                 26 page printout, page 81 - 106
                            CHAPTER V

                  The Futility of Belief in God

          The Silence of God -- Who Made the World? --
    Does Evolution Exclude God -- The Voice of Conscience --
               The Religious Instinct -- Disproofs

                       THE SILENCE OF GOD

     A WEEK or two ago I stood on the brink of a dark, strange pool
in central Yucatan. It lay deep in a large round pit in the midst
of the forest, some two hundred yards from the temples and sacred
buildings which explorers had stripped of their mantle of bush and
their mounds of earth.

     This was once a great Maya city. Now fat lizards sunned
themselves in the rocky ledges of the sheer sides of the pool.
Tender foliage overhung the edge and was mirrored in the quiet
water. A paved road led to the pool from the temples, and, where it
reached the edge of the pool, it ended in a raised parapet of
stone.

     And I half close my eyes and people the deserted woods with
the men and women who trod that road a thousand years ago. A sacred
procession comes along it, and with the austere priests are flower-
decked maidens in festive dress. But in spite of flowers and fine
robes, in spite of throbbing music and thousands of spectators, a
look of terror quivers piteously in the maidens' eyes. They are
going to die. The god wants victims. The priests say so. In a few
moments these fairest things that life produces, young girls in the
fresh bloom of womanhood, will be hurled from the parapet into the
pool, fifty feet below, and they and their mothers must stifle
their agony in a pretense of blessedness.

     Well, You say, that was in the heart of Yucatan, and a
thousand years ago.

     A thousand miles away is the ghost of the city of another
ancient American people, and guides will show you the stone on
which priests stretched their victims to pluck out the heart and
offer it to the sun-god. Still ancient America, you say. But away
over the earth, in the islands of the Pacific, in central Africa,
the gods still clamored for the blood of men only a few decades
ago. In ancient Rome, in Cartage, in Britain, in Syria -- remember
the story of Abraham and Isaac -- these ghastly sacrifices had been
demanded. During countless ages of human history men and maidens
had been slain in the name of gods.

     Where was God? I do not ask you why He tolerated these crimes
in His name for thousands of years, because the answer will be that
you do not know. But you cannot blot all these horrors out of the
memory of man by light assurances that the finite mind cannot hope
to comprehend the infinite. It is a truism; but the facts remain.
From near the dawn of religion, which was many tens of thousands of
years ago, horrible things have been done, and grotesque things
believed, in the name of God. I am merely asking you for the moment




                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               81

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

to admit to yourself that you hold that God, your God, looked down
complacently from his state of blessedness during long ages upon
all the grisly blunders and tortures of the children of men, yet 
might have ended the whole ghastly folly in one generation.

     We know not why he takes time, you say, but the hour comes.
When? At Cholula I see a Christian church perched on the top of a
pyramid which once bore one of these bloody Mexican temples. To the
Catholics of the district it is a symbol of the at-last triumph of
revelation and mercy over human error and brutality. They do not
reflect that they believe that God made those blundering and brutal
humans of long ago; that he could have made them wiser in a year as
easily as in a hundred thousand years.

     Moreover, to the Protestant this pyramid-church merely means
that one ghastly error in the name of God has been substituted for
another. An improvement certainly: men ought to grow wiser in the
course of two thousand generations. Hearts are not physically
plucked out of living bodies in the Roman Church. No, they are
sacrificed in a different way. Near by is a nunnery, and priests
lead prettily dressed maidens to the altar to make the vow of
celibacy which they understand little more than does the babe in
arms, and which means living death to the heart.

     The Mayas and Aztecs went, but cruel things were still done
for centuries, and are done today all over the world, in the name
of God. And God was still silent. He was silent when women were
drowned as witches, and honest men were burned as heretics. He was
silent when the savage and demoralizing doctrine of eternal torment
was, in his name, imposed upon the whole earth, four thousand years
after the founding of civilization. He is still silent when -- as
happened in Tennessee recently -- the ill-educated preacher tells
the agonized mother that the soul of her dead and un-baptized babe
burns, and will burn forever, in the most appalling fires the human
imagination ever pictured,

     I am not at present arguing about the existence of God. I am
merely asking you to face manfully two facts: the long silence of
God, the long martyrdom of man. We will argue about them later.
First let us add two other facts. The belief in God today is
strongest where man has least to thank God for, and it is weakest
where men have most knowledge and most mental training. It is
universal only where life is poorest and where men have the least
intelligence to perceive whether or not they are indebted to God.

     Here and there in the world, both in Europe and in Latin
America, you see what life was like a hundred or three hundred
years ago. The very day before I sit down to write this I wander
out in a little Cuban town not thirty miles from Havana. The drains
run in open filthy streams in the center of the streets. Disease
hovers about every child that plays innocently in the sunshine.
Today little Rosita is a flower of the earth, the light and joy of
one of these poor hut-homes. In a few days, perhaps, the claw of
diphtheria will be on her tender throat, or the fiery poison of
small-pox or typhus will run in her veins.




                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               82

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     But they are all such staunch believers in God here in
Guanajay that they would cross themselves if they knew my opinions.
I have been amongst such people in Spain and Italy, in Greece and
Serbia and Bulgaria. This was the common life of men two centuries
ago, and as the conditions are improved by man, belief in God
decays. It was skeptics from New York who purified Havana, thirty
miles away, and Havana has now very many skeptics. El Anti-
Clerical, a native skeptical paper, sells in its streets.

     No, men now believe most deeply and most widely in God just
where life is most treacherous, where poverty stings worst, where
hearts are still torn out and sacrificed. And these men and women
know less, and are less capable of thinking, than men in the
skeptical cities where disease has been checked, where the burden
is lighter. Somehow, the richer life grows, the less we thank God.
The larger its problems grow, the less we consult God. The more
knowledge grows, the smaller becomes the figure of God in the sky.
The more learning a man has, the more likely you are to find him a
skeptic.

     Which of these statements would you dispute? It is, surely, a
platitude that belief in God is least disturbed amongst the more
backward nations of the earth: that it is most disturbed in the
cities of the more advanced nations, and most of all in the learned
world.

     So it is with the practice of taking one's troubles and
problems to God. He is not seriously invoked at Geneva, where the
world's gravest problems are discussed. He is unknown in the
Foreign Offices of the great Powers. There is some form of invoking
divine guidance at Washington, and Westminster; but is it serious?
Do our highest judges now pray before they give their gravest
decisions? Do our leading physicians consult God -- or medical
works? No, God has been expelled from council and congress, school
and law court, almost from the home. He is confined to the church.

     It is strange to see how lightly the modern world abandoned
God. In the great cities of Europe only a small minority ever go to
a place of worship. It is unquestionably the same in America. The
bishops of the Episcopal Church in America found, in war-time, just
the same proportion of men who never attended church as was found
in England: nine out of ten.

     Now, we can take a census of church-goers, as we have done in
London and Paris, but there is no census of sincere opinions, and
we do not know how many of these non-church-goers still believe in
God. I have quoted one of the gravest of the English bishops
saying: "Belief in God is dead in England." That is certainly a
large exaggeration; but we do find by daily contact with the crowd
that millions in our cities now no longer believe in God, or are so
indifferent about the matter that they can hardly say whether or
not they believe.

     For the other fundamental religious belief, the faith in
immortality, men, even after giving up the Christian creed, make
some sort of struggle. But few plead for God, outside the Christian



                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               83

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

Churches. The belief is slowly dying. And God is still silent. He
might write in letters of fire across the firmament at night, and
we should all return to our knees. He is silent.

     But he has written on the firmament once for all, you may say.
On every stone of the fabric of the universe, you claim, there are
the initials of the architect and builder. That is what we are
going to study in this chapter.

