Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

Preface
Foreword xi
The seed of this book can be found in an essay I published in 1989 called
“Shavian Realism.” I first developed and described there the ideas presented
(very differently) in the first three chapters of this book. It occurred
to me at that time that an understanding of Shaw’s “manner of looking at
the problems,” as Warren Sylvester Smith put it, was really the key to
understanding Shaw’s religious or metaphysical views and, moreover,
was the secret to understanding why those views were so valuable. I had
planned to write another essay explaining this insight, which seemed to
me at the time to be rather simple and straightforward. For Shaw, as for
others of his time, realism meant the courage to see things as they are, not
as one might wish them to be, but most self-declared realists had their
gazes fixed rigidly outward, on the material, scientifically observable
world; Shaw insisted on the reality of that which was within, on the irreducible
reality of human will. He contrasted realism with “idealism,”
which projected our desires and fears onto abstract entities outside ourselves
and thus evaded the pain of accepting responsibility for our own
natures. Shaw’s religion, I realized, was founded on the realization that the
reality within was ineluctably nonmaterial and teleological, that realism
inescapably entailed the recognition that “will” is an inherent aspect of the
universe, and that we are all manifestations of that will. I imagined that this
simple and straightforward idea could easily be expounded in a brief essay.
I could hardly have been more naive. As simple as Shaw’s views in some
sense are, they are so heterodox, so utterly at odds with the received, ingrained
assumptions of our time, that a forthright exposition is met with
bewilderment and often hostility. The core assumption of scientific materialism,
that the universe is nothing but a giant machine performing its
gyrations without point or purpose to the end of existence is accepted
without question by most contemporary intellectuals regardless of the
many other differences between them. The postmodernists’ disdain for the