God, Thought and Wisdom

◆ Commenting on the scripture at Proverbs 1:7, “The fear of Jehovah is the beginning of knowledge,” R. F. Horton wrote in The Expositor’s Bible: “There can be no true knowledge or wisdom which does not start from the recognition of God. This is one of those contentions, not uncommon in the Sacred Writings, which appear at first sight to be arbitrary dogmas, but prove on closer inquiry to be the authoritative statements of reasoned truth. We are face to face, in our day, with an avowedly atheistic philosophy. According to the Scriptures, an atheistic philosophy is not a philosophy at all, but only a folly: ‘The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.’

◆ “We have thinkers among us who deem it their great mission to get rid of the very idea of God, as one which stands in the way of spiritual, social, and political progress. According to the Scriptures, to remove the idea of God is to destroy the key of knowledge and to make any consistent scheme of thought impossible. Here certainly is a clear and sharp issue.

◆ “Now, if this universe of which we form a part is a thought of the Divine mind, a work of the divine hand, a scene of operations, in which God is realizing, by slow degrees, a vast spiritual purpose, it is self-evident that no attempt to understand the universe can be successful which leaves this, its fundamental idea, out of account; as well might one attempt to understand a picture while refusing to recognize that the artist had any purpose to express in painting it, or indeed that there was any artist at all. . . .

◆ “But if the universe is not the work of a Divine mind, or the effect of a Divine will; if it is merely the working of a blind, irrational Force, which realizes no end, because it has no end to realize; if we, the feeble outcome of a long, unthinking evolution, are the first creatures that ever thought, and the only creatures who now think, in all the universe . . .; it follows that of a universe so irrational there can be no true knowledge for rational beings, and of a scheme of things so unwise there can be no philosophy or wisdom. No person who reflects can fail to recognize this, and this is the truth which is asserted in the text. It is not necessary to maintain that without admitting God we cannot have knowledge of a certain number of empirical facts; but that does not constitute a philosophy or a wisdom. It is necessary to maintain the without admitting God we cannot have any explanation of our knowledge, or any verification of it; without admitting God our knowledge can never come to any roundness or completeness such as might justify our calling it by the name of Wisdom.

◆ “Or to put the matter in a slightly different way: a thinking mind can only conceive the universe as the product of thought; if the universe is not the product of thought it can never be intelligible to a thinking mind, and can therefore never be in a true sense the object of knowledge; to deny that the universe is the product of thought is to deny the possibility of wisdom. We find, then, that it is not a dogma, but a truth of reason, that knowledge must start with the recognition of God.”

Questions From Readers

● Why does the New World Translation at Matthew 6:9 read: “Let your name be sanctified,” whereas ever so many other English translations read “Hallowed”?—C. M., United States.

In rendering what is known as the Lord’s Prayer into English, the New World Bible Translation Committee adhered to a principle that was stated in the Foreword of the New World Translation of the Christian Greek Scriptures, namely, to restrict themselves as far as possible to one English word for each distinct word in the original Greek. The Greek