     One of the silliest calumnies that was ever invented is the
statement that only coarse-minded men reject belief in God. There
are, it is true, people who thrust the belief out of their minds
wilfully and live rebelliously. These are exceptions. They were
formerly far more common than now. Only a fool would defy a God:
would purchase thirty years of pleasure at the price of an eternity
of agony. In any case, the modern skeptic is a very real skeptic.
His revolt is intellectual and emotional, and it is his finer
emotions that cause his rejection of the idea of God.

     Does that puzzle you? Recall the long silence of God of which
I have spoken. Those bloody human blunders are only a small part of
the story. Man did not create the germs of diphtheria and smallpox,
even if, in his ignorance, he made nurseries for them. For
countless millions of years deadly parasites of thousands of
species have sucked or poisoned the blood of all other living
things. For all these millions of years the carnivore has rent the
flesh of his victim. Your intellect may say that this is a mystery.
Your heart is disposed to say that there is no mystery: that blind
nature, not conscious purpose, must have begotten these things. The
heart is not on the side of God.

     But the mind may have reasons which the heart knoweth not, to
change the famous phrase of Pascal. You may think that you are able
to silence the rebellion of the heart by heaping up formidable
proofs that there is a God. On a question of fact the heart must
yield to the head.

     But here is another difficulty. Amongst those who are most
capable of thinking, there is no agreement whatever as to these
proofs" of the existence of God. It is another aspect of this
terrible problem of the silence of God. From the days of Plato,
from the time of Job, thoughtful men have racked their brains to
find and formulate proof of the existence of God.

     To the mass of mankind, of course, it is, and always was,
simple. A famous preacher quotes with warm approval the saying of
an Arab of the desert when some skeptic asked him how be knew that
Allah existed. "How do I know that a camel has passed this way?" he
asked in reply, pointing to the footprints in the sand.

     Strange, isn't it, that it should be so plain to the Arab and
the farmer and the preacher, and so profound and difficult a
problem to the thinker! Strange that in proportion as the mental
eye is trained by education, the footprints on the sand seem to
become fainter. Plato, the great Greek thinker, gave the world two
thousand three hundred years ago what men regarded as the most
brilliant proofs of the existence of God. Hardly any man sees any 


                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               84

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

force in them today. Aristotle, an even greater thinker of the same
age, gave other and quite different proofs. Hardly any man follows
him today. St. Augustine tried next, and his arguments are just as
antiquated. From those days to ours men have been inventing new
arguments -- we will consider them -- and there is no agreement
about any of them. The majority of our best thinkers, our
philosophers, do not believe in the existence of a personal God.
Not one of them admits any force in any of the popular arguments
for God.

     I ask you only to admit that the matter is not so simple as
you thought: that the unbeliever is not exactly the "fool"
described by the Hebrew Psalmist. It is a mighty problem. You
cannot even understand the reasons why most of the deeper religious
thinkers of our time believe in God unless you first learn the most
difficult of all sciences -- philosophy. It would take you years to
understand what is called "the position of God in modern thought."
And God is silent.

     Well, these chapters are not written for philosophers. A
simple account will be given later of what the philosophers are
saying, but in the main I want to examine the reasons why the
reader, or his religious neighbor, believes in God. A thousand
million people still believe in God, and for much the same reasons,
and scarcely a trained thinker in the world will admit that those
reasons have any logical force. And God is silent.

                       WHO MADE THE WORLD?

     In my many travels I never obtrude my opinions about religion.
I write them, and I lecture about them, and those who will may read
or hear. I do not trouble others. But, knowing my opinions, people
talk to me about God and would understand why I cannot admit his
existence. So they tell me why they believe in him, and the
argument most commonly takes the form of the question which I have
made the title of this section: Who made the world, if there is no
God?

     The reader may have had a different experience, though it
could hardly be a broader and more varied experience. Men and
women, youths and maidens, preachers and lawyers and men of
business, have put their belief to me in that form. And quite
triumphantly. It was as plain as the lesson of the camel's
footprint. And, knowing (or believing) that I am a person of
average intelligence, they really wondered what I would reply.

     And the reply, which is not really a reply at all, because the
question is foolish, is deadly. You ask, Who made the world? Why
not, What made the world? In fact -- we will consider later the
argument that the world-maker must be personal or intelligent --
let us settle the question at once. We do it by asking another
question: Prithee, how do you know that the world ever was made?

     Do not tell me that it "stands to reason." The highest
representatives of reason today are our philosophers and
scientists, and I do not think that there is a single one of them
now living who believes that the world was "made." They may be 
wrong, of course, but is it not more likely that there is something
wrong with the basis of your simple proof?
                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               85

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     Let us analyze it. In asking your questions you assume that
the world was made. There is no need to define exactly what we mean
by the "world" and "Made." We mean the universe or (if there are
many universes, as some astronomers think) all the universes. By
"made" you mean created. You take it for granted that there was a
time when the universe did not exist, and that at the word of God
it sprang into existence. And that is just where you go astray.
There is no proof whatever that the world had a beginning.

     You will probably acknowledge at once that you had no definite
reason for assuming that the world had a beginning. Everybody
assumes it, simply because he has been taught for ages that
Genesis, in its first line, says so. We shall see later what that
means, and what it is worth. But you cannot quote "the word of God"
until you have proved that there is a God. And apart from Genesis
there is no ground for saying that the world ever had a beginning,
so there is no meaning in asking who made it.

     Do you mean, you will say, that the world is eternal? No. I
mean that it may be, for all I know or anybody knows. It is for the
person who says that it was made -- that it had a beginning -- to
prove his assertion.

     Until some sort of proof is given me that the world was made,
it is useless, surely, to ask me to speculate as to who made it.
Here it is. It may always have been here. I think it was.

     In point of fact, practically all thinkers -- scientists and
philosophers -- now regard the world as eternal. Philosophers (and
many others) do so because the idea of creation out of nothing is
incomprehensible to them, and, after all, there is only the word of
some unknown Hebrew writer of twenty-five hundred years ago in
favor of this idea of creation.

     Scientists regard the world as eternal, partly for the same
reason, partly on account of what modern astronomy tells us. I am
writing this at sunset on the deck of a great liner in the Gulf of
Mexico. Soon the stars will shine out of the tropical dark purple
sky as they never shine on land. A sharp eye can detect their
difference in color: red, yellow, white and blue. They are of
different temperatures, from dull red to steely blue, from about
3,000' to about 30,000' C. The most wonderful instrument we have,
the spectroscope, confirms this.

     And different temperatures mean different ages. The life of a
star is its temperature. It begins (as all metal does) at a dull
red, passes through yellow and white to a brilliant whitish-blue,
then sinks through white and yellow to red. We can tell which of
the red stars are increasing in temperature, are beginning their
career, and which are in their last phase. Another wonderful
instrument, invented in America a few years ago, tells us this. It
measures them. At first the stars are of an immense size. I shall
presently be gazing at one of the southern stars, Antares, the
blood-red heart of the Scorpion, which we know to be four hundred
million miles in diameter. Our sun is less than one million.
Antares is beginning to contract. Our sun is far advanced in
contraction. It is slowly dying.


                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               86

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     In short, the stars differ in age as much as do the human
beings in a busy city street. The only difference is that the baby-
stars are giants, and the dying stars are dwarfs, and that the life
of a star runs to billions of years. So myriads of stars will shine
ages after our sun is dead. Myriads shone before our sun was born.
And we see, all over the universe, the cloudy filmy material for
making new stars when all our two billion stars have sunk into
darkness. The universe is just like a nation, apparently.
Generation succeeds generation. We have no reason to suspect a
beginning or an end. Rather the reverse.

     Naturally, we do not say dogmatically that the universe had no
beginning. For my part, at least, I should never say positively
that the world is eternal. I do not know enough, after fifty years
of study, to be as dogmatic as young preachers are. But we do know
one thing. The stars differ from each other in age by billions of
years. The old idea that for an eternity there was a void, and
then, for some unknown reason, God spoke and the universe leaped
into being, is certainly wrong. The stars would be of the same age
if that were true.

