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.
Another change wrought by the inclusion of all phenomena under one head
and the banishment of the supernatural is the inestimable advantage
that we thereby find the possibility of constructing a single general
view of the universe for civilization. At present there are two that
matter--the orthodox religious and the scientific. The religious starts
from the top, the scientific from the bottom; but the scientific has
been creeping up, and now that it has begun to attack the problem
of mind it will be able to drown the other out. Since the current
religious formulation is only symbolic, it cannot become scientific;
but since the scientific is based on the closest possible analysis
of reality, it can become religious so far as it investigates the
realities of religious experience.
Once it has done this, we shall be able to construct a _Weltanschauung_
such as never before, with roots in the ordered reactions of inorganic
matter, trunk strong with the steady progress of evolving life, and
branches reaching up into the highest realities of the spirit. Union is
strength; and it is one of the prime duties of educated men and women
to see that the present duality and antagonism at the heart of what
should be the central unity of civilization--of its most fundamental
idea, its conception of the universe--should be terminated.
The new outlook will also interlock with the youthful science of
psychology to produce great results. Much of what now is interpreted,
by all save the few experts, in supernatural terms of the old theology
will become intelligible as a product of the natural workings of that
amazing thing, the human mind. We shall not have sects trying to
exploit the normal dissatisfactions and disharmonies of adolescence
in order to secure “conversions”; repressed tendencies will not be
thought to be the voice of a personal Devil, nor neglected ideals the
voice of a personal God. Irrational fear, to-day still the greatest
enemy of mankind and most potent annihilator of happiness, will, by
comprehension of its curious mechanism and its persistence, often
transformed, from childhood to adult life, become amenable to treatment
and be made more and more to disappear. Proper analysis of mental
processes such as repression, suppression, and sublimation will enable
us to make better use of our faculties, and deliberately to build up
treasures of spiritual experience now attainable only by the lucky few
in whom temperament and circumstances accidentally conspire.
On the moral side, the idea that a Divine command has, at some remote
period in the past, provided a fixed code, and the belief in the
immutable truth of certain dogmas--these will happily disappear.
Morals, like all else, not only have evolved, but should evolve. We
shall find, for instance, that no excuse will be left for the common
horrified (and horrible) views of sex, as of something inherently
hateful, of all its pleasures as involving sin; for it will be realized
that too much of the present attitude is due to the projection of our
own conflicts and complexes, our own pruriences and pruderies, into
what might be innocent and joyous. But this merits a fuller discussion
than we can here allot.
Again, if I had space at my disposal, I would write of the changes in
the position and constitution of religion brought about by changes
other than those in religious beliefs themselves. Most important, of
course, are the spread of education on the one hand, and the spread of
the facilities for the most varied spiritual enjoyment on the other.
If the people is educated to a point at which it can judge for itself,
it wants no special priests or clerical mediators; its mediators are
those who are specially fitted to unravel the intellectual, emotional,
and moral difficulties of its own day and for all time--poets,
philosophers, and men of science. The spread of facilities for reading,
for seeing plays and works of art, and hearing good music, means of
course that, whereas in ruder epochs the Church provided the principal
way of psychological sublimation, now sublimation and spiritual
refreshment can be achieved equally or more effectively (and every
whit as religiously) without ever frequenting a “place of worship”
or belonging to any denomination. This tendency towards fluidity and
plasticity, towards many possibilities of sublimation instead of one,
may by some be lamented. But, as a matter of fact, it is in full
accord with all we know of biological progress. Man has attained his
position of biological pre-eminence simply and solely by virtue of the
plasticity of his mind, which substitutes infinitude of potentiality
for the limited range of actuality given by the instinctive reactions
of lower forms. Humanity will always have some religion, and it will
always be of the utmost importance to man, both as individual and as
species. But the possibility of satisfying his religious tendencies
intellectually, emotionally, and morally, without rigid creed, limited
ritual, and iron-bound code of morals, will mean the liberation of all
that is best in religion from too narrow shackles, and the lifting it
on to a plane where it may be not only more free, but more rich.
It is the task of Rationalism to see that religion, this fundamental
and important activity of man, shall neither be allowed to continue in
false or inadequate forms, nor be stifled or starved, but made to help
humanity in a vigorous growth that is based on truth and in constant
contact with reality.
(_For bibliography, see the end of the next essay._)
FOOTNOTE:
[43] See W. James, _Varieties of Religious Experience_; E. Underhill,
_Essentials of Mysticism_.
