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Human beings, after all, have some sense; they see that you cannot have real
safety or happiness except in a society where every one plays fair, and it
is because they see this that they try to behave decently. Now, of course,
it is perfectly true that safety and happiness can only come from
individuals, classes, and nations being honest and fair and kind to each
other. It is one of the most important truths in the world. But as an
explanation of why we feel as we do about Right and Wrong it just misses the
point If we ask: "Why ought I to be unselfish?" and you reply "Because it is
good for society," we may then ask, "Why should I care what's good for
society except when it happens to pay me personally?" and then you will have
to say, "Because you ought to be unselfish"-which simply brings us back to
where we started. You are saying what is true, but you are not getting any
further. If a man asked what was the point of playing football, it would not
be much good saying "in order to score goals," for trying to score goals is
the game itself, not the reason for the game, and you would really only be
saying that football was football-which is true, but not worth saying. In
the same way, if a man asks what is the point of behaving decently, it is no
good replying, "in order to benefit society," for trying to benefit society,
in other words being unselfish (for "society" after all only means "other
people"), is one of the things decent behaviour consists in; all you are
really saying is that decent behaviour is decent behaviour. You would have
said just as much if you had stopped at the statement, "Men ought to be
unselfish."
And that is where I do stop. Men ought to be unselfish, ought to be
fair. Not that men are unselfish, nor that they like being unselfish, but
that they ought to be. The Moral Law, or Law of Human Nature, is not simply
a fact about human behaviour in the same way as the Law of Gravitation is,
or may be, simply a fact about how heavy objects behave. On the other hand,
it is not a mere fancy, for we cannot get rid of the idea, and most of the
things we say and think about men would be reduced to nonsense if we did.
And it is not simply a statement about how we should like men to behave for
our own convenience; for the behaviour we call bad or unfair is not exactly
the same as the behaviour we find inconvenient, and may even be the
opposite. Consequently, this Rule of Right and Wrong, or Law of Human
Nature, or whatever you call it, must somehow or other be a real thing- a
thing that is really there, not made up by ourselves. And yet it is not a
fact in the ordinary sense, in the same way as our actual behaviour is a
fact. It begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more than
one kind of reality; that, in this particular case, there is something above
and beyond the ordinary facts of men's behaviour, and yet quite definitely
real-a real law, which none of as made, but which we find pressing on us.
Let us sum up what we have reached so far. In the case of stones and
trees and things of that sort, what we call the Laws of Nature may not be
anything except a way of speaking. When you say that nature is governed by
certain laws, this may only mean that nature does, in fact, behave in a
certain way. The so-called laws may not be anything real-anything above and
beyond the actual facts which we observe. But in the case of Man, we saw
that this will not do. The Law of Human Nature, or of Right and Wrong, must
be something above and beyond the actual facts of human behaviour. In this
case, besides the actual facts, you have something else-a real law which we
did not invent and which we know we ought to obey.
I now want to consider what this tells us about the universe we live
in. Ever since men were able to think, they have been wondering what this
universe really is and how it came to be there. And, very roughly, two views
have been held. First, there is what is called the materialist view. People
who take that view think that matter and space just happen to exist, and
always have existed, nobody knows why; and that the matter, behaving in
certain fixed ways, has just happened, by a sort of fluke, to produce
creatures like ourselves who are able to think. By one chance in a thousand
something hit our sun and made it produce the planets; and by another
thousandth chance the chemicals necessary for life, and the right
temperature, occurred on one of these planets, and so some of the matter on
this earth came alive; and then, by a very long series of chances, the
living creatures developed into things like us. The other view is the
religious view. (*) According to it, what is behind the universe is more
like a mind than it is like anything else we know.
----
[*] See Note at the end of this chapter.
----
That is to say, it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one
thing to another. And on this view it made the universe, partly for purposes
we do not know, but partly, at any rate, in order to produce creatures like
itself-I mean, like itself to the extent of having minds. Please do not
think that one of these views was held a long time ago and that the other
has gradually taken its place. Wherever there have been thinking men both
views turn up. And note this too. You cannot find out which view is the
right one by science in the ordinary sense. Science works by experiments. It
watches how things behave. Every scientific statement in the long run,
however complicated it looks, really means something like, "I pointed the
telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2:20 A.M. on January 15th
and saw so-and-so," or, "I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to
such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so." Do not think I am saying
anything against science: I am only saying what its job is. And the more
scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this
is the job of science- and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But
why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind
the things science observes-something of a different kind-this is not a
scientific question. If there is "Something Behind," then either it will
have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some
different way. The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement
that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can
make. And real scientists do not usually make them. It is usually the
journalists and popular novelists who have picked up a few odds and ends of
half-baked science from textbooks who go in for them. After all, it is
really a matter of common sense. Supposing science ever became complete so
that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that
the questions, "Why is there a universe?" "Why does it go on as it does?"
"Has it any meaning?" would remain just as they were?
Now the position would be quite hopeless but for this. There is one
thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we
could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not
merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside
information; we are in the know. And because of that, we know that men find
themselves under a moral law, which they did not make, and cannot quite
forget even when they try, and which they know they ought to obey. Notice
the following point. Anyone studying Man from the outside as we study
electricity or cabbages, not knowing our language and consequently not able
to get any inside knowledge from us, but merely observing what we did, would
never get the slightest evidence that we had this moral law. How could he?
for his observations would only show what we did, and the moral law is about
what we ought to do. In the same way, if there were anything above or behind
the observed facts in the case of stones or the weather, we, by studying
them from outside, could never hope to discover it.
The position of the question, then, is like this. We want to know
whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or
whether there is a power behind it that makes it what it is. Since that
power, if it exists, would be not one of the observed facts but a reality
which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it. There is
only one case in which we can know whether there is anything more, namely
our own case. And in that one case we find there is. Or put it the other way
round. If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not
show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe- no more than the
architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in
that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be
inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in
a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves. Surely
this ought to arouse our suspicions? In the only case where you can expect
to get an answer, the answer turns out to be Yes; and in the other cases,
where you do not get an answer, you see why you do not. Suppose someone
asked me, when I see a man in a blue uniform going down the street leaving
little paper packets at each house, why I suppose that they contain letters?
I should reply, "Because whenever he leaves a similar little packet for me I
find it does contain a letter." And if he then objected, "But you've never
seen all these letters which you think the other people are getting," I
should say, "Of course not, and I shouldn't expect to, because they're not
addressed to me. I'm explaining the packets I'm not allowed to open by the
ones I am allowed to open." It is the same about this question. The only
packet I am allowed to open is Man. When I do, especially when I open that
particular man called Myself, I find that I do not exist on my own, that I
am under a law; that somebody or something wants me to behave in a certain
way. I do not, of course, think that if I could get inside a stone or a tree
I should find exactly the same thing, just as I do not think all the other
people in the street get the same letters as I do. I should expect, for
instance, to find that the stone had to obey the law of gravity-that whereas
the sender of the letters merely tells me to obey the law of my human
nature, He compels the stone to obey the laws of its stony nature. But I
should expect to find that there was, so to speak, a sender of letters in
both cases, a Power behind the facts, a Director, a Guide.
