Part 26

But, being so perceived, they are inevitably taken up into his mental life and made part of his mental organization. They are often perceived emotionally--to take the simplest examples, pestilence with horror, storm with fear, the growing of crops with gratitude. They are bound to enter into relation with his emotions, with his ideals and hopes; bound also to be in some degree generalized intellectually. When thus emotionally and intellectually built up so as to form a coherent and unitary idea, then only do they deserve the name of a God.

In parenthesis, let us make it quite clear that we are speaking of God and Gods as they operate in human affairs, as they can be classified by the anthropologist, analysed by the philosopher, experienced by the mystic. These have always been constituted as we have described--as a particular idea of the powers of nature, the cosmic forces taking shape through the moulding and organizing capacity of human thought, or, if you prefer it, as an interpretation and unification of outer and inner reality. The Absolute God, on the other hand, may be one--may, in fact, operate as a unitary whole in the same sense as this extraordinary product of the evolutionary process, this anthropological God; but we can never know it as such in the same sense as we know a person to be one.

This may be illustrated by a common fallacy--the ascription of personality to God on the ground that a purpose exists in the universe. Paley saw proof of this purpose in adaptations among organisms. Modern theologians, driven from this position by Darwin, take refuge with Bergson in the fact of biological progress. But this, too, can be shown to be as natural and inevitable a product of the struggle for existence as is adaptation, and to be no more mysterious than, for instance, the increase in effectiveness both of armour-piercing projectile and armour-plate during the last century. The time has gone by when a Paley could advance his “carpenter” view of God; when a Fellow of the Royal Society could be sure of general approval, as could D. Pront in his Bridgewater Treatise, with a work entitled Chemistry, Meteorology, and the Function of Digestion, considered with reference to Natural Theology, or when a distinguished geologist like Buckland (almost foreshadowing later writers of a certain type on labour questions) could ascribe to a Beneficent Designer the existence of Carnivora, as a means to the increase of the “Aggregate of Animal Enjoyment,” and solemnly open a sentence such as “while each suffering individual is soon relieved from pain, it contributes its enfeebled carcass to the support of its carnivorous benefactors.”

No--purpose is a psychological term; and to ascribe purpose to a process merely because its results are somewhat similar to those of a true purposeful process, is completely unjustified, and a mere projection of our own ideas into the economy of nature. Where we experience only phenomena of one order we cannot hope to reach behind them to phenomena of another order, or to the Absolute.

The ground is now cleared for our real investigation--our inquiry into the task which Rationalism has before it in finding how best what we have called the raw material of Divinity may be organized by the mind’s activity, how best clothed with word or symbol to make it more the common property of mankind as a whole.

The current Christian conception of God is of a person who is also the creator and the ruler of the universe. This person has certain attributes--is omnipotent, omniscient, and somehow, in spite of all the unhappiness and squalor and cruelty in the world, all-loving. He has personal qualities--he created the universe, and all that is in it; he takes pleasure in being worshipped; is displeased when men or women neglect him, or commit crimes or sins; takes pity on the follies and sufferings of man; and was so moved by them (albeit after a very considerable period had elapsed since man had first appeared upon the scene) that he sent his son into the world as a redeemer. (For simplicity’s sake, I omit all reference to the complexities of Trinitarian doctrine, which, however important in distinguishing Christianity from other religions envisaging an omnipotent personal God, do not affect the essential point at issue.) Further, he grants petitions, reveals himself to certain chosen persons, and is enthroned in a somewhat elusive heaven, where he is (or will be after the Day of Judgment--opinions seem to differ somewhat on the subject) surrounded by the immortal souls of the elect.

Now this view, or any view of God as a personal being, is becoming frankly untenable. The difficulty of understanding the functions of a personal ruler in a universe which the march of knowledge is showing us ever more clearly as self-ordered and self-ordering in every minutest detail is becoming more and more apparent. Either a personal God is a ruler without power, or he is the universe. In the former case he becomes a mere fly on the wheel; in the latter we revert to a frank pantheism, in which the idea of a personal Being can no longer properly be upheld. A personal creation of the world, in any reasonable sense of that term, is now meaningless except for a hypothetical creation of the original substance of the cosmos in the first instance. Creation of earth and stars, plants, animals, and man--Darwin swept the last vestiges of that into the waste-paper basket of outworn imaginations, already piled high with the debris of earlier ages. After the psychological insight which the last half-century has given us, miracles have ceased to be miracles, and have become either delusions, or, more frequently, unusual phenomena for which a cause has not yet been found. The immutability of the fundamental laws of matter and motion, more particularly the grand generalization of the conservation of energy and the substitution by science of an orderly for a disorderly conception of nature, make it impossible to think of occasional interference by God with this world’s affairs. Accordingly the value of petitionary prayer falls to the ground. Revelation and inspiration have resolved themselves into exceptional mental states, and are no longer looked upon as a sort of telepathy between divine and human minds. If we reflect, we see that all these intellectual difficulties in modern theology arise from the advance of scientific knowledge, which has shown that the older ideas of God were only symbolic, and therefore false when the attempt was made to give real value to them.