VII
RELIGION AND SCIENCE: OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES
GOD AND MAN
The world of things entered your infant mind
To populate that crystal cabinet.
Within its walls the strangest partners met,
And things turned thoughts did propagate their kind.
For, once within, corporeal fact could find
A spirit. Fact and you in mutual debt
Built there your little microcosm--which yet
Had hugest tasks to its small self assigned.
Dead men can live there, and converse with stars:
Equator speaks with Pole, and Night with Day:
Spirit dissolves the world’s material bars--
A million isolations burn away.
The Universe can live and work and plan,
At last made God within the mind of man.
RELIGION AND SCIENCE:
OLD WINE IN NEW BOTTLES
“In la sua volontade è nostra pace.”
--DANTE.
“Ye are the Gods if ye did but realize it.”--CARLYLE.
“The next great task of Science is to create a religion for humanity.”
So says Lord Morley in one of his essays. It is a striking saying,
coming as it does from one in whom thought and action have been so
intertwined, one to whom reason, not dogma, is the basis of morality,
achievement, not emotion, its justification.
Let those words be my encouragement; for they challenge at the outset,
and to my mind rightly, two of the most persistent difficulties that
confront one who tries to write of the relations between Science and
Religion. The man of science too often asks what science can have
to do with what he brands as utterly and wholly unscientific; the
religiously-minded man demands what gain can follow from contact with
the cold and inhuman attitude of pure reason. To those questions I hope
that this essay will provide a partial answer. Meanwhile I shall begin
with a perhaps less ultimate but more pressing question. That question
is asked by many men and women of to-day, who on the one hand feel as
it were instinctively that religion of some sort is necessary for
life, yet on the other are unable to do violence to their intellectual
selves by denying the facts that reason and scientific inquiry reveal,
or by closing their eyes to them.
The question, in briefest form, is this: “What room does science leave
for God?”
To the savage, all is spirit. The meanest objects are charged with
influence, the commonest actions fraught with spiritual possibilities,
the operations of nature one and all are brought about by spiritual
powers--but powers multifarious and conflicting. “Nature can have
little unity for savages. It is a Walpurgis-nacht procession, a
checkered play of light and shadow, a medley of impish and elfish,
friendly and inimical powers.”[44]
But with ordered civilization and dispassionate observation a network
of material cause and effect invaded this spiritual domain. The
mysterious influences, for example, believed to be inherent in springs
and running rivers became personified, and, anthropomorphized as nymphs
or gods, were removed into a seclusion more remote from practical
and everyday life than their unpersonified predecessors. Later, they
retreated still farther from actuality into a half-believed mythology,
and then passed away into the powerlessness of avowed fairy-story or
literary symbolism, while the rivers, perceived as the resultant of
natural forces, were more and more harnessed to man’s use. So with
the wind and the rain, the growth of crops, the storms of the sea. So,
in due time, with the thunder and the lightning, with earthquakes,
eruptions, comets, eclipses, pestilences.
This process of liberating matter from arbitrary and mysterious power,
of perceiving it as orderly and endowed with regularity of natural
law, of bringing it more and more beneath human control, was, on the
other hand, accompanied by what may be called a combined condensation
and sublimation of the spiritual forces accepted by human faith. They
are built up from spirit to spirits, spirits to gods, gods to God. But
now it seems as if this condensation had reached its limit, and the
sublimation could only go farther by resolving the one God into an
empty name or the vaguest unreality.
We look back and see the Gods of early man, and are complacently
prepared to believe that they were based in error, products of mental
immaturity, to be relegated to limbo without regret. But what about the
present? Why should we shrink from applying the same process to the God
of to-day?
Is it then to be so with every God? Is God only a personified symbol
of our residuum of ignorance? Is to hold the idea of God in any form
to be, as Salomon Reinach believes, in an infantile stage of human
development, and must we with him define religion as “a sum of beliefs
impeding the free use of human faculty”?
I think not; and I shall endeavour to justify my belief to you, and
to show that, albeit much alteration and a thorough revision of ideas
is needed, the term _God_ has an important scientific connotation, and
further that the present stagnation of religion can be remedied if, as
has happened again and again in biological evolution, the old forms
become extinct or subordinate, and a new dominant type is developed
along quite fresh lines.