Do not think I am going faster than I really am. I am not yet within a
hundred miles of the God of Christian theology. All I have got to is a
Something which is directing the universe, and which appears in me as a law
urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when
I do wrong. I think we have to assume it is more like a mind than it is like
anything else we know-because after all the only other thing we know is
matter and you can hardly imagine a bit of matter giving instructions. But,
of course, it need not be very like a mind, still less like a person. In the
next chapter we shall see if we can find out anything more about it. But one
word of warning. There has been a great deal of soft soap talked about God
for the last hundred years. That is not what I am offering. You can cut all
that out.
Note -In order to keep this section short enough when it was given on
the air, I mentioned only the Materialist view and the Religious view. But
to be complete I ought to mention the In between view called Life-Force
philosophy, or Creative Evolution, or Emergent Evolution. The wittiest
expositions of it come in the works of Bernard Shaw, but the most profound
ones in those of Bergson. People who hold this view say that the small
variations by which life on this planet "evolved" from the lowest forms to
Man were not due to chance but to the "striving" or "purposiveness" of a
Life-Force. When people say this we must ask them whether by Life-Force they
mean something with a mind or not. If they do, then "a mind bringing life
into existence and leading it to perfection" is really a God, and their view
is thus identical with the Religious. If they do not, then what is the sense
in saying that something without a mind "strives" or has "purposes"? This
seems to me fatal to their view. One reason why many people find Creative
Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort
of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences. When you are
feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the
whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to
think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and
carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do something
rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and
no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned
about when we were children. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can
switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of
religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of
wishful thinking the world has yet seen?
I ended my last chapter with the idea that in the Moral Law somebody or
something from beyond the material universe was actually getting at us. And
I expect when I reached that point some of you felt a certain annoyance. You
may even have thought that I had played a trick on you-that I had been
carefully wrapping up to look like philosophy what turns out to be one more
"religious jaw." You may have felt you were ready to listen to me as long as
you thought I had anything new to say; but if it turns out to be only
religion, well, the world has tried that and you cannot put the clock back.
If anyone is feeling that way I should like to say three things to him.
First, as to putting the clock back. Would you think I was joking if I
said that you can put a clock back, and that if the clock is wrong it is
often a very sensible thing to do? But I would rather get away from that
whole idea of clocks. We all want progress. But progress means getting
nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong
turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the
wrong road, progress means doing an about turn and walking back to the right
road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most
progressive man. We have all seen this when doing arithmetic. When I have
started a sum the wrong way, the sooner I admit this and go back and start
over again, the faster I shall get on. There is nothing progressive about
being pigheaded and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at
the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been
making some big mistake. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we
must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.
Then, secondly, this has not yet turned exactly into a "religious jaw."
We have not yet got as far as the God of any actual religion, still less the
God of that particular religion called Christianity. We have only got as far
as a Somebody or Something behind the Moral Law. We are not taking anything
from the Bible or the Churches, we are trying to see what we can find out
about this Somebody on our own steam. And I want to make it quite clear that
what we find out on our own steam is something that gives us a shock. We
have two bits of evidence about the Somebody. One is the universe He has
made. If we used that as our only clue, then I think we should have to
conclude that He was a great artist (for the universe is a very beautiful
place), but also that He is quite merciless and no friend to man (for the
universe is a very dangerous and terrifying place). The other bit of
evidence is that Moral Law which He has put into our minds. And this is a
better bit of evidence than the other, because it is inside information. You
find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general
just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than
by looking at a house he has built. Now, from this second bit of evidence we
conclude that the Being behind the universe is intensely interested in right
conduct -in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and
truthfulness. In that sense we should agree with the account given by
Christianity and some other religions, that God is "good." But do not let us
go too fast here. The Moral Law does not give us any grounds for thinking
that God is "good" in the sense of being indulgent, or soft, or sympathetic.
There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It
tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful,
or dangerous, or difficult it is to do. If God is like the Moral Law, then
He is not soft. It is no use, at this stage, saying that what you mean by a
"good" God is a God who can forgive. You are going too quickly. Only a
Person can forgive. And we have not yet got as far as a personal God-only as
far as a power, behind the Moral Law, and more like a mind than it is like
anything else. But it may still be very unlike a Person. If it is pure
impersonal mind, there may be no tense in asking it to make allowances for
you or let you off, just as there is no sense in asking the multiplication
table to let you off when you do your sums wrong. You are bound to get the
wrong answer. And it is no use either saying that if there is a God of that
sort-an impersonal absolute goodness-then you do not like Him and are not
going to bother about Him. For the trouble is that one part of you is on His
side and really agrees with His disapproval of human greed and trickery and
exploitation. You may want Him to make an exception in your own case, to let
you off this one time; but you know at bottom that unless the power behind
the world really and unalterably detests that sort of behaviour, then He
cannot be good. On the other hand, we know that if there does exist an
absolute goodness it must hate most of what we do. That is the terrible fix
we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all
our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making
ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least
likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We
cannot do without it. and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He
is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most
want to hide from. He is our only possible-ally, and we have made ourselves
His enemies. Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness
would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with
religion. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger-according
to the way you react to it. And we have reacted the wrong way. Now my third
point. When I chose to get to my real subject in this roundabout way, I was
not trying to play any kind of trick on you. I had a different reason. My
reason was that Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced
the sort of facts I have been describing. Christianity tells people to
repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I
know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of
and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness. It is after you have
realised that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and
that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power-it is
after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.
When you know you are sick, you will listen, to. the doctor. When you have
realised that our position is nearly desperate you will begin to understand
what the Christians are talking about. They offer an explanation of how we
got into our present state of both hating goodness and loving it. They offer
an explanation of how God can be this impersonal mind at the back of the
Moral Law and yet also a Person. They tell you how the demands of this law,
which you and I cannot meet, have been met on our behalf, how God Himself
becomes a man to save man from the disapproval of God. It is an old story
and if you want to go into it you will no doubt consult people who have more
authority to talk about it than I have. All I am doing is to ask people to
face the facts-to understand the questions which Christianity claims to
answer. And they are very terrifying facts. I wish it was possible to say
something more agreeable. But I must say what I think true. Of course, I
quite agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of
unspeakable comfort. But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in the
dismay I have been describing, and it is no use at all trying to go on to
that comfort without first going through that dismay. In religion, as in war
and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for
it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for
comfort you will not get either comfort or truth- only soft soap and wishful
thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over
the prewar wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did
the same about religion.
