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

236 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
that has become so pervasive its tenets are the unconscious and unexamined
assumptions of most contemporary intellectuals. The deconstructing
postmodernists of today who assert the relativity of all morality grow
from the same soil as the Social Darwinists who delighted in the prospect
of the weak being devoured by the strong. Progressives who frankly disbelieve
in the possibility of progress offer little hope to oppose those who see
progress in the annihilation of the “unfit,” however that unlovely term
might be defined. Shaw did offer an alternative, one based in reality and
reason. The postmodern rejection of progress is a cogently logical extension
of the assumptions of scientific materialism. Shaw’s major achievement
as a philosopher was to perceive that those assumptions are false. He
did not make it clear why they are false or how logically compelling his
alternative is. For those of us who despair of the impotent stagnation of
progressive politics it is worthwhile to review just how compelling those
arguments are. They are neither comforting nor soothing to the self-righteous,
but they do provide a bracing, crisp challenge for those who seek to
change the world rather than merely complain about it.
Shaw’s scientific religion strikes many as neither scientific nor religious
because it is based on the logical denial of the most cherished dogmas of
each belief system. He found his faith by rejecting two great orthodoxies
and embracing what remained. That would seem to leave a void indeed, yet
what remains turns out to be not emptiness but profound and glorious
truth. We have clung to those protective dogmas, flimsy as on honest inspection
they are revealed to be, because they have shielded us from reality:
the reality of our own responsibility.
The religious dogma denied is the faith in an all-knowing, all-powerful,
and benevolent God. Leibniz put the argument as succinctly as anyone in
his famous syllogism:
Whoever does not choose the best course is lacking either in power, or
knowledge, or goodness.
God did not choose the best course in creating this world.
Therefore God was lacking in power, or knowledge, or goodness.
(377)
Leibniz offers to attack the second premise. Shaw dares to accept it and the
inevitable conclusion, but he realizes that God’s failure to choose the best
course need not entail His lack of goodness, only His present deficiency in
power and knowledge. Here too Shaw was heterodox: people find it easier
to envision a cruel God than a weak or ignorant one. He answered that God