That being the quagmire in which traditional Christian theology is floundering, it behoves us to discuss the opposite side of the question, and to see whether the very advance of science which has seemed to exert only a destructive influence may not have made it possible to build up new and sounder conceptions of fundamental religious ideas.

We have already seen that the conception of God always represents man’s idea of the powers operating in the universe; that it has two components--the outer consisting of these powers so far as they are known to man, the inner consisting in the mode in which the conception is organized and the way it is related to the rest of the personality. It is obvious that both man’s knowledge of the cosmic powers as well as his method of organizing them in his mind can grow and change; and man’s Gods can--and do--grow and change accordingly.

The growth of science in the last few centuries has radically altered our knowledge of the outer world. It has shown us, in the first place, a fundamental unity of all phenomena, however apparently diverse. It has shown us the inorganic part of the cosmos pursuing a direction--the progressive degradation of energy--which, if it is carried to its limit, will result in the extinction not only of life, but of all activity. It has next shown us the organic part, sprung from the inorganic but running a different course, ascending during evolutionary time to increasing heights of complexity and to increasing control over its inorganic environment.

Finally, we have the psychozoic or human portion--that minute fraction of the cosmos which yet is of a preponderant importance, since it definitely represents the highest level yet reached by evolutionary progress. In this sphere mind is the dominant partner, biologically speaking, in the mind-matter partnership; evolution can begin to be conscious instead of fortuitous; and true values arise which, incorporated in ideals and purposes, exert an effect upon events.

As regards our own mental organization, psychological science has recently shown us the enormous importance of what we may call the extra-personal portion of our mind--all that which is normally subconscious, or has not been during our mental growth incorporated to form an integral part of our private personality. But this extra-personal part of the mind may from time to time irrupt into the personal, and does normally do so at some period of life. It is the merit of psychology to have shown the true nature of this relationship between personal and extra-personal, which was in the past a source of an infinity of mistaken ideas--revelation, inspiration, possession, direct communion with angels, saints, gods, or devils, and so forth.

Thus the powers operating in the cosmos are, though unitary, yet subdivisible; and, though subdivisible, yet related. There are the vast powers of inorganic nature, neutral or hostile to man. Yet they gave birth to evolving life, whose development, though blind and fortuitous, has tended in the same general direction as our own conscious desires and ideals, and so gives us an external sanction for our directional activities. This again gave birth to human mind, which, in the race, is changing the course of evolution by acceleration, by the substitution of new methods for old, and by introducing values which are ultimate for the human species; and, in the individual, provides, in the interplay of conscious and subconscious, unbounded possibilities of the invasion of the ordinary and humdrum personality of every day by ideas apparently infinite, emotions the most disinterested and overwhelming.

Still other light has of late years been thrown by psychology upon the inner component of the idea of God. Recent work has shown, for instance, that the mind, unless deliberately corrected and trained, tends to think in terms of symbols instead of along the more arduous paths of intellectual reasoning, tends to explain the unknown in terms of the known, tends accordingly to project the familiar ideas of its own personality as symbols for the explanation of the most varied phenomena. The science of comparative religion has shown us an early stage of religious belief in which but one idea held sway--the idea of a magical influence residing in all things potent for good or ill: the projection was so complete that no distinction whatever was made between the personal and the impersonal. Later, the idea of particular divine beings or Gods arose; and in early stages man still continued to project not only his own passions, but even his own form, into these divinities. The statement of Genesis that God made man in his own image is in reality an admission of the converse process. Still later, the divinity was purged of the grossness of human form and members, and, gradually, of characteristically human passions; but God remained personal, although the personality was now organized chiefly of ideals.

There is, however, no reason whatever to admit that personality is a genuine characteristic of any knowable God; but every reason to suspect that it is, as a matter of hard fact, merely another product of this property of projection so strong in the human mind.

On the other hand, an analysis of religious experience as a phenomenon, as something equally worthy of patient and scientific study as the gas-laws or the methods of evolution, shows that the powers which move in the universe, when organized by thought into a God, are apprehended by the majority of the great mystics and those to whom religious experience has been richly granted as in some way personal. Although, if our line of argument is valid, this will be partly due to a projection of the idea of personality into the idea of God, yet it is clearly in part due to the idea of God being organized by our mental activity to be of the same general type as is a normal personality--as something into which concepts of power, of knowledge, and of feeling and will all enter, with such interconnections between its parts that, like a personality, all of its resources are capable of mobilization at any one point. It will be one of the great constructive tasks of psychology to ascertain just how such a conception is organized, and how it operates to produce the experiences, often of overpowering intensity and lasting value, which as a matter of record it often does.

Put broadly and roughly, there are, then, three main accounts possible, or at any rate actually found in occidental civilization to-day, of the phenomena generally known as religious. The first is that of the out-and-out sceptic--that they are all illusions, imaginations of the childhood of the race. This is an extreme view which I do not feel called upon to discuss. The second is the view of almost every existing religious denomination in Europe--that God is a personal being. And the third is one, only just beginning to take shape, which I have endeavoured, with every consciousness of inadequacy, to outline--the account made possible by a radically scientific view of the universe.

