PART I: CONCERNING GOD.
Page: 35

most excellent of all.

Further, this doctrine does away with the perfection of God:
for, if God acts for an object, he necessarily desires something
which he lacks. Certainly, theologians and metaphysicians draw
a distinction between the object of want and the object of
assimilation; still they confess that God made all things for
the sake of himself, not for the sake of creation. They are
unable to point to anything prior to creation, except God
himself, as an object for which God should act, and are
therefore driven to admit (as they clearly must), that God
lacked those things for whose attainment he created means, and
further that he desired them.

We must not omit to notice that the followers of this doctrine,
anxious to display their talent in assigning final causes, have
imported a new method of argument in proof of their
theory--namely, a reduction, not to the impossible, but to
ignorance; thus showing that they have no other method of
exhibiting their doctrine. For example, if a stone falls from a
roof onto someone's head, and kills him, they will demonstrate
by their new method, that the stone fell in order to kill the
man; for, if it had not by God's will fallen with that object,
how could so many circumstances (and there are often many
concurrent circumstances) have all happened together by chance?
Perhaps you will answer that the event is due to the facts that
the wind was blowing, and the man was walking that way. "But
why," they will insist, "was the wind blowing, and why was the
man at that very time walking that way?" If you again answer,
that the wind had then sprung up because the sea had begun to be
agitated the day before, the weather being previously calm, and
that the man had been invited by a friend, they will again
insist: "But why was the sea agitated, and why was the man
invited at that time?" So they will pursue their questions from
cause to cause, till at last you take refuge in the will of
God--in other words, the sanctuary of ignorance. So, again,
when they survey the frame of the human body, they are amazed;
and being ignorant of the causes of so great a work of art,