The Bible and Astronomy Author:Johann Heinrich Kurtz, T D Simonton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER SECOND. THE DEISTIC AND PANTHEISTIC THEORIES OF THE WORLD. Two antagonistic extremes in the province of religion, are to be met with in all ages of... more » the world; and especially in our own times — Deism and Pantheism. The grand point of conflict between these two religious tendencies is, as is well known, the relation of God to the world. The former acknowledges only a far-distant God, whose infinite greatness prevents him from stooping to regard every little circumstance in the world, and renders it necessary that he should commit the preservation and government of the world to the so-called laws of nature. The latter recognizes only a God near at hand and in the world, who lives in and shares his life with all things, who unfolds himself in a blade of grass, who finds his highest development in the mind of man, and whose life is the life of nature, apart from which it has no existence. Both these tendencies or views are, when opposed to each other, in the right; for each one has at its foundation a deep religious necessity, of which its antagonist is wholly unconscious. But both are, when opposed to Christianity, in error; as the latter unites in a most comprehensive system the elements of truth contained in these antagonistic views, and yet shuns their one-sided features. We shall employ the termsDeistic and Pantheistic to designate the false theories of the world to which these extreme and onesided views have mutually given rise. To these we will then oppose the Biblical theory of the world, together with the results and views of modern astronomy, which serve to explain and establish that theory. Let us first notice the arguments in support of the Deistic theory of the world. This theory, which claims to be "par excellence" the learned one, has in modern times bor...« less