What is "arbitrarily"

Usage examples of "arbitrarily".

It was not reached by an induction of facts, a study of phenomena, or any fair process of reasoning, but was arbitrarily created to rescue a dogma from otherwise inevitable rejection.

As a mode of explaining the Scriptures, it is refuted by the fact that it is nowhere plainly stated in the New Testament, but is arbitrarily constructed by forced and indirect inferences from various obscure texts, which texts can be perfectly explained without involving it at all.

They show that sin and woe are not arbitrarily bounded by the limits of time and sense in the grave, and that nothing can ever exhaust or destroy the satisfaction of true life, faith in the love of God: it abides, blessed and eternal, in the uninterrupted blessedness and eternity of its Object.

Augustine declared that a few were arbitrarily elected to salvation from eternity, and that Christ died only for them.

Those destitute of this spirit would never awake from the oblivious sleep of death, unless as he maintained will actually be the case with a large part of the dead they are arbitrarily immortalized by the pleasure of God, in order to suffer eternal misery in hell!

It is all an exquisite piece of gratuitous horror arbitrarily devised to meet a logical exigency of the theory its contrivers held.

The difference, then, in a word, between the two methods of salvation thus far explained, is this: While both assume that mankind are doomed to death and hell in consequence of the sin of Adam, the one asserts that the interference of Christ of itself saved all souls, the other asserts that that interference cannot save any soul except those whom God, of his sovereign pleasure, had from eternity arbitrarily elected.

Puerilities of fancy and monstrosities of passion arbitrarily connected with principles claiming to be eternal truths should be carefully separated, and not the whole be despised and trodden on together.

Upon the hypothesis that annihilation is the fate of man, they are not satisfied merely to take away from the present all the additional light, incentive, and comfort imparted by the faith in a future existence, but they arbitrarily remove all the alleviations and glories intrinsically belonging to the scene, and paint it in the most horrible hues, and set it in a frame of midnight.

UNIVERSAL ORDER is the expression of the purposes of God, not as arbitrarily chosen by his will and capriciously revealed in a book, but as necessitated by his nature and embodied in his works.

The divine retribution for every deed is the kick of the gun, not an extra explosion arbitrarily thrown in.

Mythology is the deceptive substitute for this, employed when we arbitrarily project forms of our present experience into the unknown futurity, and then hold the resultant fancies as a rigid belief, or regard them as actual knowledge.

Reasoning from a purely classical standpoint, we would expect this placid and flat image of space to persist all the way to arbitrarily small length scales.

Because we previously envisioned all matter particles and all force particles to be pointlike objects with literally no spatial extent, we were obligated to consider properties of the universe on arbitrarily short distance scales.

In the physical framework of general relativity and in the corresponding mathematical framework of Riemannian geometry there is a single concept of distance, and it can acquire arbitrarily small values.