The rational basis of religious
experience
Part 3
by A G Oettle
THE REVELATION OF GOD
b. The Conscience
The existence of a
moral sense in mankind is tacitly acknowledged in every quarrel. In many
religions, particularly the Judæo-Christian group, this is combined with a
sense of responsibility to an ethically perfect Being, whose standards are
those of the universe. A knowledge of failure to maintain these standards
affects communion with God: the conscience awakens us to our guilt and
shortcomings. By it, man recognizes his sinfulness, and tries to mend his ways
at the expense of comfort or inclination. The idea of an absolute standard is
exemplified in Abraham’s question “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do
right?”[18]
The issues of right and wrong are not raised by all
religions. The Greek deities had nothing to do with the conscience and rather
encouraged lust, with the exception, perhaps, of the gloomy Pluto. Their
deities reacted to human arrogance or hubris, but, if the myths are any
indication, they were licentious and amoral, and the practice of temple
prostitution confirms this seemingly harsh judgment.
Similarly the Japanese ethic has concentrated on
meticulously correct behaviour, and the sense of shame has tended to take the
place of guilt. Their religion, though Buddhist in origin, is largely amoral.
Behaviour in circumstances not provided for in the code, e.g. in motor traffic
or as world conquerors, appears hopelessly at variance with the courtesies of
the conventional situations. Here the conscience seems almost entirely
suppressed by social forces; nevertheless the occurrence and survival of
Christian groups in Japan is evidence that this is not a national or racial
deficiency, but is socially induced.
Of course, the existence of the conscience may be granted
but explained as the product of tribal needs. Where such inward standards aid
the survival of the group, it can be argued that such groups would have a
selective advantage over the amoral or immoral. (Would that such selection in
favour of a good conscience would continue in international politics!) This
view regards all ethical standards as relative and flexible. It is not denied
that social customs will condition this conscience, but it is a gross
oversimplification to claim that they explain its existence. Social factors
will determine the local rule of the road, or any other rule, and my survival
may depend on accepting this, but these do not explain the existence within me
of a sense of what I ought to do as distinct from what I would prefer to do.
The Hindu widow may feel she ought to commit suicide on her husband’s funeral
pyre, whereas the Western widow would feel that she ought not to use the
crematorium for this purpose, but in both the sense of duty is distinct from
personal inclination, benefit or survival. Confusion between cause and effect
is the source of much conveniently loose thinking on this subject.
What sets the standard of moral excellence? If this were
determined by man’s mind, subject as it is to the winds of passion, selfishness
and social influence, he would soon sink to the lowest common denominator.
Instead, man recognizes standards that are higher than his own, often only
detecting the rightness of a particular course when it is demonstrated to him
by the hero or the saint, and then it becomes something to which he may aspire.
Thus when Sir Philip Sidney passed on the draught of water to another wounded
man, or when Jesus told men to love their enemies, we recognize standards that
do not mark us or our societies. Similarly we can recognize the rightness of
Jesus’ assessment of the widow’s mites: “Of a truth . . . this poor
widow hath cast in more they all: For all these have of their abundance cast in
unto the offerings of God: but she of her penury hath cast in all the living
that she had.”[19] The
continuing popularity of silver collections indicates that the lesson is not
generally accepted among fund raisers, even religious ones.
Others have tried to charge the community with the task
of setting the standard. At the terminus of that line of thought the State is
the arbiter of right and wrong, and the results are discouraging. In a
half-century of Russian Communism we have seen the systematic perversion of the
truth, the rewriting of history, the Moscow trials and the vindication of
Lysenko[20]
– and the blind folly that published the proceedings of such investigations. It
may well be that glorification of the State or personal ambition may render
consciences so insensitive or unreliable that those responsible for the
publication were wholly out of touch with the moral judgment of nations of
different outlook.
Neither man’s own standards nor those of the state
suffice to account for the conscience. Humanist doctrine fails to find any
other source for such standards and must rely upon the personal assessment. The
weakness of their position may be concealed by the noble behaviour of many
Humanists, their righteous indignation at injustice, their social consciousness
and respectable lives – which may suggest to some that a sound moral life can
be achieved independently of religious belief. This view may be further
encouraged by the patent hypocrisy of much that claims to be Christian. Few
Humanists recognize the extent to which they draw on their inheritance from a
Christian era whose standards are taken for granted, though the foundations of
these have been rejected. This has been described as a “cut-flower ethic”
doomed to wither away eventually since it has lost all its connections with its
roots. Even so, there are not many mission hospitals or orphanages run by
Humanists, and there is a difference between drawing attention to social
injustices and a personal committal to the correction of one’s own life.
