WHAT IS EVIDENCE?
If you go to any believer in any religion--in any of the greater
religions, I mean--and ask him why he believes in his religion, he has
always one answer: "Because it is true." And if you continue and say to
him, "How do you know it is true?" he will reply, "Because there is full
evidence to prove it." He imagines that he is guided by his reason, that
it is his logical faculty that is satisfied, and his religion can be
proved irrefragably. And yet it is strange that if any religion is based
on ascertained fact, if any religion is demonstrably true, no one can be
brought to see this truth, to accept this proof, except believers who do
not require it. The Jew cannot be brought to admit the truth of
Christianity, let the Christian argue ever so wisely; nor will the
Christian accept Mahommedanism or Buddhism as containing any truth at
all, no matter how the adherents of these faiths may argue.
It is not so with most other matters. If a problem in chemistry or
physics be true at all it is altogether true for every one. Nationality
makes no difference to your acknowledging the law of gravity, the
science of the stars, the dynamics of steam, or the secrets of
metallurgy. If an Englishman makes a discovery a Frenchman is able to
follow the argument. The Japanese are not Christians, but that does not
in any way prevent them assimilating modern knowledge. Twice two are
four all over the world, except in matters of religion.
This is a somewhat remarkable phenomenon. What is the reason of it?
I can remember not very long ago walking in a garden with a man and
talking intermittently on religious topics. He was a man of great
education, of wide knowledge of the world, a man of no narrow sympathies
or thoughts. And as we went we came to a bed of roses in full bloom;
there were red and white and deep yellow roses in clusters of great
beauty, filling the air with their perfume. "To see a sight like that,"
he said, "proves to me that there is a God."
Proves! There was the _proof_.
I did not ask him how such roses would be proof of a God. I did not say
that if beauty was proof of a God, ugliness would be proof of a Devil,
for I know there is no reasoning in matters like that. The sight and
scent awoke in his heart that echo that is called God. Not only God, nor
was it any God, nor any Gods that the echo answered to. It was _his_
God, it was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, that came to him. He
saw the roses, and their beauty brought to his mind the idea of God.
That was enough for him. He had, as so many have, an absolute
instinctive understanding of God, as clear to him as if he saw Him at
midday--unreasoning because _known_.
"And for others," he said, "is there not ample evidence? How do you
account for the world unless God made it? Have we not in the Scripture a
full account of how it was made out of chaos? And has not He manifested
Himself in His prophets? The truth is proved over and over again, by the
prophecies and fulfilment, by the birth and death of Christ, by the
miracles of Christ, by endless matters. It is so clear." And so it is to
him and those like him who have in themselves the idea of God. They
_know_. It seems humorous to remember that scientific men have thought
they traced this to a savage's speculations on dreams. The speculation
of a savage, forsooth, and this certainty of feeling. The Theist says:
"How can you answer the questions of who made the world other than by
God?" It is a question that rises spontaneously. Do you remember
Napoleon the Great and the idealogues on the voyage to Egypt? They were
ridiculing the idea of a Creator. And to them the Emperor, pointing to
the stars above him, replied, "It is all very well, gentlemen, but who
made all those?" But the Non-Theist replies that it would never occur to
him to put such a question. To ask "Who made the world?" is to beg the
whole question. That question which is always rising in your mind never
does in ours. We would ask how and from what has the world evolved, and
under what cause? "Your evidence is good only to you." The Hindu has
perhaps the keenest mind in religious matters the world knows; does he
accept it? Do the Buddhists accept it? Do keen thinkers in Europe accept
any of this evidence? It is not so. If you have the instinct of God,
then is evidence unnecessary; and if you have not, of what use is the
evidence brought forward? Was anyone ever converted by reasoning? I am
sure no one ever was. Religions are not proved, they are not matters of
logic; they are either above logic or beneath it. To a man who
_believes_, anything is proof. He will reason about religion in a way he
would never do about other matters. He will offer as evidence, as
absolute proof, what he who does not believe cannot accept as evidence
at all. The religions are always the same. The believers _know_ them to
be true, and they cannot understand why others also do not know it.
Their truths seem to them absolutely clear, capable of the clearest
proof. And as to this evidence, this proof, there is always plenty of
it. Any faith can if pushed bring evidence on some points that not even
unbelievers can disprove, that is clearly not intentionally false, that
if the matter were a mundane concern would probably be accepted. It is
so, I think, in all religions, but here is a case from Buddhism.
In my book upon the religion of the Burmese I have given a chapter to
the belief of the people in reincarnation, a belief that is to them not
a belief but a knowledge. And I have given there a few of these strange
stories of remembrance of previous lives so common among them. For
almost all children will tell you that they can remember their former
lives.
There is a story there of a child who remembered nothing until one day
he saw used as a curtain a man's loin-cloth, that of a man who had died
and whose clothes had, as is the custom, been made into screens. And the
sight of that pattern awoke in him suddenly the knowledge that he had
lived before, and that in that former life he had worn that very cloth.
His former life was "proved" to him, and in consequence the fact that
all men had former lives. There was proof.
When I was writing "The Soul of a People" I went a great deal into this
subject of the former life, and I collected a great deal of evidence
about it. I not only saw a number of people who said they could
recollect these lives, but I came across a quantity of facts difficult
of explanation on any other hypothesis. The evidence was honestly given,
I know. But did I believe this former life, or has any European ever
been convinced by that evidence? I never heard of one. Why? Because we
have not the instinct. The Burman has.