     Those who "reconcile" science and religion now often say that
God merely created the material of the universe and allowed it, and
gave it the power, to evolve. This does not help in the least. We
have no reason whatever to suppose that the matter of the universe
ever had a beginning. So we have no reason to entertain the idea of
its being created. You may choose to believe it, but you are
believing and asserting something for which there is not a shred of
proof.

     Here and there in old-fashioned religious literature you find
a curious attempt to prove that the world really had a beginning.
The proof runs something like this: If the world is eternal, then
the number of days, or units of time, which have already elapsed
must be infinite. But the number is being added to every day, so it
cannot be infinite. Therefore time is finite. They say much the
same about space. If the universe is infinite, the number of miles
out in any direction from our earth must be infinite. But there are
just as many miles in the Opposite direction, so ...

     I do not know whether the reader expects a patient analysis of
this sort of verbiage. Writers who say these things are merely
playing with ideas. There are no "days" or "miles" in nature. There
is no such thing as an infinite series which is bounded at one end.
The whole argument is preposterous.

     And much the same must be said about a set of arguments for a
maker of the universe which, like the preceding, are chiefly used
in Roman Catholic literature. There are causes and effects in the
universe, one argument runs, and therefore there must be a First
Cause. There are movements in the universe, so there must be a
Prime Mover, something ultimate which moves all and is not itself
moved. There are things in the universe which exist by chance or
contingency, but at the base of all there must be something that
exists necessarily.




                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               87

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     Roman Catholics are most amusingly proud of these curious
arguments. They imagine that they are part of the great treasure of
learning of the Catholic Middle Ages, and that Protestants have
forfeited these wonderful demonstrations by severing themselves
from Rome. The truth is that all such arguments were completely
discredited more than a hundred years ago. They are mere words and
phrases strung together. They "do but gather dust in our
libraries," as the great American thinker, Professor William James,
said of them.

     Take the supposed argument for a First Cause. The idea of
cause and effect is not taken very seriously in modern science and
philosophy, but we will accept it as roughly expressing what we see
in nature. Heat causes evaporation, electricity in the clouds
causes lightening and thunder, and so on. And of course you must
come ultimately to a fundamental cause or causes. There is no clear
reason for saying that ultimately there is just one First Cause.
There is no reason for giving it (or them) capital letters. In
point of fact, ether (which Professor Dayton Miller has recently
proved to be a reality) is probably the ultimate or fundamental
reality of the universe, the Prime Mover and all the rest of it.
Until you prove that ether had a beginning -- that there was a time
when it did not exist -- the mind cannot pass beyond it.

     But how, we are asked, could a material reality like ether be
the first cause of spiritual things like mind, emotion, idealism?
A stream cannot rise above its source, we are told. Well, we cannot
here discuss materialism and spiritualism. That is done elsewhere.
We have seen that there is no proof that mind is spiritual, so
there is no need to assume a spiritual reality and no need to use
capital letters for the "First Cause" and "Prime Mover."

     These dry-as-dust arguments are quite discredited in modern
thought, and we will not waste further time on them. I notice them
rather as illustrations of my point that most people believe in God
on grounds which are disdainfully regarded by other believers in
God as mere fallacies. They agree together only in saying that the
existence of God is certain and the Atheist is a fool. After that
each flatly denies that the "proofs" of the other are of any value
whatever!

     But there is another type of very zealous believer who thinks
that his proof is in the strictest accord with science -- is, in
fact, based on science. Men put this to me with the greatest
assurance, and profess a pathetic surprise at the skepticism
amongst men of science. There are "laws of nature," they say. Every
page of a scientific work talks about them. Very good, then there
must be a law-giver. A great mind stamped these laws upon the
material universe and so set it evolving.

     It is a good example of the extreme weakness of all the
popular arguments for the existence of God -- of the way in which
religious literature always lags a generation or two behind science
and philosophy, and so believers are honestly unable to understand
the Agnosticism of modern thinkers. The Catholic, with his First
Cause and Prime Mover and Necessary Being, lingers in the
atmosphere of the Middle Ages. The Protestant, with his "laws of
nature," is merely clinging to fallacies of the early part of the 
nineteenth century.
                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               88

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     Laws of nature, as we use the phrase in science, have not the
least resemblance to human laws, and have no relation whatever to
a "legislator" or a mind. We say, for instance, that there is a law
of gravitation. But we do not mean that there is a code of behavior
drawn up in advance which things must obey. We mean simply that
things do behave consistently in certain ways. The "law," as we
call it, is simply a description of their behavior.

     How very shallow, some eloquent preacher or apologetic writer
says! Let me ask you again to reflect that it is strange that these
men should be so profound while our great men of science, who are
all their lives studying the "laws of nature," very rarely believe
in this supreme legislator. You must, surely, sometimes suspect
that there is something wrong with this cocksureness of the
preacher and the religious writer.

     There is, and it is very simple. He never -- quite naturally
-- knows enough about science to understand fully these matters
about which he speaks. A stone, let us say, always falls to the
ground unless it is prevented. Why should it, unless there is a law
imposed upon it? Nature acts uniformly, or consistently. But if
nature is blind and unconscious, ought we not to expect things to
act erratically, not uniformly?

     Not in the least. It is a very poor fallacy. Consistent
behavior is just what we ought to expect from blind mechanical
things. A ball will roll in a straight line unless something
interferes with it. It is will, or mind, that we might expect to
act otherwise. It would be a proof of mind in nature if things at
times did not act uniformly; it is precisely the contrary when we
find them acting uniformly.

     No, along these lines the human mind will never reach God.
Many learned theologians, in fact, now give up the idea of
creation, or first causes and prime movers and legislators. They
look to the order, the beauty, the design in nature for proof of
the existence of a great intelligence. Let us see what there is in
this.

                   DOES EVOLUTION EXCLUDE GOD?

     Here we come at once to the great question which agitates the
religious world in America: Does evolution undermine or destroy the
belief in God?

     Let us consider it very patiently and very frankly. Certain
men of science in the United States go about loudly proclaiming
that evolution is quite consistent with religion. It is quite
useless to try to settle the question that way. Professor Osborn
and Professor Millikan have every right to tell any person whom it
may interest -- it does not interest me, because I know that they
have never studied philosophy or religion -- that they believe both
in evolution and religion. But they have no right whatever to say
this in the name of science; for the great majority of men of
science and evolutionists do not believe in God.




                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               89

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     Just a word about this "conflict of religion and science."
Science as such is never concerned with religion. No branch of
science deals with God or the soul or Christ. Yet there is a deadly
conflict, because science tells us a large number of truths which,
in the opinion of the majority of highly educated people, are
inconsistent with the belief in God and the soul. Let me add again
that it is mere folly to propose on that account to exclude
evolution and science from the schools. The facts of history -- in
short, all the facts about nature and man which we now know -- are
just as inconsistent with religion.

     In order to understand the clash, let us glance at the history
of it. Atheism began long ago, in ancient Greece, and religious
thinkers like Socrates worked out the argument that the order and
beauty and purposiveness of nature proved the existence of a God.
That controversy was suspended by Europe passing into the Dark
Ages, but after the Renaissance men began to think again and the
old issue returned.

     Modern skepticism began with a group of men whom we call
Deists. They rejected the Christian religion, but they believed in
God, and they turned again to the old proofs of God's existence and
developed them. Atheism was arising once more. To cut a long story
short, by the middle of the nineteenth century there was a whole
library of books proving that the order of the heavenly bodies, the
beauty of nature, and the remarkable contrivances by means of which
animals and plants maintained their lives, pointed triumphantly to
the existence of a supreme intelligence and designer. Science
seemed to be full of evidence for God.

