3. After the downfall of the nation and Temple, the situation changed through the contemptuous question of the nations, "Where is your God?" Then the necessity became evident of proving that the Ruler of nations still held dominion over the world, and that His wondrous powers were shown more than ever before through the fact of Israel's preservation in captivity. This is the substance of the addresses of the great seer of the Exile in chapters XL to LIX of Isaiah, in which he exposes the gods of heathendom to everlasting scorn, more than any other prophet before or afterward. He declares these deities to be vanity and naught, but proclaims the Holy One of Israel as the Lord of the universe. He hath "meted out the heavens with the span," and "weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance." Before Him "the nations are as a drop of the bucket," and "the inhabitants of the earth as grasshoppers." "He bringeth out the hosts of the stars by number, and calleth them all by name," "He hath assigned to the generations of men their lot from the beginning, and knoweth at the beginning what will be their end."(160) Measured by such passages as these and such as Psalms VIII, XXIV, XXXIII, CIV, and CXXXIX, where God is felt as a living power, all philosophical arguments about His existence seem to be strange fires on the altar of religion. The believer can do without them, and the unbeliever will hardly be convinced by them.
4. Upon the contact of the Jew with Greek philosophy doubt arose in many minds, and belief entered into conflict with reason. But even then, the defense of the faith was still carried on by reasoning along the lines of common sense.(161) Thus the regularity of the sun, moon, and stars,--all worshiped by the pagans as deities--was considered a proof of God's omnipotence and rule of the universe, a proof which the legend ascribes to Abraham in his controversy with Nimrod.(162) In like manner, the apocryphal Book of Wisdom(163) says that true wisdom, as opposed to the folly of heathenism, is "to reason from the visible to the Invisible One, and from the cosmos, the great work of art, to the Supreme Artificer."
5. Philo was the first who tried to refute the "atheistic" views of materialists and pantheists by adducing proofs of God's existence from nature and the human intellect. In the former he pointed out order as evidence of the wisdom underlying the cosmos, and in the latter the power of self-determination as shadowing forth a universal mind which determines the entire universe.(164) Still, with his mystical attitude, Philo realized that the chief knowledge of God is through intuition, by the inner experience of the soul.