I have been asked to tell you what Christians believe, and I am going
to begin by telling you one thing that Christians do not need to believe. If
you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions
are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe
that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one
huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these
religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth.
When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human
race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most;
when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view. But, of
course, being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs
from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong. As in
arithmetic-there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers
are wrong: but some of the wrong answers are much nearer being right than
others.
The first big division of humanity is into the majority, who believe in
some kind of God or gods, and the minority who do not. On this point,
Christianity lines up with the majority-lines up with ancient Greeks and
Romans, modern savages, Stoics, Platonists, Hindus, Mohammedans, etc.,
against the modern Western European materialist.
Now I go on to the next big division. People who all believe in God can
be divided according to the sort of God they believe in. There are two very
different ideas on this subject One of them is the idea that He is beyond
good and evil. We humans call one thing good and another thing bad. But
according to some people that is merely our human point of view. These
people would say that the wiser you become the less you would want to call
anything good or bad, and the more dearly you would see that everything is
good in one way and bad in another, and that nothing could have been
different. Consequently, these people think that long before you got
anywhere near the divine point of view the distinction would have
disappeared altogether. We call a cancer bad, they would say, because it
kills a man; but you might just as well call a successful surgeon bad
because he kills a cancer. It all depends on the point of view. The other
and opposite idea is that God is quite definitely "good" or "righteous." a
God who takes sides, who loves love and hates hatred, who wants us to behave
in one way and not in another. The first of these views-the one that thinks
God beyond good and evil-is called Pantheism. It was held by the great
Prussian philosopher Hagel and, as far as I can understand them, by the
Hindus. The other view is held by Jews, Mohammedans and Christians.
And with this big difference between Pantheism and the Christian idea
of God, there usually goes another. Pantheists usually believe that God, so
to speak, animates the universe as you animate your body: that the universe
almost is God, so that if it did not exist He would not exist either, and
anything you find in the universe is a part of God. The Christian idea is
quite different. They think God invented and made the universe-like a man
making a picture or composing a tune. A painter is not a picture, and he
does not die if his picture is destroyed. You may say, "He's put a lot of
himself into it," but you only mean that all its beauty and interest has
come out of his head. His skill is not in the picture in the same way that
it is in his head, or even in his hands. expect you see how this difference
between Pantheists and Christians hangs together with the other one. If you
do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is
easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of
course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you
cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world
and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will.
Confronted with a cancer or a slum the Pantheist can say, "If you could only
see it from the divine point of view, you would realise that this also is
God." The Christian replies, "Don't talk damned nonsense." (*)
----
[*] One listener complained of the word damned as frivolous swearing.
But I mean exactly what I say-nonsense that is damned is under God's curse,
and will (apart from God's grace) lead those who believe it to eternal
death.
----
For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the
world-that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes,
and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God "made up out of His
head" as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things
have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and
insists very loudly, on our putting them right again.
And, of course, that raises a very big question. If a good God made the
world why has it gone wrong? And for many years I simply refused to listen
to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling
"whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn't it much
simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent
power? Aren't all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the
obvious?" But then that threw me back into another difficulty.
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and
unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call
a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I
comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was
bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to
be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man
feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a
fish would not feel wet.
Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was
nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument
against God collapsed too- for the argument depended on saying that the
world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my
private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not
exist-in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless-I found I was
forced to assume that one part of reality-namely my idea of justice-was full
of sense.
Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe
has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just
as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with
eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
Very well then, atheism is too simple. And I will tell you another view
that is also too simple. It is the view I call Christianity-and-water, the
view which simply says there is a good God in Heaven and everything is all
right-leaving out all the difficult and terrible doctrines about sin and
hell and the devil, and the redemption. Both these are boys' philosophies.
It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things are
not simple. They look simple, but they are not. The table I am sitting at
looks simple: but ask a scientist to tell you what it is really made of-all
about the atoms and how the light waves rebound from them and hit my eye and
what they do to the optic nerve and what it does to my brain-and, of course,
you find that what we call "seeing a table" lands you in mysteries and
complications which you can hardly get to the end of. A child saying a
child's prayer looks simple. And if you are content to stop there, well and
good. But if you are not-and the modern world usually is not-if you want to
go on and ask what is really happening- then you must be prepared for
something difficult. If we ask for something more than simplicity, it is
silly then to complain that the something more is not simple.
Very often, however, this silly procedure is adopted by people who are
not silly, but who, consciously or unconsciously, want to destroy
Christianity. Such people put up a version of Christianity suitable for a
child of six and make that the object of their attack. When you try to
explain the Christian doctrine as it is really held by an instructed adult,
they then complain that you are making their heads turn round and that it is
all too complicated and that if there really were a God they are sure He
would have made "religion" simple, because simplicity is so beautiful, etc.
You must be on your guard against these people for they will change their
ground every minute and only waste your tune. Notice, too, their idea of God
"making religion simple": as if "religion" were something God invented, and
not His statement to us of certain quite unalterable facts about His own
nature.
Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd.
It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect. For instance, when you
have grasped that the earth and the other planets all go round the sun, you
would naturally expect that all the planets were made to match-all at equal
distances from each other, say, or distances that regularly increased, or
all the same size, or else getting bigger or smaller as you go farther from
the sun. In fact, you find no rhyme or reason (that we can see) about either
the sizes or the distances; and some of them have one moon, one has four,
one has two, some have none, and one has a ring.
Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That
is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not
have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always
expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the
sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about
it that real things have. So let us leave behind all these boys'
philosophies-these over-simple answers. The problem is not simple and the
answer is not going to be simpler either.
What is the problem? A universe that contains much that is obviously
bad and apparently meaningless, but containing creatures like ourselves who
know that it is bad and meaningless. There are only two views that face all
the facts. One is the Christian view that this is a good world that has gone
wrong, but still retains the memory of what it ought to have been. The other
is the view called Dualism. Dualism means the belief that there are two
equal and independent powers at the back of everything, one of them good and
the other bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in which they fight
out an endless war. I personally think that next to Christianity Dualism is
the manliest and most sensible creed on the market. But it has a catch in
it.
The two powers, or spirits, or gods-the good one and the bad one-are
supposed to be quite independent. They both existed from all eternity.
Neither of them made the other, neither of them has any more right than the
other to call itself God. Each presumably thinks it is good and thinks the
other bad. One of them likes hatred and cruelty, the other likes love and
mercy, and each backs its own view. Now what do we mean when we call one of
them the Good Power and the other the Bad Power? Either we are merely saying
that we happen to prefer the one to the other-like preferring beer to
cider-or else we are saying that, whatever the two powers think about it,
and whichever we humans, at the moment,, happen to like, one of them is
actually wrong, actually mistaken, in regarding itself as good. Now it we
mean merely that we happen to prefer the first, then we must give up talking
about good and evil at all. For good means what you ought to prefer quite
regardless of what you happen to like at any given moment. If "being good"
meant simply joining the side you happened to fancy, for no real reason,
then good would not deserve to be called good. So we must mean that one of
the two powers is actually wrong and the other actually right
But the moment you say that, you are putting into the universe a third
thing in addition to the two Powers: some law or standard or rule of good
which one of the powers conforms to and the other fails to conform to. But
since the two powers are judged by this standard, then this standard, or the
Being who made this standard, is farther back and higher up than either of
them, and He will be the real God. In fact, what we meant by calling them
good and bad turns out to be that one of them is in a right relation to the
real ultimate God and the other in a wrong relation to Him.
