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

198 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
entails above all the acknowledgment that the formulas offered by both
religion and science are inadequate. Religion must learn to accept change,
to be willing to discard that which proves incompatible with the facts, and
to rid itself of superstition and nonsense. Science must become tolerant of
mystery, to accept that there are large and important areas of our experience
about which it presently knows nothing. And if science is to avoid
nonsense itself, it must learn to recognize the facts about any new subject
matter that it undertakes to comprehend. It must, if it wishes to study life
and mind, find a place for teleology and consciousness.
Religion cannot avoid being scientific, and science must inevitably be
religious in the sense that their territories must unavoidably overlap. If
each attempts to ignore the other, the result will be “bad” science and
“bad” religion. This is clearest when both claim exclusive domain, but the
attempts at segregation, at confining each in a watertight compartment,
are logically inconsistent at best and a barrier against the growth of both
religion and science at worst.
Conflicts cannot be avoided in advance; they must be faced and resolved
as they arise. The segregationists do not really help matters by sweeping
controversy under the rug, and the pervasive construal of scientific law as
blind and mechanistic, together with its claims of total dominance of the
physical world, must inevitably produce strife. Conflicts are especially
common because of the claims of two scientific disciplines that have particular
relevance to religion: evolution and scientific psychology—as Shaw
insisted.
Darwinism: The Linchpin of Materialism
The mechanistic, materialistic assumptions of science force it to conflict
with religion. And the reason that the dispute about conflict between religion
and science invariably turns to Darwin is that Darwinism is the linchpin
of materialism. Daniel Dennett likens it to a “universal acid,” an imaginary
acid that eats through all substances possible and thus cannot be
contained. His point is that Darwinism utterly destroys all justification for
belief in a teleological universe; it brings everything in our experience into
the realm of mechanistic causal law: not merely evolution but psychology,
religion, sociology, ethics—everything. It represents the glorious triumph
of materialistic atheism, which for Dennett means the triumph of science
over superstition.
Unfortunately, discussions of Darwinism are invariably muddled by
the kind of “semantic shell game” that Mary Midgley finds in the writings