Man Out of Darkness: Religion Has Not Lost Its Power

by THEODORE M. GREENE

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WHEN Professor Stace says that the question of purpose in the universe is the crucial cultural issue of our times, he is certainly right. He is also right in urging us to face the truth, whatever it is, and to live with it honestly and courageously. The question is, Is “the truth" what he thinks it is? Has science, as Professor St ace claims, given us a new imaginative picture of the world — a picture of a meaningless and purposeless universe indifferent to all human aspiration? This picture in its large outline is certainly not “new” — in our tradition it is at least as old as Democritus and Lucretius. Nor is it correct to say that science has given us a picture of reality as a whole which logically excludes meaning and purpose. All that can fairly be said is that the scientific account of the “world of nature” does not, at least at present, include moral or religious purpose and meaning. The picture science paints is neutral with respect to such purpose and meaning because the scientific enterprise, in and of itself, simply ignores these issues.

It must be admitted, however, that the concept of a purposeless universe has been judged by many people to have received the endorsement of modern science. We must also grant that this picture, with its prestige thus greatly enhanced, has profoundly influenced the thought and the unconscious attitudes of a lot of people, particularly the intelligentsia, but also the man in the street.

But ibis is not the whole story. Not only has organized Christianity losi no ground during the last decades; it is actually increasing its following in this country, in England, and in some portions of Europe. More people are going to church with, in many cases, a deeper sense of spiritual need.

Theological seminaries arc crowded with students who are, on the whole, abler than their pre-war predecessors, yet seminaries are unable to satisfy the demand of churches for more clergy. Missionary activity is increasing in scope and improving in quality. Christianity is more widely spread geographically and more deeply rooted among more peoples than it has ever been. The Christian ecumenical movement is making rapid strides; through it Christians are coming together on a world-wide scale as never before.

There is also increasingly evident in various branches of the Church a growing tendency to take stock of their inadequacies and failures, to indulge in contrite self-examination, and to seek to promote a revitalization of Christian belief, thought, and social action.

No less significant is the renewed interest of college students in a faith to live by. Most of these eager inquirers are largely ignorant of the Bible, Christian doctrine, and the Christian tradition. Many of them are highly critical of Christian orthodoxy and traditionalism and are indignant at what they (often justly) regard as self-righteousness, wishful thinking, and cant in organized religion. Few are properly equipped to grapple intelligently with the basic problems of religious faith in our secular society. But they are neither complacent nor dogmatic; they are deeply troubled and sincerely anxious to find whatever light and strengt h religion can provide. In short, the “spirit of religion” is a vital force in their lives.

Who, then, is the common man who, according to Professor St ace, has absorbed the idea of a purposeless universe so completely that he has lost all belief not only in God but in moral principles, freedom of the will, and moral responsibility, and could not now be persuaded to abandon or modify this idea even if the intellectual and spiritual leaders in his community were convinced that it was erroneous? In so far as he is impervious to philosophy, he will not greatly be affected by naturalism in its modern scientific dress. If, on the other hand, he has been impressed indeed, very deeply impressed — by the “new world picture,” is there any reason why philosophers and scientists, in combination, could not gradually impress another picture of the world upon his mind?

This leaves us with the question, Can we formulate a constructive argument in support of a critical religious faith? I believe we can.

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THE scientific method has amply demonstrated its validity and power in the areas of inquiry, and for the purposes, for which it has been designed. Witness the spectacular advance of science over the past three hundred years, the large measure of agreement among reputable scientists, and the technological achievements of applied science, every one of which is a pragmatic demonstration of the scientist’s understanding of natural processes.

Science also invites, and supports, more embracing philosophical accounts of the nature of the physical world, and no responsible interpretation of reality as a whole can ignore, or contradict, careful philosophical generalizations based upon well-established scientific conclusions. The position I would defend is therefore committed to affirmative reliance on scientific evidence and to the full incorporation, at any point in history, of accepted scientifically supported interpretations of nature.

