# Lehre und Wehre_St. Louis Missouri_April 1863_S97
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

Lehre und Wehre.

Volume IX.    April 1863.    No. 4.

Materialism, or the So-Called Results of Modern Natural Science.

(Continued.)

Before we proceed to the result prepared for by the propositions communicated here — a result in which a wretched creature dares, before his fellow creatures, to declare his God an absurd notion of fools — it may serve, for a better understanding of this result and to abbreviate the refutation it will presently require, if we first picture to ourselves a materialist not afflicted with stupidity, who makes clear to himself his position, his goal, and the meaning of his striving. He would express himself about it somewhat as follows. The thought of God and judgment, and of his world-order, is painful, unbearably burdensome. Yet we cannot escape this affliction so long as the society in which we live keeps reproducing it ever anew. We must seek to destroy it. For this purpose the natural sciences can be used as an effective means. For, in the first place, on account of the beautiful and useful discoveries in their domain — which, to be sure, none of our own number has made — the natural sciences have won for themselves extraordinary favor and esteem among the multitude; and then, further — and this is what makes them especially serviceable — they are still in so imperfect a state that one can drag them in to prop up the strangest and most senseless assertions without forfeiting one's claim to be a natural scientist. The denial of God must therefore, if it is to accomplish anything in our time, be given a scientific expression. One simply sets up the proposition: natural science has found it to be an undeniable fact that force is a property inherent in matter from eternity. Now anyone, even one who understands nothing of the natural sciences, can easily draw the conclusion: since force and matter are from eternity, the world cannot have been created, and consequently there is no Creator. To be sure, a clever mind might object here: "But how do you know that force inheres in matter from eternity? Have you ever been able to look into matter and found force dwelling there? And how can you know that force never moved into its dwelling, but only ever remained there? Could there