     Then came Charles Darwin. What a tremendous splash that quiet
little man made in the religious world! Yet Darwin never attacked
religion. Indeed, if he were not such a great and good man, I
should say that he was rather cowardly about it. He believed
sincerely in God at the time when he wrote "The Origin of Species,"
and, although he came some years later to reject the belief, it was
difficult to get him to speak on the subject. He was a delicate and
retiring man, and he looked on with some bewilderment when the
brilliant Professor Huxley and my equally high-minded, if not
equally gifted, friend, Professor Haeckel, proceeded to show that
evolution made an end of God and the soul.

     There had been evolutionists before Darwin, and Darwin's
particular theory of how evolution was brought about is by no means
generally accepted today; though it is not honest to represent this
as a doubt about the fact of evolution itself. But Darwin's name is
forever, and deservedly, associated with evolution because he put
it on a very solid basis of facts and drew the attention of the
world to it.

     And it was at once apparent that it had a most serious bearing
on religion. As I said, the religious literature of the first half
of the nineteenth century was full of proofs of God's existence
drawn from the remarkable structures and instincts of animals, and
the wonderful adaptations of plants to their surroundings. Look how
wonderfully the deep-sea fishes are adapted to life at the bottom
of the sea, the desert shrubs to the scarcity of water in the 


                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               90

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

desert, the Alpine flowers to the cold of the mountains, the
mammals to the low temperature of the north, the reptiles to the
warmth of the tropics! And so on. Every organ of every organism was
as eloquent a proof of a divine artificer as the parts of a watch
are of the watchmaker.

     It opened up an entirely new world, it made theologians
shudder, when evolutionists began to show that all these things
were gradually evolved during tens of millions of years. If these
structures had come into existence all of a piece, certainly we
should have to admit a creator. But if they were evolved gradually,
one crude form leading to another, the whole situation is changed.
Unconscious nature may do, by many trials and errors, in a million
years what it certainly cannot do in a year. Moreover, several
theories of the way in which this evolution could be brought about
naturally, without any design in advance, of any supernatural
guidance, have been put forward by scientific men, and, whether you
follow Darwin, Weismann, or Mendel (or De Vries, the real Mendelist
leader), the effect in abolishing design is the same. All three --
Darwin, Weismann and De Vries -- were Agnostics.

     That is how evolution undermines religion. The basis of the
religious argument from design in nature is that there is no other
possible explanation of the organs and instincts of animals except
a divine plan drawn up in advance. No plea for the supernatural
origin of anything is valid as long as there is a possibility of a
natural explanation of its origin. Even if we do not see the
explanation today, we may see it tomorrow.

     It began to be frightfully difficult to find any sort of proof
of the existence of God. Moreover, the argument from the supposed
order and beauty of the universe was equally undermined. This
"order" had been found mainly in the movements of the heavenly
bodies. Today we know not only that there is a terrible amount of
disorder in the heavens -- great catastrophes or conflagrations
occur frequently -- but evolution gives us a perfectly natural
explanation of such order as there is. No distinguished astronomer
now traces "the finger of God" in the heavens; and astronomers
ought to know best.

     As to beauty -- the beauty of flowers and birds, of shells and
scenery -- evolution explains it just as it explains instincts and
organs. It was evolved. The argument was always very one-sided, for
there is as much ugliness as beauty in nature, as much brutality
and bestiality as mutual aid. We will see this later. Both are now
understood, however. Nature knows nothing of order and beauty, or
disorder and ugliness. It evolves without a plan. Then man develops
a sense of beauty, probably as part of his sex-life, and the rose
or the orchid appeals to it. We can trace their evolution, and it
would now be absurd to say that the flowers were evolved in order
to please man a few million years later.

     Thus the entire argument of design, the greatest triumph of
the theologians, fell to pieces. There have, of course, been
attempts to reconstruct it, but they all contain the same fallacy.
They select something that science "cannot explain" (the writers
themselves never knew enough about science to know whether it can 
be explained or not) and they then bring in God to explain it in
the usual way.
                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               91

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     Lord Balfour, who is a clever statesman and a mere novice in
science, repeats the old argument with little variation. Lord
Kelvin, who was a very distinguished physicist, but knew nothing
about biology, was promptly snubbed by the biologists of England
when be tried to find an argument for God in their science. Sir
Oliver Lodge, who also is a physicist and knows nothing about
biology, is disdainfully ignored by them when he tries to do the
same thing. The argument for a Designer is as dead as the argument
for a First Cause, a Prime Mover, a Creator, or a Legislator of the
laws of nature.

     It is sometimes said, especially by Sir Oliver Lodge, that the
argument can be entirely changed, and restored to its full
strength, by admitting that natural causes produced everything, but
that God guided these natural agencies. You might, for instance,
trace in science the whole series of movements, from the primitive
nebula onward, which eventually produced the bee, with all its
wonderful "instincts." But, says Sir Oliver Lodge, you would not
see the guidance of these natural agencies by a supernatural power.

     Yes, quite naturally. What Sir Oliver Lodge forgets is that he
has to prove that there was such a guidance. He can only do this by
proving that the guidance was necessary: that the natural agencies
of evolution would not have produced the bee, as we know it, unless
they were guided. I have repeatedly challenged him to prove this,
and he has never done it. It cannot be done.

     Moreover, this idea of "guidance" of the forces of nature,
which is very popular with some, raises a score of difficulties the
moment you examine it closely. How would you guide a billiard ball,
without pushing it? Can a mind communicate its designs to matter,
and could matter carry out such designs if they were communicated?
Do the atoms in the rose know that they are working out a design?
In what earthly sense can anyone conceive these atoms to be
"guided"?

     It is mere verbiage. These people are fond of representing the
Agnostic and the scientific men as "superficial" and themselves as
"profound." But just reflect for ten minutes on this idea of
guidance of the forces or elements of nature! Try to work it out.
You will soon find which side it is that is superficial.

     And this applies in full force to what is called "creative
evolution -- the theory of Professor Bergson, George Bernard Shaw
and a few others. One ought almost to apologize for bringing Mr.
Shaw into a serious work, and Professor Bergson has not, and never
had, any support in the world of philosophy. Their theory is that,
though a personal God does not exist, a sort of Vital Force works
through matter and finds expression in the myriads of animals and
plants and man.

     This is worse than ever. A conscious personal God might
vaguely be conceived as realizing a plan through matter in a way we
cannot comprehend. But when you take the Vital Principle itself to
be impersonal -- a sort of muddle-headed God at the best -- and
regard this vague thing as working in conjunction with unconscious
atoms to produce a peacock's tail or a palm, you feel like Alice in
Wonderland.

                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               92

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     Sometimes Theists fancy that they get rid of difficulties by
sacrificing the "personality" of God. "I don't believe in a
personal God, but there must be a cosmic mind," says a lawyer to
me. Another calls it a Cosmic Power, another the Energy of the
Universe, and so on.

     Well, I should not regard an impersonal God as worth a grain
of incense or a spot of ink. We could have no more emotion about
it, or practical relation to it, than in the case of ether. It is
not worth quarreling about. But in point of fact, many of these
people do not know what personality means. It means mind or self-
consciousness. And as to those who prefer to talk about a great
energy, or force, or power, they are equally ignorant of the
meaning of the words they use. In science, from which the words are
taken, power, force, and energy are merely mental abstractions, not
realities.

     There is, in fine, no aspect of nature today which even
suggests the existence of God. There is a very great deal in
nature, as we shall see, which suggests that there is no God, no
sort of God. But before we turn to consider this, let us regard man
himself and see whether this highest form of existence (as
positively known to us) has any characteristics which send the mind
to God.

                     THE VOICE OF CONSCIENCE

     The sum of what we have so far seen is that in the universe at
large there is no sort of evidence of the existence of any sort of
God -- any sort of power or being or mind beyond or behind it.

