George Bernard Shaw

“ There is behind the universe an intelligent and driving force of which we ourselves are a part—a divine spark." After the Darwins and Lyell and Samuel Butler had had their say, the difficulty presented was this: How are we to retain the notion of design without going back to the idea that the design is the work of a cruel designer? The trouble, as usual, was that we had been making the entirely gratuitous assumption that the force behind the universe is omnipotent. Now, you cannot prove that that force is at once omnipotent and benevolent If omnipotent, why did it create us? ”

“ I am convinced that the accusations made against Darwin of having deliberately suppressed the debt that civilization owed to his grandfather for the discovery of evolution were entirely unjust, because I don't believe that Charles Darwin knew anything about evolution, or that to the end of his life he ever understood the whole theory or what it meant. ”

“ In a sense there is no God as yet achieved, but there is that force at work making God, struggling through us to become an actual organized existence, enjoying what to many of us is the greatest conceivable ecstasy, the ecstasy of a brain, an intelligence, actually conscious of the whole, and with executive force capable of guiding it to a perfectly benevolent and harmonious end. ”

“ The world had got so horrified by the old theology, with its conception of a spiteful, narrow, wicked, personal God, who was always interfering and doing stupid things— often cruel things—that for a moment it could feel nothing but relief at having got rid of such a God altogether. ”

“ In that way we get rid of the old contradiction, we begin to perceive that the evil of the world is a thing that will finally be evolved out of the world, that it was not brought into the world by malice and cruelty, but by an entirely benevolent designer that had not as yet discovered how to carry out its benevolent intention. ”

“ A man with a bad toothache only thinks of getting rid of the tooth; it is not till afterwards he discovers that he must have a new tooth if he is to go on eating and keep his digestion in order. So people said, "Now that we have got rid of the old conception of religion we will believe in science and evolution." Of course, they knew nothing about evolution; they thought that natural selection, Darwin's discovery, was evolution. Darwin merely turned the attention of mankind to the effects of natural selection; he did not deal with the real problem of evolution. ”

“ But the common sense of mankind said, "If all the operations of the species can be accounted for without consciousness, intelligence, or design, you have still got to account for the consciousness, intelligence, and design that undoubtedly exist in man." The religious people naturally turn this argument to account, saying, "It is all very well to say that life is a mere pursuit of pleasure and gain, but many men do not live in order to get a balance of pleasure over pain; you see everywhere men doing work that does not benefit them—they call it God's work ”

“ I have made your brain, and I want you to work with that and try to find out the purpose of the universe; and when one instrument is worn out, I will make another, and another, always more and more intelligent and effective." One difficulty is that so many of the earlier efforts of this world-force—for example, the tiger— remain, and the incompatibility between them and man exists in the human being himself as the result of early experiments, so that there are certain organs in your body which are perishing away and are of no use and actually interfere with your later organs. ”

“ What you have got to understand is that somehow or other there is at the back of the universe a will, a life-force. You cannot think of him as a person, you have to think of him as a great purpose, a great will, and, furthermore, you have to think of him as engaged in a continual struggle to produce something higher and higher, to create organs to carry out his purpose ”

“ It is a frightful thing that it should have been possible so recently as twenty-five years ago for a party of educated men to be in that state of superstition. I am not at all certain that I have not made some of those I address very uncomfortable by what I have just said. Well, I intend to go on making people who hold such views uncomfortable. I want to make them understand in a very vivid way that it is quite impossible at this time of day to unite the world or appeal to our highest intelligence or better natures by preaching that particular sort of God. ”

“ He abolished adaptation and design, and, as Samuel Butler said, banished mind from the universe, which was a great relief to many Englishmen who greatly dislike anything in the shape of reflection. Considering that there are and necessarily must be a large number of consciously religious men always living, and that everyone of us has a considerable religious element in him and could not exist without it, why was it that the naked horror of Darwin's conception did not strike them? ”

“ Darwin was really the man who completely turned the attention of mankind from the doctrine of evolution. Evolution is a vital part of the New Theology, but it sprang into something like completeness as a conception at the end of the eighteenth century, when all the great evolutionists, including Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin, brought out their books and developed the whole system. The main thing by which they astonished the world was by attacking the old conception of creation in the Garden of Eden. ”

