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

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230 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter—not of course our individual minds, but the mind in which the atoms out of which our individual minds have grown exist as thoughts. (186) Nothing has happened since in the realm of physics to give reason to change that assessment. However much biologists and psychologists may cling to old-fashioned materialism, physicists are acutely aware how untenable it is. Paul Davies and John Gribbin close their book The Matter Myth by referring to the phrase coined and made famous in 1949 by Gilbert Ryle, who has become something of a patron saint of contemporary NothingButters. Ryle derided the notion that there was anything in the universe except matter in motion as a fallacious belief in the “ghost in the machine.” Davies and Gribbin wryly note that today “we can see that Ryle was right to dismiss the notion of the ghost in the machine—not because there is no ghost, but because there is no machine” (309). If we are to believe, as the scientists are always urging, in the unity of nature, we cannot imagine that anything as complex as our consciousness appeared magically with the first homo sapiens. It must have developed out of some fundamental principles governing the universe. But you cannot build minds out of matter any more than you can build houses out of thoughts. The atomic elements of any structure must be appropriate to that structure. Bricks and mortar can produce houses because their nature is such as makes houses possible. We have made a tiny step toward identifying the mortar of consciousness when we noticed the connections that are the defining attribute of consciousness, but even more significant is the recognition that desire—will—is fundamental to the nature of the universe. The assumption that has provided the foundation for so much of twentieth-century philosophy, that we are merely cogs in a cold, pointless universal machine that blindly and indifferently grinds away, is false. We are pilgrims on a long journey, the end of which is far beyond our ken. We are the soul of the universe, not its victim, and it is our frightful responsibility to guide it to its destination, a goal we can but dimly perceive. Science has not yet fully accepted this fact because individual scientists, like most of the rest of us, are conservative when it comes to relinquishing fundamental assumptions, but science must eventually come to see its truth. It must
The Marriage of Science and Religion 231 because the scientific ideal, the creed which scientists profess even when failing to practice, demands it. Shaw, dismissed even by many of his friends as a relic of the nineteenth century even as he claimed to be the prophet of the twentieth, will have the last word if, in the twenty-first, his stubborn and lonely proclamation finally becomes the new orthodoxy. The Holy Ghost, he said, with astonishing accuracy and profound simplicity, is a scientific fact (Pref. Back to Methuselah 5:281).
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Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religio
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Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religio
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For Jalma, who made it possible.
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Contents Foreword by R. F. Dietrich
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Foreword “I believe because it is
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Preface Foreword xi The seed of thi
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Preface xiii hope to reach some of
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Introduction Preface xv Here we hav
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Introduction xvii the facts asked i
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o I Foundations of Faith
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Unity 1 A Creed for Living A Faith
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A Creed for Living 5 ticism toward
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A Creed for Living 7 posed to the i
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A Creed for Living 9 ally—at the
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A Creed for Living 11 tions of deat
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A Creed for Living 13 For many the
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A Creed for Living 15 fying faith.
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A Creed for Living 17 We have inesc
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Realism 19 Thus, I blush to add, yo
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Realism 21 evenhanded. Tyndall pres
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Realism 23 no scoundrels. A similar
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Realism 25 sage and confuse and dis
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Realism 27 tific materialism is utt
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Realism 29 of his fellows) is natur
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Realism 31 to be tied down to textb
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Realism 33 as they do not denote an
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Realism 35 women who disparage home
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Realism 37 woven out of words and i
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Consistency 3 The Will and Its Resp
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The Will and Its Responsibilities 4
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II o A Guide to Art and Life
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Dramatic Realism 4 A Playwright’s
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Illusionism Is Not Realism A Playwr
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Contradictions in Scientific Realis
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A Playwright’s Progress 79 view,
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A Playwright’s Progress 81 horror
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A Playwright’s Progress 83 My pla
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A Playwright’s Progress 85 disast
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A Playwright’s Progress 87 Shaw i
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A Playwright’s Progress 89 jectiv
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A Playwright’s Progress 91 suprem
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A Playwright’s Progress 93 certai
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A Playwright’s Progress 95 In cal
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A Playwright’s Progress 97 pishly
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A Playwright’s Progress 99 too
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A Playwright’s Progress 101 woman
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A Playwright’s Progress 103 focus
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A Playwright’s Progress 105 Candi
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A Playwright’s Progress 107 Shaw
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A Playwright’s Progress 109 strug
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A Playwright’s Progress 111 Not t
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A Playwright’s Progress 113 Amiab
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A Playwright’s Progress 115 find
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A Playwright’s Progress 117 sexua
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A Playwright’s Progress 119 culti
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A Playwright’s Progress 121 ing t
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The Organic and the Didactic 5 Majo
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Major Barbara 125 fundamental confl
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Major Barbara 127 picture, but Majo
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Major Barbara 129 acters in a play,
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Major Barbara 131 goes his own way,
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Major Barbara 133 have you ever sav
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Major Barbara 135 gibbet, while Chr
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Major Barbara 137 Moral responsibil
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Major Barbara 139 motto is “Unash
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Major Barbara 141 (this is explicit
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Major Barbara 143 eryone else in th
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Major Barbara 145 which he himself
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Ethics 6 Ethics, Economics, and Gov
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Ethics, Economics, and Government 1
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Page 197 and 198: Ethics, Economics, and Government 1
Page 199 and 200: Ethics, Economics, and Government 1
Page 201 and 202: III o God and Science The Marriage
Page 203 and 204: 7 The Marriage of Science and Relig
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Page 225 and 226: Can Science Be Purged of Materialis
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Page 251 and 252: IV o A Peroration
Page 253 and 254: 8 Catching Up with Shaw Shaw procla
Page 255 and 256: Catching Up with Shaw 237 would pre
Page 257 and 258: Catching Up with Shaw 239 to variou
Page 259 and 260: Catching Up with Shaw 241 rialists
Page 261 and 262: Catching Up with Shaw 243 Such goal
Page 263 and 264: Notes Chapter 1. A Creed for Living
Page 265 and 266: Notes 247 difficult to obtain, but
Page 267 and 268: Notes 249 turbing, these attitudes
Page 269 and 270: Works by Shaw Works Cited Notes 251
Page 271 and 272: Works Cited 253 Shaw and Ibsen: Ber
Page 273 and 274: Works Cited 255 ———. Introduc
Page 275 and 276: Works Cited 257 McRory, Desmond J.
Page 277 and 278: Works Cited 259 Weismann, August. E
Page 279 and 280: Aquinas, Thomas, 52 Archer, William
Page 281 and 282: Saussure, Ferdinand de, 74 Schopenh
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Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

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