     One by one the old arguments have been discredited. There were
the early philosophical arguments, the proofs of a First Cause and
Prime Mover, and so on. Modern philosophy entirely rejects them,
and it is the philosophers who best know their value. Then there
was the order of the heavens, and modern astronomy has made an end
of this argument. The idea that such beauty as there is in nature
testified to a God has been equally discredited by evolution. The
argument from design has been shattered in the same way.

     Science gives us a natural interpretation of nature. It is
very far indeed in its present stage from explaining everything,
but to take some part of nature which is at present obscure and say
that the hand of God must be there is a very poor fallacy. It is
quite obvious that our ignorance of the natural causes may be, and
in view of the history of science probably is, only temporary.

     A few moments' reflection will show you the fallacy of all
these arguments and explain why men in their search for God have
been driven by science from one department of nature to another.
For such an inference to be valid, you must prove, not merely that
science cannot today explain this or that phenomenon in nature, but
that it will never furnish a natural explanation of the phenomenon,
because such an explanation is impossible. Who will venture to
attempt that?




                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               93

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     No, the ordinary believer in God must in his own interest
realize that popular preachers and writers deceive him: not
deliberately, but owing to the limitations of their education. They
use long-discredited arguments. They talk philosophy which no
philosopher will admit, and science that no scientist will
recognize. If you take any million believers in God, at least nine-
tenths of them believe for reasons which trained thinkers regard as
quite illogical, and it is merely foolish to imagine that the
business man or the popular preacher or the politician can judge
the value of such arguments better than the trained thinker.

     Amongst the higher type of religious writers, the better
educated clergy, this is sadly recognized. They do not now use the
old arguments, which seem on the lips of the popular preacher to be
so convincing that you feel that the Atheist must be a fool or a
knave. They do not boast that they can demonstrate the existence of
God. They admit that it is a delicate and difficult problem. The
glory of God, which was once thought to fill the universe, is now
regarded as a purely spiritual thing that is not reflected from a
material universe.

     Did you ever, with a friend, argue as to whether the pale
delicate line low down on the far horizon was really a range of
hills or a cloud? Did you ever see the northern lights quivering so
faintly in the night sky that you were not quite sure in your own
mind whether the light was there or not? For the most honest and
learned believers in God this is now the true position of the light
which was once thought to flood the universe and convince every
man.

     So new ways, new avenues, are tried. Some, as I said, talk
only of an impersonal power; but that does not help. Some say that
(God is limited in power, and we shall see later that this does not
help. Some say that God is "immanent" in the universe, not
"transcendent" to it or outside of it; but no Church ever really
said otherwise, and it is merely a new word that these Modernists
have coined.

     It is no use appealing to the universe in any way. It is
godless. It is a great reality evolving slowly through the ages,
with long portentous periods of blind clash and ferocity crowned by
relatively few years of civilization. Nobody, from Job onward, ever
really reconciled its features with God.

     New schools of theologians abandon nature and turn to man: or
abandon nature generally and concentrate on its highest product and
representative, man. If we cannot find the finger of God here,
where shall we look for it? There may be -- on general grounds I
should say that there probably are -- higher beings than man on
other planets in other parts of the universe. Our life-story on
this globe has probably some two hundred million years still to
run. Other stars are older than ours, and they may have planets on
which the life-story has run millions of years ahead of ours. Mars
even may have I think probably has -- a more advanced race than
ours.




                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               94

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     But the highest thing in the universe which we actually know
is man, and in his nature we ought to find something more
suggestive of divine action than in stars or flowers. Moreover, he
is so frail a being, and his nerves quiver so with pain, that a
benevolent or merciful power may be expected to take especial
interest in him. The star feels no shock when it enters a nebula,
or approaches another star, and its entrails are torn out and flung
leagues over space. The rose has no tears when it withers. Even the
animal has only a very dull glow of conscious pain. But man ....

     I am reserving for special consideration the reasons in nature
and man for not believing in God -- you will not grumble if I give
a single section to disproofs and five to an account of what are
regarded as proofs. But right here it is necessary to anticipate a
little.

     It is precisely in the case of man, where we ought to find
divine action, that we have least trace of it. The history of man
is now written without the smallest need to introduce supernatural
action. Whatever has been accomplished was accomplished by man. The
prehistory of man -- the millions of years of primitive savagery --
is even more brutally godless. The human world today, which we know
so well, nowhere suggests a finger of God.

     Let this wait a little. Let us take first the best that there
is in man. It is in man's moral emotions, in his conscience, that
theologians generally claim to find evidence of the existence of
God. Whatever may be said about the moral emotions of animals --
and some writers have detected the crude beginnings of a moral code
amongst the higher animals -- man broadly stands out from the rest
of the world of life as the being with a conscience. He perceives
moral law, and moral law implies a legislator. Natural laws may be
mere descriptions. Moral law is a code drawn up in advance for
humans to obey.

     Moral law exists, and it implies a legislator. We admit it.
There are modern writers -- novelists, dramatists, Nietzscheans,
etc. -- who seem to question it, but one finds that they generally
mean that some part of the accepted moral code is questionable. Let
us say that the race recognizes a law of justice, honor,
truthfulness, honesty, temperance and kindness.

     You say that God imposed this law, and that in the voice of
conscience we have the faint echo of his thunder. I say that the
legislator was humanity, and that the conscience of the individual
is an outcome of causation. If the facts of moral life are
consistent with my theory, there is no room for yours. A
supernatural explanation is superfluous when a natural explanation
is possible. Why? For this simple reason: if a thing which actually
exists is enough to explain a phenomenon, you have not the least
guarantee of the existence of something else, otherwise unknown,
which you call in to explain it. It may be more poetic to regard
thunder as the voice of God, but, since electricity fully explains
it, you give up the idea of a God in the sky or on the mountain
top.




                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               95

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     Now every feature of the moral life is consistent with the
theory that moral law is a code of behavior imposed on the
individual by the community. The nature of the law, the clauses and
precepts of it, points to this. Justice, honesty, and truthfulness
are social laws, obviously. Social life improves in so far as they
are observed, and it is disturbed in so far as they are ignored.
Nothing could be clearer than that nine-tenths of the moral code
represents rules of social conduct.

     The evolution of morals quite confirms this. The lowest
peoples of the human family have no moral ideas, as we may see, and
reviewing the various tribes of savages and barbarians in
succession, from the lowest level upward, we see the moral law
taking shape in harmony with the needs of the expanding social life
of the tribe and the nation. Religious creeds pervert the code.
Local circumstances and needs shape it differently in different
places. But the general development is clear. Man gradually
formulates his moral or social law. Then the priests take it over
and ascribe the law to a divine legislator.

     It would be strange if nine-tenths of the moral code were
purely human, the other tenth supernatural, yet this is, I suppose,
what the argument implies. Men certainly do not need a God to teach
them that justice and honesty are laws or ideals. And the different
emphasis put on different clauses of the law is equally human.
Lying, for instance, is (where no great harm is done) regarded as
a light offense. To get drunk once in a while is not a serious
matter. To get drunk habitually and ruin your family is a crime.
Murder is the greatest of crimes. It is all perfectly human. It is
social law.

     The only difficulty is about sex-morals, and precisely on this
point there is no such thing as a universal and consistent human
conscience. This is, plainly, very significant.

     A few weeks ago a cultivated Mexican gentleman told me that
there are parts of his country where your host offers you the
companionship of his wife for the night and is offended if you
decline. It was a virtue of hospitality in ancient Scotland and
other places. Polygamy is quite moral in Turkey and quite immoral
in America, yet even a Christian moralist like St. Augustine would
allow a man to beget children by another woman if his wife was
barren. There is no limit to the vagaries of conscience in the
field of sex. In our own highly civilized age the most serious
writers dispute the (theoretically) accepted code of virtue.

     This is in perfect harmony with the view that moral law is
human law, and it is quite inconsistent with the belief that an
autocratic legislator framed the law. We are in an age of
transition. The Christian code of conduct contained things which
were purely ecclesiastical in origin. We are now trying to separate
what is really moral and social law from these sectarian ideas. And
the standard of most people is a social standard: Does the act do
harm to others? The Golden Rule is the ultimate moral principle.
Behave toward others as you wish them to behave toward you. Nothing
could be more clearly social.



