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

A Creed for Living 15
fying faith. Believing as he did that “men without religion have no courage”
and that no social or political change is possible unless it is rooted in
the values and goals of the citizens, he naturally saw a religion based in
equality and progress as the prerequisite to social equality and progressive
politics (Collected Letters 2:670). His efforts, however futile in their ultimate
goal, produced two notable successes. The first was that it was the
inspiration for his prodigious literary and dramatic work. Indeed, as the
established religions come slowly and reluctantly around to his way of
seeing the divine, he may eventually succeed in his aim of providing fables
for a new faith. The second success is the subject of this book. Shaw demanded
consistency and honesty of religion, and he got it. Undershaft tells
his daughter Barbara, former major in the Salvation Army: “You have
made for yourself something that you call a morality or a religion or what
not. It doesnt fit the facts. Well, scrap it. Scrap it and get one that does fit”
(3:170–71). People pay a high price for professing beliefs that do not fit the
facts. They have to shut their eyes, a condition that inclines one to stumble.
Still, most do shut them, for fear of the terrible pain that loss of faith and
the search for a new faith entails. Major Barbara has the courage to choose
pain over blindness, thus showing she understands that anyone who hides
from the facts for fear of losing her faith has not only locked the barn door
after the horse has been stolen but has replaced the living animal with a
dummy so as to pretend that it was not stolen at all. A faith that is terrified
to be lost is no faith at all. The central tenet of what has become the twentieth-century
creed is that no such faith is possible—that the horse has
been not only stolen but butchered. “God is dead,” and the facts have killed
Him. Shaw showed that this is not true, that faith in something reasonably
called a divine power can be self-consistent and consistent with modern
scientific knowledge. Yet the proponents of the “scientific” view dismiss
Shaw has fuzzy-headed and his Life Force as blind wishful thinking, while
the few who support Creative Evolution do so from a traditionally mystical
and nonrational point of view. No one has shown how thoroughly consistent
and genuinely scientific his faith really is.
We have come to take for granted that religion requires a leap of faith,
that one embraces religion in spite of the facts, that religion involves an
entirely different way of knowing the universe from that provided by science
and reason. Shaw’s faith was not a blind leap into the unknown but
the pinnacle of a solid pyramid build with stones of fact and logic. For him,
religion, metaphysics, science, politics, and the day-to-day business of living
were all one. A religion that had to be kept separate was not credible,