The same point can be made in a different way. If Dualism is true, then
the bad Power must be a being who likes badness for its own sake. But in
reality we have no experience of anyone liking badness just because it is
bad. The nearest we can get to it is in cruelty. But in real life people are
cruel for one of two reasons- either because they are sadists, that is,
because they have a sexual perversion which makes cruelty a cause of sensual
pleasure to them, or else for the sake of something they are going to get
out of it-money, or power, or safety. But pleasure, money, power, and safety
are all, as far as they go, good things. The badness consists in pursuing
them by the wrong method, or in the wrong way, or too much. I do not mean,
of course, that the people who do this are not desperately wicked. I do mean
that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some
good in the wrong way. You can be good for the mere sake of goodness: you
cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when
you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because
kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty
is wrong-only because cruelty was pleasant or useful to him. In other words
badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness
is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness.
And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled. We called
sadism a sexual perversion; but you must first have the idea of a normal
sexuality before you can talk of its being perverted; and you can see which
is the perversion, because you can explain the perverted from the normal,
and cannot explain the normal from the perverted. It follows that this Bad
Power, who is supposed to be on an equal footing with the Good Power, and to
love badness in the same way as the Good Power loves goodness, is a mere
bogy. In order to be bad he must have good things to want and then to pursue
in the wrong way: he must have impulses which were originally good in order
to be able to pervert them. But if he is bad he cannot supply himself either
with good things to desire or with good impulses to pervert. He must be
getting both from the Good Power. And if so, then he is not independent. He
is part of the Good Power's world: he was made either by the Good Power or
by some power above them both.
Put it more simply still. To be bad, he must exist and have
intelligence and will. But existence, intelligence and will are in
themselves good. Therefore he must be getting them from the Good Power: even
to be bad he must borrow or steal from his opponent. And do you now begin to
see why Christianity has always said that the devil is a fallen angel? That
is not a mere story for the children. It is a real recognition of the fact
that evil is a parasite, not an original thing. The powers which enable evil
to carry on are powers given it by goodness. All the things which enable a
bad man to be effectively bad are in themselves good things-resolution,
cleverness, good looks, existence itself. That is why Dualism, in a strict
sense, will not work.
But I freely admit that real Christianity (as distinct from
Christianity-and-water) goes much nearer to Dualism than people think. One
of the things that surprised me when I first read the New Testament
seriously was that it talked so much about a Dark Power in the universe-a
mighty evil spirit who was held to be the Power behind death and disease,
and sin. The difference is that Christianity thinks this Dark Power was
created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong.
Christianity agrees with Dualism that this universe is at war. But it does
not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil
war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied
by the rebel.
Enemy-occupied territory-that is what this world is. Christianity is
the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in
disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of
sabotage. When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret
wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us
from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness and
intellectual snobbery. I know someone will ask me, "Do you really mean, at
this time of day, to reintroduce our old friend the devil-hoofs and horns
and all?" Well, what the time of day has to do with it I do not know. And I
am not particular about the hoofs and horns. But in other respects my answer
is "Yes, I do." I do not claim to know anything about his personal
appearance. If anybody really wants to know him better I would say to that
person, "Don't worry. If you really want to, you will Whether you'll like it
when you do is another question."
Christians, then, believe that an evil power has made himself for the
present the Prince of this World. And, of course, that raises problems. Is
this state of affairs in accordance with God's will or not? If it is, He is
a strange God, you will say: and if it is not, how can anything happen
contrary to the will of a being with absolute power?
But anyone who has been in authority knows how a thing can be in
accordance with your will in one way and not in another. It may be quite
sensible for a mother to say to the children, "I'm not going to go and make
you tidy the schoolroom every night. You've got to learn to keep it tidy on
your own." Then she goes up one night and finds the Teddy bear and the ink
and the French Grammar all lying in the grate. That is against her will. She
would prefer the children to be tidy. But on the other hand, it is her will
which has left the children free to be untidy. The same thing arises in any
regiment, or trade union, or school. You make a thing voluntary and then
half the people do not do it. That is not what you willed, but your will has
made it possible.
It is probably the same in the universe. God created things which had
free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. Some
people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no
possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is
also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why,
then, did God give them free will? Because free will though it makes evil
possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or
joy worth having. A world of automata-of creatures that worked like
machines-would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for
His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to
Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which
the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk
and water. And for that they must be free.
Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the
wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk. Perhaps we feel inclined
to disagree with Him. But there is a difficulty about disagreeing with God.
He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be
right and He wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own
source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very
power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch
you are sitting on. If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price
worth paying for free will-that is, for making a live world in which
creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can
happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the
strings-then we may take it it is worth paying.
When we have understood about free will, we shall see how silly it is
to ask, as somebody once asked me: "Why did God make a creature of such
rotten stuff that it went wrong?" The better stuff a creature is made of-the
cleverer and stronger and freer it is-then the better it will be if it goes
right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong. A cow cannot be very
good or very bad; a dog can be both better and worse; a child better and
worse still; an ordinary man, still more so; a man of genius, still more so;
a superhuman spirit best-or worst-of all.
How did the Dark Power go wrong? Here, no doubt, we ask a question to
which human beings cannot give an answer with any certainty. A reasonable
(and traditional) guess, based on our own experiences of going wrong, can,
however, be offered. The moment you have a self at all, there is a
possibility of putting Yourself first-wanting to be the centre-wanting to be
God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the
human race. Some people think the fall of man had something to do with sex,
but that is a mistake. (The story in the Book of Genesis rather suggests
that some corruption in our sexual nature followed the fall and was its
result, not its cause.) What Satan put into the heads of our remote
ancestors was the idea that they could "be like gods"-could set up on their
own as if they had created themselves-be their own masters-invent some sort
of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that
hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history-money,
poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery-the long
terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will
make him happy.
