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

Catching Up with Shaw 237
would prevail in time; God did not create the universe: the purpose of the
universe is to create God.
For the traditionally religious people an imperfect God is no God at all;
for the scientific materialists Shaw’s God-in-the-making is a cowardly
evasion founded only in wishful thinking. Rejecting Nobodaddy, they
fearlessly embrace NothingButtery. The scientific materialists believe
they stand for logic, objectivity, and fact, but the refutation of Nothing-
Buttery is as logically sound as the denial of Nobodaddy. It is, however,
much less familiar. The Devil’s position, sneeringly flung to Don Juan—
“You think, because you have a purpose, Nature must have one”—is such
a firmly entrenched orthodoxy that even opponents of materialism, such
as Searle, stumble over it. If Don Juan’s answer were reformulated as a
syllogism, it would go something like this:
I am part of the universe.
I am aware, at least in part, of myself; I am not indifferent to my
state; and I have some capacity to change that state.
Therefore the universe is capable of being aware of itself, prefers
some states to others, and is capable of changing them.
Nature does have a purpose, even if we cannot yet grasp what it is. Purpose
cannot be reduced to purposelessness. A purposeless and mechanical universe
could never give rise to values. That is the fallacy hidden within the
naturalistic fallacy, which maintains that one can never derive ought from
is. The fallacious hidden assumption is that values cannot be facts; that
facts exist and values do not; that values are not an actual part of the universe
but something imposed upon it. Imposed from where?
Contemporary materialists reserve their most withering contempt for
Cartesian dualism, but their alternative is the utter denial of one-half of
the duality rather than a genuinely monistic metaphysics. Mind, they say,
is an illusion. Shaw would respond that that is nonsense. The materialist
presumption that values are a completely arbitrary and accidental product
of natural selection is untenable. Natural selection creates nothing; it selects
only from that which has been created. It cannot create values from
the pointless collisions, repulsions, and adhesions of atomic particles. To
assume otherwise is like a parody of an elementary school problem in
arithmetic: if you have six apples, eat two of them, and buy three more,
how many pears will you have? No amount of adding and subtracting
apples will tell you the first thing about pears. No amount of juggling
molecules can tell you anything about values. The truth of the naturalistic