Science, however, in the stricter sense of the term, is not all-inclusive; it addresses itself to a specific type of inquiry into a specific area of reality for a specific purpose. Pure science concerns itself solely with temporal events, both “physical’ and “psycho-physical.” It studies these to discover and formulate recurrences and uniformities, commonly called “laws of nature”; and it does so partly to satisfy man’s native curiosity, partly to facilitate his control of nature for greater human welfare. But, as Professor Stace admits, it is by its very nature unqualified to deal with values; “it can teach us the best means for achieving our ends, it can never tell us what ends to pursue.” This fact is enormously important, for it means that science, in its strict sense, simply has nothing to say about God or goodness or beauty.

Hence the “imaginative picture of the world” which science, in and of itself, supports is of course a picture of a valueless, meaningless universe. How could it be otherwise? But this doesn’t prove that there are no values and no God in the universe; it merely proves that science can’t possibly discover these values and this Deity if they do exist.

Furthermore, no scientific conclusions, at any point in history, are final, definitive, or certain. They are necessarily hypothetical and tentative. It follows that philosophical extrapolations of science are equally tentative and hypothetical. For example, late-nineteenth-century science supported the philosophical doctrine of strict mechanistic determinism; some qualified philosophers today are not sure that the most recent scientific thinking justifies any such philosophical conclusion. In any case, the farther science advances, the less disposed are first-rate scientists to believe that they have fathomed the mysteries even of the world of nature, let alone the whole of reality. Their attitude is humble and cautious, not dogmatic and assured.

If my analysis is correct thus far, it follows that science cannot properly deny that there may be meaning and purpose, or even a God, in the universe, though it cannot itself make any such assertions. Responsible belief in God and in a cosmic purpose is possible, however, only if affirmative evidence can be adduced for its support. Without such evidence, moral and religious belief would have to be wholly blind, and I would condemn blind faith as heartily as does Professor Stace. What kind of evidence, then, would be relevant and coercive? On what kind of experience can an enlightened belief in God and cosmic meaning be based?

The obvious answer would seem to be: on man’s moral and religious experiences. Moralists like Socrates and Kant based their beliefs in a meaningful cosmos on man’s moral experiences at their best. Christian theologians have based their beliefs on man’s Christian experiences, individual and corporate. Is this procedure invalid? Is it wrong to believe that we can achieve reliable knowledge of objective moral values by means of a critical interpretation of man’s experience of duty, his respect for his fellow man, his loyalty to moral ideals, or that we can achieve reliable knowledge of God by critical interpretation of man’s religious experiences as described, for example, in the New Testament?

It is precisely at this point that we can relate man’s search for, and knowledge of, God and moral values to man’s scientific study of, and knowledge of, nature. The scientific method is, in essence, the method of rational interpretation of sensory evidence. (I will ignore here the complications raised by psychology.) This means that both sensory evidence and rational interpretation are essential for scientific knowledge; that sensory data without interpretation are blind, and that reasoning, however consistent, which is not based on sensory evidence is empty of content.

If we can accept the basic scientific assumption that logical interpretation of sensory evidence gives us an ever increasing understanding of the world of nature, why can we not similarly assume that the logical interpretation of moral and religious data, if such exist, can give us an ever increasing understanding of a spiritual — that is, a moral and religious — dimension of reality which is related to, but not identical with, the world of nature? If this were possible, it would then be the task of philosophy to try to give an account of reality which does justice both to sensory and to moral and religious experiences, to science and to ethics and theology at their best.

The crucial point in the entire constructive argument is thus the concept of “experience.” If the only type of experience which can be taken seriously — that is, accepted as providing contact with reality and clues to its nature—is sensory experience, then Professor Stace’s conclusions inevitably follow. But why must experience be so narrowly defined? What is to prevent us from being really empirical and believing that man’s moral and religious experiences, which are no less coercive, vivid, sharable, tint! rationally interpretable than his sensory experiences, provide further contacts with reality and further clues to its nature?