Fortunately for his peace of mind, the Rationalist has
cherished an implicit faith in the upward progress of mankind. This opinion,
being a basic tenet, was considered to be so obvious that proof was
unnecessary. It panders agreeably to human pride, for it blames others for
failure. Its optimism is incurable so that Shelley could prophesy:
The
world’s great age begins anew,
The
golden years return,
The
earth doth like a snake renew
Her
winter weeds outworn . . .
Another
Athens shall arise
And to
remoter time
Bequeath
like sunset to the skies
The
splendour of its prime.
It seems unkind to express doubts, but none the less,
such views are tinged with misgivings today. The affluent society has not shown
itself to be free of crime. On the contrary, criminal records reveal a steady
increase in crime since the Second World War, at first attributed to post-war
disequilibrium, but that excuse is now threadbare. Rather, it is evident, as
Lord Goddard has said, that the causes of crime today are the same as they
always were, viz. lust, avarice, greed and jealousy. The socialization of the
means of production has not proved a panacea: it has limited the operation of
human failings in one sphere, perhaps, but the innate weaknesses of the private
owners have reappeared in the public officials.
The realistic approach to human progress is expressed in a letter written by Benjamin Franklin to Joseph Priestley, in which he commented:
“The rapid progress true Science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born so soon. It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter. . . . Agriculture may diminish its labour and double its produce; and all diseases may by sure means be prevented or cured. . . . O that moral Science were in as fair a way of improvement, that men would cease to be wolves to one another.”
Some such realism is being forced upon mankind, and the
development of nuclear energy has only emphasized the insecurity of nations.
For the realistic and disillusioned Agnostic, the only comfort lies in the hope
that he may somehow be mistaken.
By comparison, the Christian view of man starts
disillusioned and ends full of hope. Accepting the natural turpitude of
unregenerate man, it sees hope for him only as this is admitted, and as he gets
right with the Source of moral standards. It recognizes the existence of evil,
and though it cannot explain its ultimate origin, believes that the issue was
faced and settled by Jesus Christ – a point which Chesterton made in The Man
who was Thursday.
c. The Evidence of
Design
With experience of their own creative activities, men have reasoned from the existence of motion to a Prime Mover, from causation to a First Cause and from design to a Designer. The third of these will be examined here. Paul the Apostle claimed that the universe provided adequate evidence of the nature of God,
“that
which may be known of God is manifest . . . for the invisible things
of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood from
the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead”.[21]
To the sensitive person, nature provides abundant
evidence of the One behind it, though this be not patent to all. George Herbert
wrote:
Teach me, my God and King,
In all things Thee to see . . .
A man that looks on glasse
On it may stay his eye;
Or if he pleaseth, through it passe,
And then the heav’n espie.
All cannot or will not see beyond the immediate detail,
even though the only alternative to a Designer is the view that all arose by
Chance, and this requires a faith in the achievement of randomicity nearly as
profound as that demanded by religion. Chance generally leads to greater
randomness and increased entropy rather than the detailed variety of nature.
Selection, as illustrated by Maxwell’s demon, could bring variety out of random
molecular movements, but this assumes prescience and concern to exploit the
favoured directions of movement, not very remote from the concept of Deity.
Admittedly, design is recognized in retrospect, and its
detection depends on our imagination and comprehension. We may critize what
through our ignorance we fail to understand – the rapidly diminishing list of
“useless” organs is a witness to the confident arrogance of past ignorance.
Alternatively, of course, we may claim to see design in mere coincidence.
Nevertheless since man is himself a creator, it is not unreasonable that he
should recognize the presence of design in the works of the Creator whose image
he bears. Thus the savage who discovers an instrument will not consider for a
moment that it might have arisen by accident, but will assume that it was made
by someone and for some purpose. His opinion of the purpose will depend on the
instrument and the gulf that separates the maker from the finder. Supposing
that our man finds a binocular, it should not be long before the function is
discovered, whereas the purpose of a sextant may prove to be wholly beyond his
comprehension.
In certain fields sceptics have successfully explained
away the claim for design. Thus, although the earth may seem eminiently suited
to the support of life – its distance from the sun controlling radition
intensities, the polar tilt governing the seasons, a suitably sized and distant
moon controlling the range of the tides, the atmosphere blanketing dangerous
radiations, the ratio of water to land surface governing the rainfall and temperature,
its revolution every 24 hours limiting the periods of heat gain and heat loss –
all these and more is explained as a coincidence in view of the vastness of the
universe. Other earths as convenient may lie in the multitude of nebulæ
available, and I am in no position to argue.