The reason why it can never succeed is this. God made us: invented us
as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on gasoline, and it would
not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run
safety or happiness except in a society where every one plays fair, and it
is because they see this that they try to behave decently. Now, of course,
it is perfectly true that safety and happiness can only come from
individuals, classes, and nations being honest and fair and kind to each
other. It is one of the most important truths in the world. But as an
explanation of why we feel as we do about Right and Wrong it just misses the
point If we ask: "Why ought I to be unselfish?" and you reply "Because it is
good for society," we may then ask, "Why should I care what's good for
society except when it happens to pay me personally?" and then you will have
to say, "Because you ought to be unselfish"-which simply brings us back to
where we started. You are saying what is true, but you are not getting any
further. If a man asked what was the point of playing football, it would not
be much good saying "in order to score goals," for trying to score goals is
the game itself, not the reason for the game, and you would really only be
saying that football was football-which is true, but not worth saying. In
the same way, if a man asks what is the point of behaving decently, it is no
good replying, "in order to benefit society," for trying to benefit society,
in other words being unselfish (for "society" after all only means "other
people"), is one of the things decent behaviour consists in; all you are
really saying is that decent behaviour is decent behaviour. You would have
said just as much if you had stopped at the statement, "Men ought to be
unselfish."
And that is where I do stop. Men ought to be unselfish, ought to be
fair. Not that men are unselfish, nor that they like being unselfish, but
that they ought to be. The Moral Law, or Law of Human Nature, is not simply
a fact about human behaviour in the same way as the Law of Gravitation is,
or may be, simply a fact about how heavy objects behave. On the other hand,
it is not a mere fancy, for we cannot get rid of the idea, and most of the
things we say and think about men would be reduced to nonsense if we did.
And it is not simply a statement about how we should like men to behave for
our own convenience; for the behaviour we call bad or unfair is not exactly
the same as the behaviour we find inconvenient, and may even be the
opposite. Consequently, this Rule of Right and Wrong, or Law of Human
Nature, or whatever you call it, must somehow or other be a real thing- a
thing that is really there, not made up by ourselves. And yet it is not a
fact in the ordinary sense, in the same way as our actual behaviour is a
fact. It begins to look as if we shall have to admit that there is more than
one kind of reality; that, in this particular case, there is something above
and beyond the ordinary facts of men's behaviour, and yet quite definitely
real-a real law, which none of as made, but which we find pressing on us.
Let us sum up what we have reached so far. In the case of stones and
trees and things of that sort, what we call the Laws of Nature may not be
anything except a way of speaking. When you say that nature is governed by
certain laws, this may only mean that nature does, in fact, behave in a
certain way. The so-called laws may not be anything real-anything above and
beyond the actual facts which we observe. But in the case of Man, we saw
that this will not do. The Law of Human Nature, or of Right and Wrong, must
be something above and beyond the actual facts of human behaviour. In this
case, besides the actual facts, you have something else-a real law which we
did not invent and which we know we ought to obey.
I now want to consider what this tells us about the universe we live
in. Ever since men were able to think, they have been wondering what this
universe really is and how it came to be there. And, very roughly, two views
have been held. First, there is what is called the materialist view. People
who take that view think that matter and space just happen to exist, and
always have existed, nobody knows why; and that the matter, behaving in
certain fixed ways, has just happened, by a sort of fluke, to produce
creatures like ourselves who are able to think. By one chance in a thousand
something hit our sun and made it produce the planets; and by another
thousandth chance the chemicals necessary for life, and the right
temperature, occurred on one of these planets, and so some of the matter on
this earth came alive; and then, by a very long series of chances, the
living creatures developed into things like us. The other view is the
religious view. (*) According to it, what is behind the universe is more
like a mind than it is like anything else we know.
----
[*] See Note at the end of this chapter.
----
That is to say, it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one
thing to another. And on this view it made the universe, partly for purposes
we do not know, but partly, at any rate, in order to produce creatures like
itself-I mean, like itself to the extent of having minds. Please do not
think that one of these views was held a long time ago and that the other
has gradually taken its place. Wherever there have been thinking men both
views turn up. And note this too. You cannot find out which view is the
right one by science in the ordinary sense. Science works by experiments. It
watches how things behave. Every scientific statement in the long run,
however complicated it looks, really means something like, "I pointed the
telescope to such and such a part of the sky at 2:20 A.M. on January 15th
and saw so-and-so," or, "I put some of this stuff in a pot and heated it to
such-and-such a temperature and it did so-and-so." Do not think I am saying
anything against science: I am only saying what its job is. And the more
scientific a man is, the more (I believe) he would agree with me that this
is the job of science- and a very useful and necessary job it is too. But
why anything comes to be there at all, and whether there is anything behind
the things science observes-something of a different kind-this is not a
scientific question. If there is "Something Behind," then either it will
have to remain altogether unknown to men or else make itself known in some
different way. The statement that there is any such thing, and the statement
that there is no such thing, are neither of them statements that science can
make. And real scientists do not usually make them. It is usually the
journalists and popular novelists who have picked up a few odds and ends of
half-baked science from textbooks who go in for them. After all, it is
really a matter of common sense. Supposing science ever became complete so
that it knew every single thing in the whole universe. Is it not plain that
the questions, "Why is there a universe?" "Why does it go on as it does?"
"Has it any meaning?" would remain just as they were?
Now the position would be quite hopeless but for this. There is one
thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we
could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not
merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside
information; we are in the know. And because of that, we know that men find
themselves under a moral law, which they did not make, and cannot quite
forget even when they try, and which they know they ought to obey. Notice
the following point. Anyone studying Man from the outside as we study
electricity or cabbages, not knowing our language and consequently not able
to get any inside knowledge from us, but merely observing what we did, would
never get the slightest evidence that we had this moral law. How could he?
for his observations would only show what we did, and the moral law is about
what we ought to do. In the same way, if there were anything above or behind
the observed facts in the case of stones or the weather, we, by studying
them from outside, could never hope to discover it.
The position of the question, then, is like this. We want to know
whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or
whether there is a power behind it that makes it what it is. Since that
power, if it exists, would be not one of the observed facts but a reality
which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it. There is
only one case in which we can know whether there is anything more, namely
our own case. And in that one case we find there is. Or put it the other way
round. If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not
show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe- no more than the
architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in
that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be
inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in
a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves. Surely
this ought to arouse our suspicions? In the only case where you can expect
to get an answer, the answer turns out to be Yes; and in the other cases,
where you do not get an answer, you see why you do not. Suppose someone
asked me, when I see a man in a blue uniform going down the street leaving
little paper packets at each house, why I suppose that they contain letters?
I should reply, "Because whenever he leaves a similar little packet for me I
find it does contain a letter." And if he then objected, "But you've never
seen all these letters which you think the other people are getting," I
should say, "Of course not, and I shouldn't expect to, because they're not
addressed to me. I'm explaining the packets I'm not allowed to open by the
ones I am allowed to open." It is the same about this question. The only
packet I am allowed to open is Man. When I do, especially when I open that
particular man called Myself, I find that I do not exist on my own, that I
am under a law; that somebody or something wants me to behave in a certain
way. I do not, of course, think that if I could get inside a stone or a tree
I should find exactly the same thing, just as I do not think all the other
people in the street get the same letters as I do. I should expect, for
instance, to find that the stone had to obey the law of gravity-that whereas
the sender of the letters merely tells me to obey the law of my human
nature, He compels the stone to obey the laws of its stony nature. But I
should expect to find that there was, so to speak, a sender of letters in
both cases, a Power behind the facts, a Director, a Guide.