In any case the man of science must obviously, if he face the problem
at all, take up a scientific attitude of mind towards it. He cannot
say that there is no such thing as religion; or try to whittle it away
by explaining that it is something else--a complicated fear, or a
sublimated sex-instinct, or a combination of credulity and duplicity.
A thing, if it is a thing at all, is never merely something else. Nor
can he submit to the pretensions of those who assert that it is too
sacred to be touched, or that its certainties are greater than those
of science. No--he must treat it for what it is--a fact, and a very
important fact at that, in human history: and he must see whether the
application of scientific method to its study--in other words, its
illumination by the faculty of pure intellect--will help not only our
comprehension of religion in the past, but its actual development in
the future.
He can study it in various ways. He can use the method of observation
and comparison, collecting and collating facts until he is able to give
a connected account of the manifestations of religion and of their
past history; he can study it physiologically, so to speak, to see what
part it plays in the body politic, and how that part may alter with
circumstances; or he may seek to investigate its essence, to discover
not only how it appears and what it does, but what it _is_.
Further, he must have some general principles to lean on in his search,
principles both positive and negative. He must be content to leave
certain possibilities out of account because as yet he cannot see how
they can be connected with his organized scheme of things; in other
words, he has to be content to build slowly and imperfectly in order
that he may be sure of building soundly. This is the principle which we
may call positive agnosticism.
This very fact has been in the past one of the great obstacles in
the way of successful treatment of religion by science. One of the
attributes of man is his desire for a complete explanation, or at
least a complete view, of his universe, and this has been at the
bottom of much doctrine and many creeds. But before Kepler and Newton,
no truly scientific account could be given of celestial phenomena;
before Darwin, none of Natural History; before the recent revival
in psychology, none of the mind and its workings. In the second
half of the nineteenth century, for instance, science could give an
adequate account of most inorganic phenomena, and, in broad outline,
of evolutionary geology and biology; but mind was still refractory.
Accordingly, the philosophy of science was mainly materialist. But the
common man felt that mind was not the empty epiphenomenon that orthodox
science would have it; and he desired a scheme of things in which mind
should be more adequately explained than it could be by science at its
then stage of development. _Hinc illae lacrimae._
To-day it is at least possible to link up, not only physics and
chemistry and geology and evolutionary biology, but also anthropology
and psychology, into a whole which, though far from complete, is at
least organized and coherent with itself. If the seventeenth century
cleared the ground for that dwelling-place of human mind which we
call the scientific view of things, if the eighteenth century laid
the foundations and the nineteenth built the walls, the twentieth is
already fitting up some of the rooms for actual habitation.
There are certain other domains of reality which have not yet been
properly investigated by science. Telepathy, for instance, and the
whole mass of phenomena included broadly under the term spiritualism,
are in about the some position with regard to organized scientific
thought to-day as was astronomy before astrology’s collapse, as was the
study of electricity in the eighteenth century, or that of hypnotism
in the middle of the nineteenth. What is more, the average man demands
that phenomena of this order shall be included in his scheme of things.
Science cannot yet do this for him; and accordingly the dwelling-place
that we are building must still be incomplete; it is for those who
come after to build the upper stories.
This cannot be helped. What we build, we must build firmly; on what is
yet to be built, science cannot pronounce, except to say that she knows
that it will be congruous with what has gone before.
What general principles, then, do we assume? We assume that the
universe is composed throughout of the same matter, whose essential
unity, in spite of the diversity of its so-called elements, the recent
researches of physicists are revealing to us; we assume that matter
behaves in the same way wherever it is found, showing the same mode
of sequence of change, of cause and effect. We assume, on fairly
good although indirect evidence, that there has been an evolution of
the forms assumed by matter; that, in this solar system of ours, for
instance, matter was once all in electronic form, that it then attained
to the atomic and the molecular; that later, colloidal organic matter
of a special type made its appearance, and later still, living matter
arose. That the forms of life, simple at first, attained progressively
to greater complexity; that mind, negligible in the lower forms, became
of greater and greater importance, until it reached its present level
in man.[45]
Unity, uniformity, and development are the three great principles that
emerge. We know of no instance where the properties of matter change,
though many where a new state of matter develops. The full properties
of a molecular compound such as water, for instance, cannot be deduced
at present from what we know about the properties of its constituent
atoms of hydrogen and oxygen. The properties of the human mind cannot
be deduced from our present knowledge of the minds of animals. New
combinations and properties thus arise in time. Bergson miscalls
such evolution “creative.” We had better, with Lloyd Morgan, call it
“emergent.”