“ I say it seemed to me perfectly natural and proper, if the ruler of the universe were really the petty, spiteful criminal he was represented to be, for a man who denied his existence to take his watch out of his pocket and, instead of troubling about what happened many centuries ago, to ask him to strike him dead at the end of five minutes. ”

“ If there are three orders of existence—man as we know him, the angels higher than man, and God higher than the angels—why did God first create something lower than himself, the angels, and then actually create something lower than the angels, man? ”

“ I do not address myself to your logical faculties, but as one human mind trying to put himself in contact with other human minds. By theology I really do mean the science of godhead, and I want to examine whether we have made any advance in the science, whether there is a science of it in which we can believe and on which we can get a pretty general agreement. ”

“ The reason I have been putting the matter as I have is that I want to bring into your minds very strongly the fact that in the middle of the last century all the mind, conscience, and intelligence of the best part of mankind was in revolt against the old-fashioned conception of God, and yet at the same time finding itself intellectually unable to get away from the conception of God the Designer. ”

“ The real thing that enabled Charles Darwin to come to different conclusions from other naturalists was that between the time of the evolutionists of 1790-1830 and Charles Darwin's discovery in his book, The Origin of Species, the researches of the great biologist Lyell led him to teach the world that the stratification and formation of rocks and mountains in order to be scientifically accounted for forced us to assign a much greater age to the earth than had hitherto been assigned. ”

“ We may not dare to say that the power that wills that is cruel; it might bring worse consequences on us. But the cruelty is no reason for our ceasing to believe in its existence." And so, neither science on the one hand, nor the moral remonstrances of Shelley and his school on the other, were able to shake the current belief in that old theology that came back to the old tribal idol, Jehovah. ”

“ A person who points out a thing of which the mass of people are unconscious really does to some extent create the thing which he points out. I remember not very long ago rolling up my sleeves to the elbow in order to wash my hands, and, as I have a great deal to think about, including the New Theology, I am sometimes rather absent minded. ”

“ Our grandfathers had always been taught, on the authority of Archbishop Ussher, that the world was 6,006 years old, and some people had actually discovered the actual day of the month when creation began. This present of millions of years gave time for Darwin's theory of natural selection. ”

“ That is exactly what happened when Charles Darwin appeared and the reason why he had such an enormous success that the religion of the last half of the nineteenth century became Darwinian. Many people are under the impression that Darwinism meant that the world had been converted to a belief in evolution. ”

“ I want to see whether there is any possibility of our arriving at a religion on which we can agree, because it is very important we should have a religion of some kind. I know that that is quite a fashionable opinion, but we have got out of the habit of thinking that we ought to believe in the religion we have. Hardly any person in London believes in the religion he professes. Now let us come to the New Theology ”

“ They saw that there was a great deal of terrible cruelty in the world, which rather confirmed the idea that the force at the back of things was wicked and cruel, and therefore the denunciations of Shelley and others of the current conception of God as immoral did not remove the presumption that he existed. There was another reason why these people had to believe in God: Everywhere in nature they saw evidence of design. ”

“ But it was a common article of belief at that time that the universe was ruled by a God who was that particular sort of person, an exceedingly spiteful person, capable of taking the most ferocious revenge. ”

“ They were in a dilemma, There must be what they called God, and yet they could not make him responsible for the good in the world without making him also responsible for the evil, because they never questioned one thing about him: that, being the designer of the universe, he must be necessarily omnipotent. This being the situation, is it not clear that if at the time any man had risen up and said, "AH this wonderful adaptation of means to end, all this design which seems to imply a designer, is an illusion ”

“ Men were able to demonstrate that, according to the theory of natural selection, it was perfectly possible that all the books in the British Museum might have been written, all the. pictures in the National Gallery 'might have been painted, all the cathedrals of Europe might have been built, automatically, without one person concerned in the process having been conscious of what he was doing. Some of the natural selectionists used to make the demonstration themselves with a certain pride in doing so. ”

“ And here you have, as it seems to me, the explanation of that great riddle which used to puzzle people—evil and pain. Numbers of things which are at present killing and maiming us in our own organism have got to be evolved out of that organism, and the process is painful. ”

“ And in that sense I still am an atheist, as it must seem to me every humane person must be. That kind of God is morally inconceivable. The God who would send bears to eat up little children would be a wicked God—what Shelley called an Almighty Fiend. ”