                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               96

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

                     THE RELIGIOUS INSTINCT

     What we have seen in the last section applies to every attempt
to create a belief in God for practical purposes. This was
admirably illustrated in the effort of H.G. Wells to establish a
new conception of God a few years ago. It failed completely.

     Wells had come to the conclusion that, while the world will
certainly remain democratic in the political sense, progress is
bound to come from a sort of aristocracy, a union of the best men
and women in each country. He then imagined that these select
companies would do well to have an ideal leader, and he conceived
this as "God the Invisible King." He made very little attempt to
prove that this Invisible King really existed. It was rather an
ideal, a personification of law and duty. But I never heard of a
single convert to the new religion, though its author is one of the
cleverest and most influential writers in England. God is not
wanted by our generation.

     It is just as futile for our philosophers to imagine that,
when they have shattered the bases of the popular argument for God,
they can provide the mass of the people with new arguments or new
conceptions of God. As I have said, hardly any thinker of our time
believes any longer in the personal Deity of the Churches. None
accepts the common arguments for God. But a large number of our
philosophers believe in a God, and some of them seem to think that
they may communicate their belief to people who are not
philosophers.

     They certainly will not, and therefore I do not propose to
examine their ideas here. They are divided into two antagonistic
schools. One school follows the German philosopher Hegel, and
believes in a very abstract and impersonal God, without
recognizable characteristics, which they call the Absolute. It
takes a large volume even to explain what they mean. On the general
public the philosophy, as a critic said long ago, makes much the
same impression as an elephant which is introduced to a nation
which never saw one before. People are not sure which is the head
and which is the tail.

     The other school of philosophers, mainly an estimable group of
professors at Oxford University, who are as far out of touch with
the world as professors generally are, call themselves Personal
Idealists. They believe in a Personal God, and they find evidence
for Him in the mind of man and its ideals. The argument is very
strained and almost as difficult to follow as the preceding.
Evolution explains man's ideals without any metaphysics of this
kind.

     Then there is the very small school which is known in America
as Pragmatists and in England as Humanists, and has no influence in
either country. It is not the aim of this school to prove the
existence of God, but some religious writers regard it as favorable
to them because it does not admit the supremacy of human reason.
Our beliefs, it says, are not due to reason alone. Our whole
nature, even our needs and interests, enter into them.



                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               97

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     That is largely true; but, clearly, beliefs formed in this way
are more likely to be false than true. The theory does not help any
man who wants to be sure that God really exists. At the most it may
approve of belief in God as useful. I am concerned with those who
regard it as true: it is of no use unless it is true.

     No one would expect me in so short a chapter as this to give
a satisfactory account of these new religious philosophies, but I
give the reader just this word about them for two reasons. First,
very few of these philosophers accept the personal God of the
creeds, and it is quite wrong to represent them as doing so.
Secondly, none of these philosophers -- that is, remember, our most
profound thinkers -- admits any value in the only arguments for the
existence of God which circulate amongst the general public. The
believer ought to understand that clearly. Philosophy is as much
against him as is science or history.

     But I am mainly concerned in this section with an argument
which is supposed to be philosophical in form, yet is used in
popular literature. It is said that, no matter how little trace of
God there is in the external world, man has a religious sense or
instinct which bears witness to him.

     This argument used to be put, and is still sometimes put, in
the form of a unanimous testimony of the human race to the
existence of God. All peoples that exist or have ever existed, it
is said, believe in God.

     What that would prove, if it were true, is not very clear. The
whole human race has until modern times been wrong on hundreds of
things: one would almost say, wrong on all things except those
which are quite obvious. Moreover, nearly the whole of the race
believes in God (as I have now shown) for false reasons.

     Finally, it is not true that all peoples believe in God. The
lower peoples do not believe in God. The belief evolves before our
eyes, and now, in the highest peoples, it is disappearing before
our eyes. This supposed "consent of the whole human race" is a
myth, and the inference from it is ridiculous.

     Well, the new apologists say, let us take the belief in God as
it actually exists. It is so widespread, so nearly universal, that
there must be some instinct or special religious sense in man for
perceiving the existence of God. Just as one part of a man
perceives color, another hears sounds, and another feels heat or
cold, so there may be a spiritual faculty for perceiving God. We
may feel his presence, not infer it from nature; and many believers
say that this is their experience.

     In view of the collapse of all the arguments for God from the
external world there is naturally a tendency to concentrate on and
develop this argument. It seems safe against any advance of
science. You know more about your own consciousness, you think,
than the man of science does. If you feel the existence of God, how
can a man of science tell you that you do not?

     It sounds very simple and promising, but it leads to nothing.


                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               98

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     The first difficulty is that the strength of this "instinct"
has a remarkable relation to the degree of a man's education.
Belief is strongest where education is poorest. In the better
educated middle class the majority of the men have no such inner
sense or belief in God. The women, who are less educated, have more
religion; but the modern woman, who is getting equal education, is
becoming as irreligious as man. And in the circles of highest
culture, of science and philosophy, the belief is feeblest of all.

     Strange, isn't it, that if God has implanted a religious
instinct, a sense of his presence, in the breast of man, it should
grow feebler in proportion as the head is enlightened, and should
generally disappear where the knowledge is greatest? Most of us,
when we were young, had this "religious sense." In proportion as we
grow in wisdom, it fades out of existence. I have not an atom of
this religious instinct today. Why have you?

     Two-thirds of the leading men of science and historians do not
believe in God. Two-thirds of the younger pupils in their colleges
do. Why is the religious sense distributed in this curious way? No
one, surely, will suggest that the elderly professors are so
dissipated that the internal mirror of their religious sense is
tarnished, and the young undergraduates are so refined and virtuous
that in them the mirror is spotless and bright.

     I really cannot help being a little sarcastic at times when I
write on some of these arguments for the existence of God. Perhaps
you think that I misunderstand or misrepresent the argument.
Certainly not. Learned clergymen, amongst whom I have many friends,
assure me that they rely no longer on arguments from design and
First Causes, and so on. They appeal to the inner religious sense
or instinct. You can read this in any quite modern religious work.
And this religious sense -- that is to say, the belief in God which
expresses it -- is certainly distributed in the curious way I have
described. The more educated we are, the higher the proportion of
unbelievers. The more the world grows in wisdom, the less belief in
God there is.

     It is surely plain that this so-called religious sense is,
like conscience, an outcome of education and environment. There are
four "faculties" or powers or senses or instincts in man from which
one or other theologian has tried to deduce the existence of God.
They are the intellectual, the moral, the religious, and the
aesthetic faculty. Let me note in passing that in modern psychology
the idea of special faculties or powers or instincts is not
recognized. These are only abstract ways of regarding the mind.

     In regard to the intellect, some say that as the universe is
rational" and can be understood by the mind, there must be a
rationality, an arrangement by mind, in the universe itself.

Bishop Gore repeats this in his recent book, "Belief in God." The
book, by the way, is only one more illustration of the desperate
condition in our time of the belief in God. Gore is so overwhelmed
by the growth of skepticism that be declares that the belief is
"dead," and he sees no immediate prospect of its revival. In the
face of this dark situation -- as it must seem to him -- his book
is really frivolous. Of its four hundred pages only about twenty 

                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               99

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

are devoted to an effort to prove the existence of God! I say that
this is frivolous, but the real reason is clear enough; there is no
new argument for God, and Gore seems to feel that the old arguments
have now little force.

     He might at least have chosen some argument more plausible
than this from the "rationality of the universe." Its "laws" are,
as I explained, merely man's way of summing up its behavior. Its
regulatory of conduct is just what we expect of a being without
mind or will. Its order is an outcome of an evolution. If the human
mind (and whatever minds there are on other planets) were blotted
out tomorrow, there is no sense whatever in which the universe
could be described as rational.