Do not think I am going faster than I really am. I am not yet within a
hundred miles of the God of Christian theology. All I have got to is a
Something which is directing the universe, and which appears in me as a law
urging me to do right and making me feel responsible and uncomfortable when
I do wrong. I think we have to assume it is more like a mind than it is like
anything else we know-because after all the only other thing we know is
matter and you can hardly imagine a bit of matter giving instructions. But,
of course, it need not be very like a mind, still less like a person. In the
next chapter we shall see if we can find out anything more about it. But one
word of warning. There has been a great deal of soft soap talked about God
for the last hundred years. That is not what I am offering. You can cut all
that out.
Note -In order to keep this section short enough when it was given on
the air, I mentioned only the Materialist view and the Religious view. But
to be complete I ought to mention the In between view called Life-Force
philosophy, or Creative Evolution, or Emergent Evolution. The wittiest
expositions of it come in the works of Bernard Shaw, but the most profound
ones in those of Bergson. People who hold this view say that the small
variations by which life on this planet "evolved" from the lowest forms to
Man were not due to chance but to the "striving" or "purposiveness" of a
Life-Force. When people say this we must ask them whether by Life-Force they
mean something with a mind or not. If they do, then "a mind bringing life
into existence and leading it to perfection" is really a God, and their view
is thus identical with the Religious. If they do not, then what is the sense
in saying that something without a mind "strives" or has "purposes"? This
seems to me fatal to their view. One reason why many people find Creative
Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort
of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences. When you are
feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the
whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to
think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and
carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do something
rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and
no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned
about when we were children. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can
switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of
religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of
wishful thinking the world has yet seen?
I ended my last chapter with the idea that in the Moral Law somebody or
something from beyond the material universe was actually getting at us. And
I expect when I reached that point some of you felt a certain annoyance. You
may even have thought that I had played a trick on you-that I had been
carefully wrapping up to look like philosophy what turns out to be one more
"religious jaw." You may have felt you were ready to listen to me as long as
you thought I had anything new to say; but if it turns out to be only
religion, well, the world has tried that and you cannot put the clock back.
If anyone is feeling that way I should like to say three things to him.
First, as to putting the clock back. Would you think I was joking if I
said that you can put a clock back, and that if the clock is wrong it is
often a very sensible thing to do? But I would rather get away from that
whole idea of clocks. We all want progress. But progress means getting
nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong
turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the
wrong road, progress means doing an about turn and walking back to the right
road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most
progressive man. We have all seen this when doing arithmetic. When I have
started a sum the wrong way, the sooner I admit this and go back and start
over again, the faster I shall get on. There is nothing progressive about
being pigheaded and refusing to admit a mistake. And I think if you look at
the present state of the world, it is pretty plain that humanity has been
making some big mistake. We are on the wrong road. And if that is so, we
must go back. Going back is the quickest way on.
Then, secondly, this has not yet turned exactly into a "religious jaw."
We have not yet got as far as the God of any actual religion, still less the
God of that particular religion called Christianity. We have only got as far
as a Somebody or Something behind the Moral Law. We are not taking anything
from the Bible or the Churches, we are trying to see what we can find out
about this Somebody on our own steam. And I want to make it quite clear that
what we find out on our own steam is something that gives us a shock. We
have two bits of evidence about the Somebody. One is the universe He has
made. If we used that as our only clue, then I think we should have to
conclude that He was a great artist (for the universe is a very beautiful
place), but also that He is quite merciless and no friend to man (for the
universe is a very dangerous and terrifying place). The other bit of
evidence is that Moral Law which He has put into our minds. And this is a
better bit of evidence than the other, because it is inside information. You
find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general
just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than
by looking at a house he has built. Now, from this second bit of evidence we
conclude that the Being behind the universe is intensely interested in right
conduct -in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and
truthfulness. In that sense we should agree with the account given by
Christianity and some other religions, that God is "good." But do not let us
go too fast here. The Moral Law does not give us any grounds for thinking
that God is "good" in the sense of being indulgent, or soft, or sympathetic.
There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It
tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful,
or dangerous, or difficult it is to do. If God is like the Moral Law, then
He is not soft. It is no use, at this stage, saying that what you mean by a
"good" God is a God who can forgive. You are going too quickly. Only a
Person can forgive. And we have not yet got as far as a personal God-only as
far as a power, behind the Moral Law, and more like a mind than it is like
anything else. But it may still be very unlike a Person. If it is pure
impersonal mind, there may be no tense in asking it to make allowances for
you or let you off, just as there is no sense in asking the multiplication
table to let you off when you do your sums wrong. You are bound to get the
wrong answer. And it is no use either saying that if there is a God of that
sort-an impersonal absolute goodness-then you do not like Him and are not
going to bother about Him. For the trouble is that one part of you is on His
side and really agrees with His disapproval of human greed and trickery and
exploitation. You may want Him to make an exception in your own case, to let
you off this one time; but you know at bottom that unless the power behind
the world really and unalterably detests that sort of behaviour, then He
cannot be good. On the other hand, we know that if there does exist an
absolute goodness it must hate most of what we do. That is the terrible fix
we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all
our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making
ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least
likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We
cannot do without it. and we cannot do with it. God is the only comfort, He
is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most
want to hide from. He is our only possible-ally, and we have made ourselves
His enemies. Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness
would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with
religion. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger-according
to the way you react to it. And we have reacted the wrong way. Now my third
point. When I chose to get to my real subject in this roundabout way, I was
not trying to play any kind of trick on you. I had a different reason. My
reason was that Christianity simply does not make sense until you have faced
the sort of facts I have been describing. Christianity tells people to
repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I
know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of
and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness. It is after you have
realised that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and
that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power-it is
after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.
When you know you are sick, you will listen, to. the doctor. When you have
realised that our position is nearly desperate you will begin to understand
what the Christians are talking about. They offer an explanation of how we
got into our present state of both hating goodness and loving it. They offer
an explanation of how God can be this impersonal mind at the back of the
Moral Law and yet also a Person. They tell you how the demands of this law,
which you and I cannot meet, have been met on our behalf, how God Himself
becomes a man to save man from the disapproval of God. It is an old story
and if you want to go into it you will no doubt consult people who have more
authority to talk about it than I have. All I am doing is to ask people to
face the facts-to understand the questions which Christianity claims to
answer. And they are very terrifying facts. I wish it was possible to say
something more agreeable. But I must say what I think true. Of course, I
quite agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of
unspeakable comfort. But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in the
dismay I have been describing, and it is no use at all trying to go on to
that comfort without first going through that dismay. In religion, as in war
and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for
it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for
comfort you will not get either comfort or truth- only soft soap and wishful
thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair. Most of us have got over
the prewar wishful thinking about international politics. It is time we did
the same about religion.
