Wednesday, October 4, 2023

George H. Brimhall (former BYU President) on importance in Belief in God and a Personal God

  

BELIEF IN GOD

 

Believing in God: Belief in God, a something more than human, is spiritually inherent in man. The feelings of man call for a God; the desires make a demand for one, and thinking shows the necessity for a God. it is asserted by high, up-to-date authority that thinking men believe in God. It may be the all-pervading goodness of the universe; it may be the inescapable laws of nature; it may be the identity behind the image; or it may be the personal deity of revelation. At all events, a belief in God is an accompaniment of thought.

 

BELIEF IN A PERSONAL GOD

 

The organized is greater than the unorganized, and man is organized intelligence or intelligence operating through organism; he is the apex of earth life; he is more than the elements that compose him; he is element plus organization; he is a unity of three: mind, spirit, and mortal body. The inherent yearning to worship, i.e., to praise and petition, cannot be consistently gratified by subordinating the superior to the inferior which must be the case if the organized bows before the unorganized. Consistency calls for either the personal God or a discontinuance of worship. My thinking forbids my praying to any other than a personal God. (George H. Brimhall, Long and Short Range Arrows [Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1934], 27)

 

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