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REFLECTIVE religious faith (in contrast to blind superstition and uncritical faith) rests on precisely this more liberal and inclusive conception of experience. It is always anchored in the primary religious experiences of the individual believer, set in the context of the religious experiences of other individuals in the same and other religious traditions. That is, it rcsls on the deep conviction of reflective religious believers that only in and through such experiences do we confront a living God. But religious faith, if it is reflective, is never identified with mere experience, however intense, however often repeated, and however widely shared by others. The factor of reasonable interpretation is as essential as the factor of the primary experience itself.

What we actually find in the history of religions, therefore, parallels what we find in the history of science. The earliest attempts in our tradition at a “scientific” understanding of nature were those of the pre-Socratic thinkers who tried to explain the whole of nature in terms of one or more of the four basic “elements” — earth, air, fire, and water. Only very gradually did this attempt grow out of its primitive crudities into the rich pattern of concepts, principles, and methods that constitute modern science. Similarly, primitive religious beliefs and practices were crude, uncritical, and superstitious; it is only gradually that religious experience and belief have developed into what we find them to be, at their best, in the higher religions.

I do not wish to press this analogy between science and religion too hard. Pure science is merely a way of knowing; religion is a way of life based on a way of knowing. Science can use quantitative measurement as theology cannot. And scientists, at least in principle, can hope for a degree of mutual understanding and agreement which theologians have not yet achieved. This disagreement, however, need not invalidate the belief that man can in some measure know God. If God is the infinite and mysterious Being that religious people believe He is, it is to be expected that man, with his finite mind, will have the greatest difficulty in apprehending His nature at all adequately. I must admit that men of religion have had great difficulty in achieving and maintaining an attitude of humble open-minded search, and are tempted to be. dogmatic and intolerant towards conflicting beliefs regarding the Deity. I do insist, however, on the validity of the religious quest — the belief that man can and does encounter the Divine, that he can and should reflect upon these encounters, and that such reflection can progressively increase our understanding of God and render our belief in Him less superstitious and more responsible and mature.

Many people feel obliged to repudiate religious belief because they identify religion with one of its cruder, more superstitious forms, or because they interpret more enlightened religious beliefs and practices in a crudely anthropomorphic manner. Anyone who thinks that enlightened Christians believe that God is literally in the sky, or that the phrase in the Nicene Creed “sitteth on the right hand of the Father” literally means that God has a body with a right and a left hand, must of course, as an intelligent man, reject such rubbish. It is true that most professing Christians are deplorably uninformed regarding the language of religious utterance and inclined to a crude anthropomorphism in their thinking about God. Hut t he fact that most people are also scientifically illiterate does not justify us in reading this illiteracy into science and in repudiating science on that score. Similarly, Christianity at its enlightened best should not be identified with its unenlightened distortions.

Let us therefore be fair to religion before we decide to brand all religious faith as the “Great Illusion.” We can and should distinguish man’s everyday encounters with nature and his unscientific conceptions of physical objects from the scientist’s much more precise observations and much more critical interpretations of them. We need not, in making this distinction, condemn the common man’s experiences or beliefs as illusory, but we should recognize their limitations. We can say that he possesses “opinions" rather than “knowledge,” defining opinions as beliefs which may be valid so far as they go but which a man who cannot rise above opinions cannot rationally refine or test. Similarly, we can and should distinguish between the common man’s coercive religious experiences which he rather crudely interprets in terms of an inadequate theology, and the far deeper experiences of the saint and the far more refined interpretations of the competent theologian and philosopher of religion. This does not mean that the religious beliefs of the common man are necessarily false, or that he fails to find strength and joy in his religious life; it does not mean that Christianity is available only to intellectual and spiritual aristocrats. Far from it—witness Jesus’ concern for children and uneducated people. “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden.” But Jesus was also concerned to eradicate inadequate conceptions of God in the minds of his disciples, and for twenty centuries his followers have tried to refine and clarify man’s understanding of God — witness the long history of progressive theological clarification. Every honest man must of course make his own final decision as to what he believes and what his ultimate loyalties are to be; but a man is less than honest with himself if he fails to inform himself as best he can what Christianity, or any other religion, is at its best before he rejects it as illusory.