Those who adopt the third attitude believe that the second is a purely symbolic and not very accurate presentation of certain fundamental facts, of which they are attempting to give what seems to them an account which is closer to reality. Before the scientific work of the last three or four centuries, it was impossible to attempt what we may call a realistic account of this nature, so that symbols were perforce adopted. In Christian theology man formulated a coherent scheme, which, however, was purely symbolic, to account for the facts we have just been considering. The chief feature in any such scheme must be the conception of the powers with which man feels himself in relation; and in this particular formulation his conception of these powers was that of a God who was also a person.

Now, the danger of symbols and symbolic thinking comes when the symbols are accepted for real, and taken as they stand for bases from which conclusions shall be drawn. The Christian theologians did not hesitate--why should they, in their position?--to use the personal nature of the Deity as one premiss in a whole series of syllogisms, and to accept at their full face value the conclusions which emerged from these syllogisms.

If a personal God was ruler of the universe, then he must be omnipotent; if truly divine, then omniscient; if worthy of worship, then all-wise. He must be capable of interfering with the course of events by “miracles,” of granting our prayers, of communicating directly with us, of deciding our fate in afterlife. From these conclusions yet further conclusions were drawn. If God revealed himself in the Bible, then the Bible was “true” ... with all that this in its turn involved as to our beliefs concerning natural causation, creation, our relations with God, or personal immortality. The whole scheme was self-consistent, and worked as well as many other human schemes. But what if the whole premiss, of God as a personal being, ruler and father and judge--what if this were not in fact tenable? Then, of course, the whole edifice itself would come toppling down. That is what is actually happening to-day. God, as personal ruler, is being slowly driven out of the universe, but returning as this organized idea of which we have spoken.

Another cardinal point in the older systems has always been its claim to possess a revelation of Truth which is in some real ways complete and absolute.

This leads us on immediately to a subject of especial interest to us as rationalists--namely, the relation of religion to science and to free inquiry. Religious beliefs, if they are really believed with any conviction, will be to a greater or less extent dominant beliefs, because by their nature they concern the general relationship between man and his surroundings, which must bulk large in all our lives; and it is matter of common experience with what obstinacy and fanaticism they may be held. If therefore a system of religious belief includes the belief that it is revealed, and therefore true with a more ultimate and complete truth than the truths of observation or experiment, any fact or idea which conflicts with any part of the system will be inevitably treated not only as dangerous to the system, but as actually evil: and this tendency is reinforced by the craving of the average man for certainty, for intellectual satisfaction without undue intellectual effort. The cynic who said that beliefs are generally held with an intensity inversely proportional to the amount of evidence which can be adduced in their support was not wholly or only cynical.

Since, however, the progress of modern science, in addition to the discovery of many wholly new facts, has largely consisted in a proper investigation and a revaluation of the facts subsumed without full analysis into the symbolism of theology, the inevitable result has been for the two to find each other in constant antagonism. But be it noted that it is not science and religion which are in conflict, but science and a particular brand of religion.

The essence of science is free inquiry combined with experimental testing. The result is a body of knowledge, of fact, and explanatory theory, which can properly be regarded as established. By established, however, we do not mean that it is absolute or immutable--we expect addition and modification. But we also expect that, in the future as in the past, the additions and alterations will not involve the scrapping and rebuilding of the whole edifice, but that it will continue to be harmonious with itself, and to undergo a gradual evolution. This has been so even with such marked changes as the discovery of radioactivity, the new outlook in psychology, or the rediscovery of Mendelism--the new, after apparent contradiction, has been or is being harmoniously incorporated and organized with the old.

This in its turn implies that toleration should ever be encouraged by the scientist. Humility cannot be genuine if combined with unsupported dogmatic assertion: and the recognition that the ideas of revelation and divine personality are such dogmatic assertions brings a whole new outlook into being.

Putting matters in a nutshell, we can say that a system based on revelation or on the pushing of unsupported premisses concerning the nature of God to their complete logical conclusions is bound to result in some degree of hostility to the pursuit of truth for its own sake; whereas a religious system basing itself on scientific method, while it must resign itself to being unable to produce a complete, ready-made, and immutable scheme, however beloved of the multitude (and indeed so beloved because it satisfies a lower and more primitive mode of thinking only), on the other hand can be assured that its knowledge and effectiveness will increase, and that contradictions will resolve themselves, provided that free inquiry, free speech, and tolerance are allowed and practised. Attempts to reconcile the old formulation with the new facts and ideas, when not insincere, are doomed to failure because the premisses of the two systems are different.

In conclusion, we may perhaps point out some of the bearings of such a change. In the first place, the change in our conception of God necessitates the stressing of religious experience, as such, as against belief in particular dogma, or in the efficacy of special ritual.

Secondly, it emphasizes the need for tolerance and enlightenment. The scientific view asserts not that its knowledge is absolute or complete, but that, although relative and partial, it will indubitably continue to grow harmoniously along the general lines already laid down.