They have the idea as an instinct, just as my friend held the idea of
God as an instinct, and there were certain matters that awakened these
instincts. They needed no more; the facts were proved to them and to
those of like thought to them. But proof. What is proof? Proof, they
will tell you, is a matter of evidence, it is a matter of cold logic, it
arises from facts.
If that is so, why does not everyone believe in ghosts? Was there ever a
subject on which there was more evidence than in the existence of
ghosts? We find the belief as far back as we can go--the witch of Endor,
for instance. We find the belief to-day. Not a year passes but numerous
people assert that they have seen ghosts. Their evidence is honestly
given; no one doubts that. The mass of evidence is overwhelming. The
fact that certain people do not see them in no way invalidates the
direct evidence. Yet the belief in ghosts is a joke, and a mark, we say,
of feeble-minded folk.
I have myself lived in the midst of ghosts. One of my houses in Burma
was full of them. Every Burman who came in saw them. Not even my
servants dared go upstairs after dark without me. My servants are
honest, truth-telling boys, and I would believe them in a matter of
theft or murder without hesitation. I would certainly hang a man if the
evidence of his being a murderer was as clear as the evidence that my
bedroom contained a ghost. No absolutely impartial lawyer, judging the
evidence of former life and of the existence of ghosts as a pure matter
of law, but would admit that they were conclusively proved. The Burmans
firmly believe both, considering them not only proved but beyond proof.
No European believes in the former life, and with regard to ghosts the
belief is relegated to those whom we stigmatise as the weak-minded and
imaginative.
Is the explanation difficult? It does not seem to me so. For it is
simply this. To believe and accept any matter it is not sufficient that
there be enough evidence, the subject itself must appeal to you, must
ring true, must be good to be believed. But with ghosts to most of us it
is the reverse. That our friends and those we love should after death
behave as ghosts behave, should be silly, unreasonable, drivelling in
their ways, imbecile in their performances, should in fact act as if the
next world was a ghostly lunatic asylum, is not attractive but the
reverse. For a murdered man's spirit to go fooling about scaring
innocent people into fits, and unable to say right out that he wants his
body buried, strikes the ordinary man as sheer idiocy. And therefore men
laugh and jeer. People who see ghosts may believe them; no one else will
do so. Because they are not worthy of belief. If these be indeed ghosts,
and they act as ghost-seers say, it is a deplorable, a most deplorable
thing. And if it is a choice of imbecilities, we would prefer to believe
in the lunacy of ghost-seers rather than in that of the dead, our dead.
But it is not only in matters relating to religion as the idea of God,
or to the supernatural as in ghosts, that we reject evidence. We can do
so also in matters that have no connection with each. For why do we
refuse to accept the sea serpent? Numbers of absolutely reliable men
declare they have seen it. And yet we laugh, or at best we say, "They
were mistaken, it was a trail of seaweed."
All men who have lived to a certain age have learnt that there are
certain facts, certain experiences not at all connected with the
supernatural, which they dare not tell of for fear of being put down as
inventors. They are curious coincidences, narrow escapes, shooting
adventures, and so on. They have happened to us all. Who has not heard
the tale of the general at a dinner party who related some such incident
that had occurred to himself, and was surprised to see amusement and
disbelief depicted on the faces of all around him. "You do not believe
me," he said stiffly, "but my friend opposite was with me at the time
and saw it too." But the friend refused with a laugh to bear witness,
and the conversation changed. "General," explained the friend
subsequently to his irate companion, "I know, of course, all you said
was true. But what would you have? If fifty men swore to it no one would
believe them. They would only have put me down as a liar too."
Just as the old woman was ready to accept her travelled son's yarns of
rivers of milk and islands of cheese; but when he deviated into the
truth she stopped. "Na, Na!" she said, "that the anchor fetched up one
of Pharaoh's chariot wheels out of the Red Sea, I can believe; but that
fish fly! Na, Na! dinna come any o' your lies over yer mither."
They are old stories, but they illustrate my point. On some matters we
are ready to believe at once, on others no amount of evidence will
change our opinions.
Indeed, we are too apt to assume that reason is our great guide in life.
To think before you act may be wise--sometimes. But if in matters of
emergency you had to stop and think first, you would not succeed very
well. The great men of action are those who act first and think
afterwards, and sometimes they even do the latter badly. There is the
story of a man who was going abroad to be a Chief Justice, and who was
addressed by the Lord Chancellor in this way: "My friend, be careful
where you are going. Your judgments will be nearly always right, but
beware of giving your reasons, for they will almost invariably be
wrong." There are many such men.
What, then, is religious proof? If it is not founded on evidence that
all can accept, on what is it founded? Why do men believe their own
religion and accept the evidence of it as irrefragable, while scornfully
rejecting that in favour of other religions?
The answer, I think, is this.
If you will take two violins and will tune them together, and if while
someone plays ever so lightly on one you will bend your ear to the
other, you will hear faintly but clearly repeated from its strings the
melody of the first. For they are in harmony. But if they are not, then
there will be no echo, play you never so loudly.
And so it is in matters of religion. If you are in harmony with any
thought there will come the echo in your heart's strings, and you will
know that it is true. But if you are not in harmony, then no matter how
loudly the evidence be sounded there will be no echo there. All these
ideas on which religions are built are instincts. They are of the heart,
never of the head. Reason affects them not at all. These instincts are
not the same with all. They vary, and so the religions that are based on
them vary. They have nothing to do with reason, and therefore those of
one religion cannot understand another. And they are not fixed; for the
belief in the Unity of God only evolved, after many thousands of years,
quite recently, and the belief in ghosts, universal among earlier people
and now among the half-civilized, lingers with us only as a subject for
amusement. There is no "evidence" in religion; you either believe or you
don't.