I must add a word regarding the vexed problem of authority. The position I have been sketching, most inadequately, might be labeled “Liberal Christian Protestantism.” This position, on the question of authority, is at variance with Christian positions which assert the literal truth of every word of the Bible or the infallibility of certain ecclesiastical dogmas. I cannot recognize the “absolute” authority of either a book or a church. 1 do, however, recognize the impressive authority, in a non-absolutistie sense, of the accumulated wisdom of the Church and of the Bible as a uniquely rich and revealing record of authentic religious experiences and vital beliefs, and I also agree with those who believe that Jesus taught “as one having authority.” Such a belief is not only completely credible: it is, to me, quite inescapable.

This authority of the Bible (interpreted in the light of the best available Biblical scholarship), and of the Church (interpreted in the light of the best, religiously informed, historical wisdom) and of Jesus Christ, encountered not only in the New Testament but in Christian devotion through the centuries and today by countless sincere Christians, is an enormously impressive testimony that the venture of Christian faith is not illusory, escapist, or irrational, but is magnificently rooted in the poignant experience of Christian love and helpfully elucidated in enlightened Christian doctrine. This faith is not, I believe, to be confused with omniscience or infallibility — it is still faith, not absolute knowledge. But it need not be blind faith, superstitious and irrational; it can become, for each individual and for mankind, a knowledge of God which is more and more deeply rooted in experience, more and more enlightened, more and more productive of that reflective commitment which is the mark of responsible maturity.

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WHERE does this leave us with regard to Professor Stace’s major thesis? It leaves us, I believe, with a way of approaching reality which he does not seriously envisage and which, if followed out, may lead us to a conception of the universe very diflcrent from the one which he offers us as the only possible conception today. Of course I have not been able to describe what Christians accept as crucial experiences of God, any more than he was able to describe the crucial scientific contacts with nature upon which scientists base (heir scientific theories. Nor have I been able to summarize the interpretations of these religious experiences offered by competent theologians, any more than he was able to summarize the major conclusions of modern science.

Anyone who wishes to verify science at first hand must train himself in the scientific method, participate in scientific experiment, and test scientific theories for belief. And even if he does so he must accept on the authority of other scientists the reports of countless other experiments and vast areas of detailed scientific theory.

Similarly, really to explore the religious approach to reality, a man must submit himself to a spiritual discipline, participate in crucial religious experiences at first hand, and test their theological interpretations for himself. The most deeply religious and thoughtful of men, moreover, must rely on the testimony of other members of the religious community, past and present, since he cannot hope, in a single lifetime, to duplicate all the religious experiences and to explore all the theological interpretations which are to be found in his own and other religious traditions. I have therefore in no sense offered a “proof” of God’s existence and nature; I have merely pointed to the empirical method whereby religious beliefs can be generated and tested.

I should not wish to suggest that Christianity is the only religion which should be taken seriously. A responsible philosophy of religion wili study all the religions of mankind, the more primitive as well as the higher, in the same sympathetic and critical spirit. Nor would I insist on any exclusive reliance on any, or all, orthodox ecclesiastical approaches to God. “God moves in a mysterious way,” and all of man’s spiritual aspirations, experiments, and reflections deserve encouragement and open-minded scrutiny. It is in this spirit that I should always welcome the secular and humanistic search for whatever can give meaning and purpose to human life. This does not mean that all roads are equally illuminating and promising. Some must certainly be dead-ends and others painfully indirect and tortuous. But no one who wishes to avoid dogmatism can presume to deny categorically that genuine light and strength may be available to those who are searching for a cosmic meaning along some other road than the one he himself is traveling.

