s highly appropriate therefore: what is the source of this religious tendency within man? Alexander Campbell, in his celebrated debate April 13-23, 1829 in Cincinnati, Ohio with Robert Owen, provided the answer to this question in a very positive fashion. He asked Owen from whence the idea of God had come in man's mind. Owen (and all skeptics) had (have) stated that the idea of God has not come from reason (skeptics hold, of course, that the concept is unreasonable), and that it has not come from revelation. Campbell pressed Owen to tell him from whence the idea of God `had' come. Owen retorted, "by imagination." Campbell then quoted both John Locke and David Hume, two philosophers who are highly respected in the secular community. Hume stated that the "creative power of the mind amounts to nothing more than the faculty of combining, transposing, augmenting and diminishing the materials afforded to us by sense and experience." The imagination, it turns out, has `no creative power'. Neither reason nor imagination create. Reason, like a carpenter's yardstick, is a measure, not an originator. Imagination works only on those items already in the mind; it does not "create" anything new. [Sigmund Freud, German psychoanalyst of the first part of the 20th century, attempted to explain God's existence by stating that man had indeed formed the "heavenly father" from the idea in his mind of his "earthly father." But this idea will not suffice either. Is the God of the Bible the God man would "invent" if asked to do so? Hardly. Look around at the "god" man invents when left to his own devices--the "god" of hedonism, epicurianism, subjectivism, or the "god" of "if it feels good, do it." The God of the Bible is not the God man would invent, if left to his own devices. Freud's attempt to explain the idea of God in man's mind failed miserably.] Campbell pointed out to Owen, in a very forceful way, that the idea of God in man's mind could only have come...