Similarly the beautiful adaptation of living organisms to
their environments is plausibly accounted for by the poorer survival of
organisms less well adapted – which explains the extinction of the defective
rather than the perfection seen in the survivors. Thus there are certain
mechanisms whose advantage is only present when a high grade of efficiency has
been attained. Thus one of the Moody Institute of Science films describes an
electric eel which detects its prey by something like radar. This is a great
advantage to a species inhabiting muddy water, but it demands the recognition
of an echo one-three-thousand-millionth of a second after emission of the
electrical pulse. The benefit of a lesser degree of refinement is difficult to
imagine, for the ability to detect an echo one-three-millionth of a second
after emission of the pulse would seem purely academic to an eel since the
reflector would be half a kilometre away. It is difficult to imagine such a
mechanism arising at the end of a succession of improvements, and either an
accidental coincidence or design must be postulated.
As it is possible to explain away much of the evidence of
design in both geography and biology, I shall consider examples that are not
modified by time, viz. the properties of certain familiar chemical substances.
The first of these is water, whose properties make it
peculiarly suitable for its rôle as the medium of life. The organization
required by living protoplasm excludes the possibility of achieving this in the
gaseous state: the flexibility and chemical reactivity it demands excludes the
wholly solid, so that protoplasm requires a liquid medium in which gel-sol
transformations and a vast number of chemical processes can take place. Natural
liquids are extremely few. The one we know as water, however, accounts for
three-quarters of the surface materials on this globe. At reiging earth
temperatures, one might have expected this simple molecule to have been a gas
(like its counterpart H2S, with a boiling point about 120°C) yet
water occurs in all three states in nature, as a solid, liquid and a gas – and
is in fact the only natural substance on earth for which this is true. In the
solid state it assumes a number of forms, and in that known as snow it provides
light and movable deposits far less dangerous to life than ice, including
hailstones, would be.
Its exceptional behaviour in cooling is well known. Like
other substances it contracts on cooling but below 4°C anomalous expansion
occurs which arrests freezing until the entire volume of water has reached 4°C,
since colder water rises to the surface. Ice has even lower density and so
floats, which facilitates subsequent melting. But for this the seas would have
frozen solid from the bottom upwards, and the possibility of survival of life
in the seas would have been greatly restricted.
The physical properties of water enable it to provide a
remarkable buffer against fluctuations in earth temperature. Not only does its
vapour absorb infra-red rays, and the cloud blanket check losses by
irradiation, but the specific heat of water is exceptionally high. The amount
of heat needed to raise a gram of water by one degree centigrade is thirty
times that for mercury and nine times that of iron. Further storage of heat is
provided by the extraordinarily high latent heat of fusion and of evaporation,
amounting to 80 and 539 calories respectively, as compared with 3 and 71 in the
case of mercury. This ensures a remarkable degree of temperature stability on
the earth, which is obliged by its rotation to expose its surface to the
coldness and darkness of space every night.
The electrochemical properties are equally noteworthy. As
a result of its polar structure it is one of the most powerful solvents, for it
is thus able to hinder re-association of ions. This facilititates the formation
of ionic and colloidal solutions. The effectiveness as a polar solvent is
measured by the dielectric constant, which in water is extremely high (81) as
compared, for example, with that of an oil (about 2). Water also has a high
dipole moment which is related to its high surface tension, so essential for
the capillary movements on which the higher plants depend.
Finally, water is a remarkable catalyst. This facilitates
the biochemical changes in protoplasm of which it forms an essential component
in every reaction. Thus, reactions of oxidation take place at body
temperatures, reactions which normally require the heat of a flame. Except
where life is dormant, as in seeds, water is the major component of protoplasm,
and accounts for more than all the remaining constituents put together.
Such an aggregation of exceptional properties make this an ideal medium for life. It can be argued of course that life exploits what it finds, but I suggest that here it has found what must either be regarded as an extraordinary coincidence of unusual properties, or else something put in its way by design. To the creative human mind, it is as easy to imagine that water has been adapted to the future requirements of living things, as it has been to consider that living things have been adapted to the properties of water. Man is not obliged to wonder, of course, and may resolutely eschew technology, taking everything for granted as unquestioningly as the infant accepts the breast, but this requires the suppression of something in his nature that normally looks for such meaning.
Similiarly, I find the properties of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen a comparable source of gratification. The carbon compounds form that vast range of substances comprising organic chemistry: by comparison the range
of compounds of silicon, a near relative, is far more limited. Furthermore, the convenience of being able to breathe out the gas, carbon dioxide, is considerable; the analogous compound of silicon is the solid known as quartz. Viewed in the aggregate, this cluster of convenient qualities is more easily accounted for by design than on the infinitesimal probability of accidental
coincidence.