I have been asked to tell you what Christians believe, and I am going
to begin by telling you one thing that Christians do not need to believe. If
you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions
are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe
that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one
huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these
religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth.
When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human
race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most;
when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view. But, of
course, being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs
from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong. As in
arithmetic-there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers
are wrong: but some of the wrong answers are much nearer being right than
others.
The first big division of humanity is into the majority, who believe in
some kind of God or gods, and the minority who do not. On this point,
Christianity lines up with the majority-lines up with ancient Greeks and
Romans, modern savages, Stoics, Platonists, Hindus, Mohammedans, etc.,
against the modern Western European materialist.
Now I go on to the next big division. People who all believe in God can
be divided according to the sort of God they believe in. There are two very
different ideas on this subject One of them is the idea that He is beyond
good and evil. We humans call one thing good and another thing bad. But
according to some people that is merely our human point of view. These
people would say that the wiser you become the less you would want to call
anything good or bad, and the more dearly you would see that everything is
good in one way and bad in another, and that nothing could have been
different. Consequently, these people think that long before you got
anywhere near the divine point of view the distinction would have
disappeared altogether. We call a cancer bad, they would say, because it
kills a man; but you might just as well call a successful surgeon bad
because he kills a cancer. It all depends on the point of view. The other
and opposite idea is that God is quite definitely "good" or "righteous." a
God who takes sides, who loves love and hates hatred, who wants us to behave
in one way and not in another. The first of these views-the one that thinks
God beyond good and evil-is called Pantheism. It was held by the great
Prussian philosopher Hagel and, as far as I can understand them, by the
Hindus. The other view is held by Jews, Mohammedans and Christians.
And with this big difference between Pantheism and the Christian idea
of God, there usually goes another. Pantheists usually believe that God, so
to speak, animates the universe as you animate your body: that the universe
almost is God, so that if it did not exist He would not exist either, and
anything you find in the universe is a part of God. The Christian idea is
quite different. They think God invented and made the universe-like a man
making a picture or composing a tune. A painter is not a picture, and he
does not die if his picture is destroyed. You may say, "He's put a lot of
himself into it," but you only mean that all its beauty and interest has
come out of his head. His skill is not in the picture in the same way that
it is in his head, or even in his hands. expect you see how this difference
between Pantheists and Christians hangs together with the other one. If you
do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is
easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of
course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you
cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world
and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will.
Confronted with a cancer or a slum the Pantheist can say, "If you could only
see it from the divine point of view, you would realise that this also is
God." The Christian replies, "Don't talk damned nonsense." (*)
----
[*] One listener complained of the word damned as frivolous swearing.
But I mean exactly what I say-nonsense that is damned is under God's curse,
and will (apart from God's grace) lead those who believe it to eternal
death.
----
For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the
world-that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes,
and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God "made up out of His
head" as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things
have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and
insists very loudly, on our putting them right again.
And, of course, that raises a very big question. If a good God made the
world why has it gone wrong? And for many years I simply refused to listen
to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling
"whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn't it much
simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent
power? Aren't all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the
obvious?" But then that threw me back into another difficulty.
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and
unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call
a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I
comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was
bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to
be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man
feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a
fish would not feel wet.
Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was
nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument
against God collapsed too- for the argument depended on saying that the
world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my
private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not
exist-in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless-I found I was
forced to assume that one part of reality-namely my idea of justice-was full
of sense.
Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe
has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just
as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with
eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
Very well then, atheism is too simple. And I will tell you another view
that is also too simple. It is the view I call Christianity-and-water, the
view which simply says there is a good God in Heaven and everything is all
right-leaving out all the difficult and terrible doctrines about sin and
hell and the devil, and the redemption. Both these are boys' philosophies.
It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things are
not simple. They look simple, but they are not. The table I am sitting at
looks simple: but ask a scientist to tell you what it is really made of-all
about the atoms and how the light waves rebound from them and hit my eye and
what they do to the optic nerve and what it does to my brain-and, of course,
you find that what we call "seeing a table" lands you in mysteries and
complications which you can hardly get to the end of. A child saying a
child's prayer looks simple. And if you are content to stop there, well and
good. But if you are not-and the modern world usually is not-if you want to
go on and ask what is really happening- then you must be prepared for
something difficult. If we ask for something more than simplicity, it is
silly then to complain that the something more is not simple.
Very often, however, this silly procedure is adopted by people who are
not silly, but who, consciously or unconsciously, want to destroy
Christianity. Such people put up a version of Christianity suitable for a
child of six and make that the object of their attack. When you try to
explain the Christian doctrine as it is really held by an instructed adult,
they then complain that you are making their heads turn round and that it is
all too complicated and that if there really were a God they are sure He
would have made "religion" simple, because simplicity is so beautiful, etc.
You must be on your guard against these people for they will change their
ground every minute and only waste your tune. Notice, too, their idea of God
"making religion simple": as if "religion" were something God invented, and
not His statement to us of certain quite unalterable facts about His own
nature.
Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd.
It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect. For instance, when you
have grasped that the earth and the other planets all go round the sun, you
would naturally expect that all the planets were made to match-all at equal
distances from each other, say, or distances that regularly increased, or
all the same size, or else getting bigger or smaller as you go farther from
the sun. In fact, you find no rhyme or reason (that we can see) about either
the sizes or the distances; and some of them have one moon, one has four,
one has two, some have none, and one has a ring.
Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That
is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not
have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always
expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the
sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about
it that real things have. So let us leave behind all these boys'
philosophies-these over-simple answers. The problem is not simple and the
answer is not going to be simpler either.
What is the problem? A universe that contains much that is obviously
bad and apparently meaningless, but containing creatures like ourselves who
know that it is bad and meaningless. There are only two views that face all
the facts. One is the Christian view that this is a good world that has gone
wrong, but still retains the memory of what it ought to have been. The other
is the view called Dualism. Dualism means the belief that there are two
equal and independent powers at the back of everything, one of them good and
the other bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in which they fight
out an endless war. I personally think that next to Christianity Dualism is
the manliest and most sensible creed on the market. But it has a catch in
it.
The two powers, or spirits, or gods-the good one and the bad one-are
supposed to be quite independent. They both existed from all eternity.
