or connection. Thus a glass of water is cold when ice is put into it but warm when placed near a fire. This is ever true of all particular things within our compass, though it fail often to be recognised. For instance, sometimes we happen upon individuals who are so confident as to be cocksure, and often they must wear out our ears as the cockerel each morning with news of their own resources and independence. Why do they feel this way? It can only be because they fail to notice their own stabilisers. It is an honour conferred upon water for them to drink of it and not the other way about, the food they daily eat is dependent on them and not contrariwise, the air is happier to breathe their breath than they to breathe the air's.

   Of course this applies to materials as well; not a mixture exists but depends upon exterior circumstances to be maintained. When the temperature is very cold this liquid is ice, when it is very hot it becomes vapour, when temperate it is liquid, and so on with all the other compounds and elements. Also as regarding particles, they are regulated by forces, which in very truth we as little understand as the particles themselves, but it is clear that no true independence is detectable within their systems as presently observed and circumscribed.

   Yet where in this is there to be found an argument for God? Only herein, that God being absent in such a universe there must arise the following riddle: if each thing is dependent on each other thing, how can alteration be sustained? Take again for illustration a chain; it is only complete while each link is connected, but as soon as a single link is broken the status of the completed chain is also broken. Now it strikes me that in a universe where every thing is propping up every other thing, the collapse of one part must signify the collapse of the total, unless there is something ambient sustaining the change itself. This might be exampled by a pile of stones; knock out the cornerstone and the others follow, but if they all are mortared together, there is no more necessity for a cornerstone as it is another factor which is sustaining them.

   Naturally in this as in other arguments for God, I am really defining the overwhelming need for His presence in all our thoughts, and that primarily by accentuating the manifold problems which beset us without the thought of Him. Some might admit that there is reason in what I describe but struggle nonetheless with the name and notion of God. I must confess I have experienced frustration at this objection, for it is due to a shallow conception of the very deepest of all concepts. God they see as a figurehead for Vikings or Aztecs, or as an excuse for crusaders, not for the fundamental philosophical proposition which He truly represents. He has been the one meet object for a mighty preponderance of the greatest minds in history, and the only true subject upon which to exert their talents. I do not believe a lie, however pretty, could be so actuating. Those who feel the shallow scepticism however, and cannot escape from the reflections of ceremonial magic, fevered zeal, prayer and miracle, should attempt to really define what it is they mean by God, and see if it is not an ill formed meaning. I know what I mean by God, I mean existence itself considered in its totality, the Thing to which all other things refer, complete, infinite, and eternal, a being all powerful and all knowing. Everything around that is extrinsic and not definitive. I do not venture to suggest what He looks like, nor what He does, for appearance is a mode of perception and doing is merely the vulgar description of being. I only venture to appreciate the purpose His presence confers on the particulate worlds He sustains. With Him we may proceed, without Him we must deteriorate into more and more arcane and remote explanations for the inexplicable—the false.