In an influential and widely-read article J. N. Findlay takes a hard look at grounds for a belief in God. The picture he draws of God is not unlike that of the poet Francis Thompson's "hound of heaven." Divine Existence, if it is to be the fitting object of truly religious attitudes, must be "inescapable and necessary, whether for thought or reality. ''1 And yet, for many, there is no hound nipping at their heels. Whether as humanists or materialists or what have you, such men go blissfully to their deaths, with, perhaps, only a reverence for the realization that they had not done all there was to do, nor learned all there was to learn. The religious frame of mind is, according to Findlay, in a quandary: "It desires the Divine Existence both to have that inescapable character which can, on modern views, only be found where truth reflects an arbitrary convention, and also the character of 'making a real difference' which is only possible where truth doesn't have this merely linguistic basis. ''2 The upshot of all this is that we cannot "remain agnostically poised in regard to God, ''~ but are forced, if we are honest with ourselves, to deny God's existence.
It is not my purpose here to attempt to characterize Findlay's argument as either an ontological argument in reverse or an argument from experience. Its primary force, for me, is that it points out certain experiences we ought of necessity to have if the God most religiously oriented persons claim exists does, in fact, exist. Yet, while plainly these experiences for many "who share a contemporary outlook" are lacking, the hound of heaven ought to have spared no one.
Findlay goes on to remark, rightly I think, that his argument does not hold for those who deny that God must exist in a necessary and