Neither of them made the other, neither of them has any more right than the
other to call itself God. Each presumably thinks it is good and thinks the
other bad. One of them likes hatred and cruelty, the other likes love and
mercy, and each backs its own view. Now what do we mean when we call one of
them the Good Power and the other the Bad Power? Either we are merely saying
that we happen to prefer the one to the other-like preferring beer to
cider-or else we are saying that, whatever the two powers think about it,
and whichever we humans, at the moment,, happen to like, one of them is
actually wrong, actually mistaken, in regarding itself as good. Now it we
mean merely that we happen to prefer the first, then we must give up talking
about good and evil at all. For good means what you ought to prefer quite
regardless of what you happen to like at any given moment. If "being good"
meant simply joining the side you happened to fancy, for no real reason,
then good would not deserve to be called good. So we must mean that one of
the two powers is actually wrong and the other actually right
But the moment you say that, you are putting into the universe a third
thing in addition to the two Powers: some law or standard or rule of good
which one of the powers conforms to and the other fails to conform to. But
since the two powers are judged by this standard, then this standard, or the
Being who made this standard, is farther back and higher up than either of
them, and He will be the real God. In fact, what we meant by calling them
good and bad turns out to be that one of them is in a right relation to the
real ultimate God and the other in a wrong relation to Him.
The same point can be made in a different way. If Dualism is true, then
the bad Power must be a being who likes badness for its own sake. But in
reality we have no experience of anyone liking badness just because it is
bad. The nearest we can get to it is in cruelty. But in real life people are
cruel for one of two reasons- either because they are sadists, that is,
because they have a sexual perversion which makes cruelty a cause of sensual
pleasure to them, or else for the sake of something they are going to get
out of it-money, or power, or safety. But pleasure, money, power, and safety
are all, as far as they go, good things. The badness consists in pursuing
them by the wrong method, or in the wrong way, or too much. I do not mean,
of course, that the people who do this are not desperately wicked. I do mean
that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some
good in the wrong way. You can be good for the mere sake of goodness: you
cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when
you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because
kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty
is wrong-only because cruelty was pleasant or useful to him. In other words
badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness
is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness.
And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled. We called
sadism a sexual perversion; but you must first have the idea of a normal
sexuality before you can talk of its being perverted; and you can see which
is the perversion, because you can explain the perverted from the normal,
and cannot explain the normal from the perverted. It follows that this Bad
Power, who is supposed to be on an equal footing with the Good Power, and to
love badness in the same way as the Good Power loves goodness, is a mere
bogy. In order to be bad he must have good things to want and then to pursue
in the wrong way: he must have impulses which were originally good in order
to be able to pervert them. But if he is bad he cannot supply himself either
with good things to desire or with good impulses to pervert. He must be
getting both from the Good Power. And if so, then he is not independent. He
is part of the Good Power's world: he was made either by the Good Power or
by some power above them both.
Put it more simply still. To be bad, he must exist and have
intelligence and will. But existence, intelligence and will are in
themselves good. Therefore he must be getting them from the Good Power: even
to be bad he must borrow or steal from his opponent. And do you now begin to
see why Christianity has always said that the devil is a fallen angel? That
is not a mere story for the children. It is a real recognition of the fact
that evil is a parasite, not an original thing. The powers which enable evil
to carry on are powers given it by goodness. All the things which enable a
bad man to be effectively bad are in themselves good things-resolution,
cleverness, good looks, existence itself. That is why Dualism, in a strict
sense, will not work.
But I freely admit that real Christianity (as distinct from
Christianity-and-water) goes much nearer to Dualism than people think. One
of the things that surprised me when I first read the New Testament
seriously was that it talked so much about a Dark Power in the universe-a
mighty evil spirit who was held to be the Power behind death and disease,
and sin. The difference is that Christianity thinks this Dark Power was
created by God, and was good when he was created, and went wrong.
Christianity agrees with Dualism that this universe is at war. But it does
not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil
war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied
by the rebel.
Enemy-occupied territory-that is what this world is. Christianity is
the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in
disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of
sabotage. When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret
wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us
from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness and
intellectual snobbery. I know someone will ask me, "Do you really mean, at
this time of day, to reintroduce our old friend the devil-hoofs and horns
and all?" Well, what the time of day has to do with it I do not know. And I
am not particular about the hoofs and horns. But in other respects my answer
is "Yes, I do." I do not claim to know anything about his personal
appearance. If anybody really wants to know him better I would say to that
person, "Don't worry. If you really want to, you will Whether you'll like it
when you do is another question."
Christians, then, believe that an evil power has made himself for the
present the Prince of this World. And, of course, that raises problems. Is
this state of affairs in accordance with God's will or not? If it is, He is
a strange God, you will say: and if it is not, how can anything happen
contrary to the will of a being with absolute power?
But anyone who has been in authority knows how a thing can be in
accordance with your will in one way and not in another. It may be quite
sensible for a mother to say to the children, "I'm not going to go and make
you tidy the schoolroom every night. You've got to learn to keep it tidy on
your own." Then she goes up one night and finds the Teddy bear and the ink
and the French Grammar all lying in the grate. That is against her will. She
would prefer the children to be tidy. But on the other hand, it is her will
which has left the children free to be untidy. The same thing arises in any
regiment, or trade union, or school. You make a thing voluntary and then
half the people do not do it. That is not what you willed, but your will has
made it possible.
It is probably the same in the universe. God created things which had
free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. Some
people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no
possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is
also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why,
then, did God give them free will? Because free will though it makes evil
possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or
joy worth having. A world of automata-of creatures that worked like
machines-would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for
His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to
Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which
the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk
and water. And for that they must be free.
Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the
wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk. Perhaps we feel inclined
to disagree with Him. But there is a difficulty about disagreeing with God.
He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be
right and He wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own
source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very
power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch
you are sitting on. If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price
worth paying for free will-that is, for making a live world in which
creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can
happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the
strings-then we may take it it is worth paying.
When we have understood about free will, we shall see how silly it is
to ask, as somebody once asked me: "Why did God make a creature of such
rotten stuff that it went wrong?" The better stuff a creature is made of-the
cleverer and stronger and freer it is-then the better it will be if it goes
right, but also the worse it will be if it goes wrong. A cow cannot be very
good or very bad; a dog can be both better and worse; a child better and
worse still; an ordinary man, still more so; a man of genius, still more so;
a superhuman spirit best-or worst-of all.
How did the Dark Power go wrong? Here, no doubt, we ask a question to
which human beings cannot give an answer with any certainty. A reasonable
(and traditional) guess, based on our own experiences of going wrong, can,
however, be offered. The moment you have a self at all, there is a
possibility of putting Yourself first-wanting to be the centre-wanting to be
God, in fact. That was the sin of Satan: and that was the sin he taught the
human race. Some people think the fall of man had something to do with sex,
but that is a mistake. (The story in the Book of Genesis rather suggests
that some corruption in our sexual nature followed the fall and was its
result, not its cause.) What Satan put into the heads of our remote
ancestors was the idea that they could "be like gods"-could set up on their
own as if they had created themselves-be their own masters-invent some sort
of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of that
hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history-money,
poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery-the long
terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will
make him happy.
The reason why it can never succeed is this. God made us: invented us
as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on gasoline, and it would
not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run