     As to man's aesthetic sense, or sense of beauty, on which Lord
Balfour builds an ingenious and amusing argument for the existence
of God, it is one of the most clearly evolved of man's faculties.
It is a higher degree of the dim sense of ornamentation in the
blurred mind of the bower-bird. It emerged from the nebulous
material of life or mind, and it will pass away with the last
dwellers on the earth. It points to nothing beyond itself.

     So it is with the moral sense, as I have shown, and the
religious sense. It is only the general collapse of the familiar
arguments, which have sustained faith in God for two thousand
years, that explains these strained efforts to find supernatural
meanings in natural things.

     Indeed the argument from a religious sense is even feebler
than that from a moral sense. We all have a moral sense, a
perception of moral distinctions and obligation, and it generally
grows with one's progress in knowledge and refinement. It is just
the reverse with this supposed religious sense. It decreases with
knowledge and generally with refinement.

     The truth is that there is no religious "sense" or "instinct"
The idea that man is "eternally religious," that the child
naturally develops a sentiment of religion, is against the entire
experience of our age. In spite of the efforts of hundreds of
thousands of ministers of religion and wealthy clerical
organizations religion is disappearing. If knowledge is light, as
we commonly say, one is inclined to regard religion as darkness,
when one notices how consistently the advance of the one means the
disappearance of the other.

     The believer in God ought easily to understand why so many are
now disposed to regard preachers and religious writers as not
honest. They constantly use arguments which have been long
discredited and are not true to the facts of life. They talk of man
as "eternally religious" while they see the educated modern world
surrendering religion on a phenomenal scale, and refusing to accept
the new religions or versions of religion that arise. "Modernism"
does not appeal to the world in spite of all the ability and energy
of its apostles. The cities of the world have done with religion.
The villages will have done with it tomorrow. The claim of a
religious sense is a flagrant defiance of plain facts.



                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               100

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     As to children, in whom this religious sense is supposed to
dawn, the statement is easily tested. I say -- modern psychologists
say -- that what is called religious sense is a set of ideas and
emotions implanted by education. Well, take children in different
environments: without religion, with little religion, and with
fervent zeligion. The children develop religion precisely in
proportion to their environment and teaching. My four children, who
were taught neither religion nor anti-religion, never showed the
least inclination to believe. It is the consistent experience of
Agnostic families.

                            DISPROOFS

     Must we then be Atheists? It depends on what you mean by the
word. Most people who do not believe in God -- and there are
millions of such in any modern civilization, if they are not the
majority -- do not call themselves Atheists. The word is taken to
mean a denial of the existence of God, and most of us do not care
to deny the existence of anything simply because it is not proved.

     The few who call themselves Atheists, however, say that they
merely mean that they have no belief in God. Agnostics, they say,
are cowards who are afraid of the popular prejudice against
Atheism. They quote a German philosopher who said that an Agnostic
is an Atheist in a silk hat." Atheist is from the Greek words "a"
and "theos" (God), and the letter "a" is sometimes said to be
"privative," not "negative." They do not deny, but they do not
accept, the existence of God.

     Unfortunately, the Greek particle "a" may be either negative
or privative," and from the days when the word Atheist was first
coined it has meant, in the minds of the great mass of mankind, one
who denies the existence of God. So I do not use it. I cannot prove
a negative. The word Agnostic ("one who does not know") seems
better. Some have used it in the sense that the human mind is so
constituted that it cannot know. That is a theory, and I do not
share it. I mean, in calling myself Agnostic, simply that the
existence of God -- any God -- is not proved. And, to finish with
these definitions of terms, a Theist is anyone who believes in God,
a Deist is one who believes in God and rejects revelation, and a
Pantheist is one who believes that God is not a separate reality
from the universe.

     But it must be clearly understood, when we use the word
Agnostic, that we do not mean that it is quite an open question
whether there is a God or not. There is no respectable evidence
whatever for God, and there is a mass of evidence which disposes us
to believe that there is no God. The case for Theism is very
feeble: the case for Atheism is very strong.

     Let us, so to say, put all the evidence on this great question
in two scales. Let us imagine God, if you like, using a divine
balance to weigh the evidence for and against his existence, as it
is found in the minds of men after two thousand years of
controversy.




                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               101

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     In one scale be puts all the affirmative arguments. He drops
in, with a smile, the ancient arguments of Plato and Socrates and
Aristotle. He adds the antiquated arguments of the Christian
Fathers and Schoolmen, of St. Augustine and St. Anselm, St. Thomas
and St. Bonaventure. Still smiling, be throws in the arguments of
the Deists, of Paley, of Kant, of Fiske, of all the poets and
philosophers of the nineteenth century. And I imagine that he still
smiles when he finally puts in the arguments of Professor Bergson
and Professor Eucken, and of the Absolute Idealists and the
Personal Idealists, of Kelvin and Lodge, of Osborn and Millikan.
There is not much in the crowded scale except mutual contradiction.

     What is there for the other scale? All the tears and blood
that these poor children of men have ever shed; all the pain and
disease and suffering that have darkened this planet; all the
brutality and injustice ever perpetrated; all the blunders and
crimes that wisdom might have prevented.

     The Modernist preacher and the religious scientist say
sometimes that evolution is a more impressive revelation of God's
power and glory than creation. How soothing nice phrases can be!
You will admit that the earth today looks rather godless. I have
lately seen the poor shivering in the zero weather of Chicago and
Minneapolis and Winnipeg. I have seen the seamy side of life in San
Francisco and Los Angeles. I have seen the poor of Mexico wresting
a pittance from the soil and shuddering under a threat of a new
revolution. I read of impending war between Chile and Peru. I hear
of Europe still laboring in the heavy seas of post-war time and
meditating new wars. I glance with pity and wonder at the daily
news-sheet of crime, brutality, death, suffering, stupidity,
hatred, exploitation, privation and indifference. If I were God ...

     It is bad enough. But I know history, and I know that it is
better today than it ever was before. Six thousand years of tears
and blood! That was bad enough. It has left us a legacy of violence
and stupidity that we shall take time to erase. And now, it seems,
it was not six thousand years, but at least six million years of
human life at the lowest and most brutal level; and, before that,
six hundred million years -- to count only from the dawn of
consciousness -- of animal savagery. This is supposed to be a
grander revelation of God than if the carnage had lasted only six
thousand years!

     And the machinery designed to effect this evolution, from this
new Theistic point of view, is not less revolting. There is no "law
of evolution." Living things do not go on evolving if you leave
them alone. They change little as long as they remain happily
adapted to their environment.

     In my debates with the leaders of the Fundamentalists I was
amused when they quoted as evidence against evolution the fact that
large classes of animals make no progress whatever. Of course not.
Why should they? They are adapted to their environment. They change
only when there is some stimulating change in their surroundings;
new enemies, new parasites, new dangers, new catastrophes -- fresh
pain and blood and death. Great changes of climate, Ice Ages, have
been a most important part of the machinery of evolution. They led
to very great advances, and, incidentally, they caused prodigious 
suffering and slaughter.
                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               102

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

     One of the "religious" scientists of America -- there are
fifteen, I believe -- has written a learned book on the microscopic
animals on which he is an authority. Because the organs of some of
them are very ingeniously constructed, he puts on the title-page of
his book an old German motto which I may translate:

               Peruse this book and from it see
               God's greatness in all things that be.

     And amongst the "things" which he then describes are the germs
of all sorts of loathsome and frightful diseases (syphilis, typhus,
tuberculosis, etc.), and other parasites. How God must have smiled.