I have not been able to demonstrate God’s existence; neither have I proved that the universe is meaningful and purposive; nor do I wish to assert that it is with the dogmatic assurance of those who deny cosmic purpose. I can, however, record my own conviction, in company with countless others, that these moral and religious approaches to reality provide evidence which justifies, nay, compels, the conclusion that there is a meaning and purpose at the heart of things. But no one can hope to encounter and comprehend this valuedimension of reality who does not feel a sense of need sufficient to motivate a humble, honest search for what others claim to have found. Philosophers, scientists, and all men capable of sincere idealism can themselves enter upon this search only in this spirit of eager inquiry.

Religion cannot, it is true, “get on with a purposeless and meaningless universe,” but it alone — or, at best, its moral equivalent — can reveal to us a universe which has a purpose and a meaning. Only to the man of religion do the “heavens declare the glory of God”; but to him they do declare this glory. Hence the peculiar responsibility of those who feel that the religious spirit is alive in them, and particularly the responsibility of organized religion. The Churches could do far more than they are doing now to educate their clergy and laity, to vitalize the Christian experience of their people, to translate Christian belief into social action, to combat racial prejudice and social privilege wit hin the Christian community, and, above all, to cultivate the tolerance and the humility that should be the first fruits of Christian love. Were the Christian leaven in the Churches purer and more powerful, it would be far more effective in quickening the religious spirit which today, though far from dead, is often dormant and lethargic.

Professor Stace is, I think, quite right in insisting that the vitality of our culture depends essentially upon the vitality of the religious spirit in it. That is why his charges against religion are so serious and his prophecies so ominous. The implication of his argument, and of my counterargument thus far, has been that the chief function of religion is to vitalize a human culture. In any informed religious perspective, however, and certainly in the Christian perspective, this is to put second things first.

The prime motive for religious revival cannot be the saving of our own or any other civilization, for that would involve the attempt to make God simply serve human ends and satisfy human desires. In the Great Commandment of Christianity, the love of God and His worship is man’s supreme privilege and duty; the exhortation to love your neighbor as yourself follows as a necessary corollary. A true Christian does believe that only in and through God’s love for man, and man’s responsive love for God, can individual men, or mankind, be saved, in this world or the next, and the New Testament is eloquent in its condemnation of those who profess to love God but fail to translate this love into charity toward their fellow men. But God alone is holy, not mankind or any human culture. Religion, if valid, is first of all an end in itself, though also an essential condition of cultural vitality. Only in this perspective can we hope to avoid a sentimentalized and distorted interpretation of religion.

My final word to Mr. Stace, then, is this. Man finds himself today not in “darkness” but in a cultural and spiritual twilight which T. S. Eliot describes as a “place of disaffection . . . in a dim light,” a state of “neither plenitude nor vacancy,” “a twittering world.” It may be that we must, as Eliot believes we must, “descend lower” into

before we can hope, as individuals or as a race, to achieve the requisite sense of need and humility. The Christian Gospel directs us not to a romantic primrose path of comforting illusions, but to the painful road of suffering and sacrifice, to the way of the Cross. Men have never really lived by illusions: they have merely existed, in some kind of fool’s paradise. Men cannot now really live, fully and deeply, on illusions, either the “minor” illusions of “fame, glory, power, or money” which Professor Stace rather cynically invites us not to give up, or the Great Illusion which he identifies with religious faith but which should perhaps rather be identified with Stygian disbelief in God. We are indeed “standing on the brink.” We do indeed need courage and honesty, not, however, to face an inevitable loss of faith, but rather to search our own hearts and minds to see whether we may not ourselves have generated this “darkness” and inadvertently invented the myth that the “light will not shine again.” May it perchance be true that “the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not”?

Each of us musl finally assume the responsibility of deciding whether to believe the grim injunction: Since faith is impossible and civilization doomed, resign yourselves to quiet contentment and be thankful for small mercies — this is the test of secular maturity; or, alternatively, the sober but heart-warming injunction to achieve religious maturity and joy: “These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”