     I do not know how many thousand types of parasites and
carnivores there are in nature. I am at the moment a thousand miles
out at sea. But does the number matter? From Pole to Equator every
living thing has innumerable parasitic and carnivorous enemies. The
earth is, and has been for hundreds of millions of years, a
battlefield. Such is the carnage, even in modern times, that I have
lately heard a surgeon claim that during those four terrible years
in Europe, 1914-1918, more lives were saved, compared with previous
years, than were wasted on the battlefields.

     And we are now humane. We humans have improved the scheme of
creation, or creative evolution. A hundred years ago more than one-
half of the babes which mothers brought into the world, in pain and
travail, never reached the age of twenty. Before that it was even
worse. It took the human population of a country four centuries to
double: now it would, if there were no birth-control, double in a
quarter of a century.

     Yes, you know it, you say. It has troubled religious thinkers
ever since the doctrine of an infinitely powerful God was
formulated. Hardly a single great Christian writer has failed to
confront this "problem of the existence of evil."

     Very good. What have they said about it? Can you recall any
serious solution of it that you ever heard? Suffering chastens the
soul and improves character, say some. Is that your experience? In
very few cases indeed of the millions of human beings does pain or
affliction ever improve character. The excuse is frivolous.

     But if we bear our cross properly, there is heaven for us, you
say. Again, to what proportion of the human race does that apply?
If the idea of heaven is an illusion, the entire argument is
vicious. But even if there were a heaven, the excuse would cover
only a small part of the pain of the world. It does not touch the
entire animal world. Why were they created at all if it be a
necessity of their lives that hunger shall drive them to seek food
and that one-half shall hunt and rend and devour the other half?

     Moreover, the argument does not even apply to the human
family. If the accepted version of the conditions of admission into
heaven be true, the part of the race which suffers most -- the
majority -- will never enter heaven. Of all the men who lived
before Christ, during many millions of years, you will expect to
meet very few in Paradise; and their brothers, the lower races of 


                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               103

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

today, will not be more fortunate. Of the civilized nations of
today the least religious are the poorer workers of our cities, and
it is they who suffer most. The elect, who will wear crowns, are
oil-magnates and stock-dealers who gave millions for clerical
charities, the comfortable dames of Fifth Avenue, the sheltered and
not ill-fed clergy, and so on. Suffering does not generally
purchase heaven. It is usually a foretaste of hell.

     What other justification of the ways of God will you attempt?
Nothing new has been discovered since the days of Job. It is a
mystery.

     Yes, it is a mystery if you believe in God. It is no mystery
in our modern philosophy of life. Nature is unconscious. Out of its
dark womb a dull glow of consciousness at last emerges, and living
things begin to suffer. But mother-nature knows nothing of their
sufferings. At last man appears. Still for millions of years be
does not differ essentially from other animals. He has no large
plans. He knows little of the world about him. He foresees no
future. At last self-conscious, civilized man appears, and science
is evolved. Then, with a fire of idealism in his heart, with the
great powers of the material world at his service, be begins to
right the wrongs and blunders which are a legacy from the less wise
past. Is that philosophy not true to the facts of life as you know
them?

     "The only excuse for God is that he does not exist," said a
witty and wicked Frenchman of the last century. In a sense Henri
Beyle's stinging phrase is a platitude. If God did exist, could you
find an excuse for him? No one has yet done it.

     But they are trying again, and we must consider what they say.
How one grows weary of following these changes of religious thought
and argument! The supposed "constant changes of science" (which are
really, for the most part, developments of what we already knew)
are slight in comparison with the changes in theology, and science
claims no divine inspirer who might be assumed to have an interest
in guarding the race from error.

     The latest plea is that, after all, perhaps God is not
infinite in power. Perhaps there are limits to what he can do.
Perhaps he could not prevent the pain and evil in the world. We
save his benevolence, at the cost of his omnipotence.

     Do we? The truth is that this theory, which was adopted by
John Stuart Mill long ago, and is now favored by Sir Oliver Lodge
and others, leaves us in a state of mind of the utmost confusion.
What proof do you offer of the existence of this finite God?
(English wits called it, when Mill introduced it, a "limited
liability God.") The order and purposivness of the universe, as
usual. The finite God is, if not the creator, at least the designer
of the universe, the mind guiding the forces of nature.

     Very well. Then he directed the forces of life to produce the
germs of typhus and cholera, the teeth of the saber-tooth tiger and
of the twenty-foot sharks of long ago, the lust for blood of the
lion and the wolf, the spider and the serpent. If he did not, why 


                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               104

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

do you claim that he paints the sunset and the orchid, shapes the
beautiful shell, or fashions the human eye? You want to leave the
simplest microbes (when they are pernicious) entirely out of the
list of things which be guided the forces of nature to produce and
to include in that list the fashioning of such complex things as
the human brain and heart. Nay, you want to ascribe to your finite
God all the good impulses of the mind and heart and leave all the
bad impulses as things which his limited power could not control.

     Certainly a naive proposal to make to us! It is like saying
that all the good things in nature clearly require an intelligent
principle to explain them, and all evil things, which are just as
intricate, do not require one.

     But perhaps you would like to help out the argument with the
hackneyed phrase that evil is only negative. So when your nerves
tingle with the pain of toothache or headache or appendicitis, the
sensation is merely "the absence of good." The teeth and claws of
the lion are as negative as the pain of the deer, perhaps. The
toxins which poisonous microbes put in the blood are negative, and,
of course, death is only the cessation of life. Poverty is only the
absence of wealth. And so on.

     Try again, my friend. I feel sure that you have a heart. Face
the facts candidly. This world contains a mass of evidence that it
was probably not designed by a God, and there is no serious
evidence that it was.

     But there is another new apology for God, and it is very proud
of itself, because it is actually based upon evolution. We admit,
it says, that there have been hundreds of millions of years of pain
and brutality. We admit that the finger of God is not very obvious
in the world today. But a brighter age is coming. A far higher race
and better earth will yet appear. The dark tragedy of the past will
be crowned by a glorious final scene.

     Yes, I believe it. On evolutionary principles it is certain.
We are only just learning the elements of civilization. We shall
rise as high above the life of today as it is above the life of the
ape.

     But the idea that a few million years of happiness at the
close justify a process of evolution (if it was consciously guided)
which entailed hundreds of millions of years of misery for beings
that die before the happiness begins is one of the most flagrant
applications I ever read of the pernicious principle that the end
justifies the means.

     An English writer, H. Mallock, damned this argument twenty
years ago. "Whatever be God's future, we shall never forget his
past," he said.

     Let us take it soberly. There seems to be nothing in the whole
of nature which now seriously persuades us to believe that a God
must have made it. Our telescopes sweep out over a million billion
miles of space, and we find no more evidence than we do about us.
On the other hand, there is a vast amount in nature that favors 


                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               105

               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

Atheism. It is the same with man. Nothing in his nature compels us
to assume that the evolutionary agencies which developed him were
guided. His imperfections, his age-long brutality, suggests that
they were not guided. It is the same with his history. There is no
finger of God in it from the first page to the last. His
blundering, evolving intelligence and ideals account for
everything, the good and the evil. In the long, torturous,
bloodstained process of the evolution of his religions there is no
more trace of divine wisdom than elsewhere.




                          ****     ****



    Reproducible Electronic Publishing can defeat censorship.


   The Bank of Wisdom is a collection of the most thoughtful,
scholarly and factual books. These computer books are reprints of
suppressed books and will cover American and world history; the
Biographies and writings of famous persons, and especially of our
nations Founding Fathers. They will include philosophy and
religion. all these subjects, and more, will be made available to
the public in electronic form, easily copied and distributed, so
that America can again become what its Founders intended --

                 The Free Market-Place of Ideas.

   The Bank of Wisdom is always looking for more of these old,
hidden, suppressed and forgotten books that contain needed facts
and information for today. If you have such books please contact
us, we need to give them back to America.


                          ****     ****


               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
                               by
                          Joseph McCabe
                              1929


                          ****     ****












                         BANK of WISDOM
                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
                               106
