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

Realism 21
evenhanded. Tyndall presented an imaginary debate between a disciple of
Lucretius (the proponent of Matter) and the eighteenth-century theologian
and philosopher Bishop Butler (the champion of Spirit). Both, Tyndall
contended, present unanswerable arguments. He particularly stressed his
endorsement of the words he put into the mouth of the bishop: “You cannot
satisfy the human understanding in its demand for logical continuity
between molecular processes and the phenomena of consciousness. This is
a rock on which Materialism must inevitably split whenever it pretends to
be a complete philosophy of life” (180). For Tyndall the answer to the difficulty
lay in a radical revision of our conception of matter. Matter has
been unjustly maligned. We have been taught to think of spirit as the
epitome of goodness and matter as the essence of baseness, when we
should regard them both as “essentially mystical and transcendental”
(“Vitality” 57). We should not think of “brute matter” but of “the living
garment of God” (“Scientific Use of the Imagination” 141). Shaw rightly
observed that Tyndall’s “materialism” reveals “a nobility which produces
poetry” (Pref. Methuselah 5:317). But Shaw neglects to mention that Tyndall
is candidly open to the demands of the spirit and humble in confessing
his ignorance when confronting its mystery.
George Eliot
Regarding George Eliot as the literary exponent of the 1860s scientific
viewpoint, Shaw confessed that he “almost venerated” Eliot’s masterpiece,
Middlemarch, as a young man (“Postscript: After Twenty-five Years” 702).
That veneration appears unconsciously in Shaw’s earliest known literary
effort, an ironical guide to growing up titled “My Dear Dorothea”—for
Eliot’s heroine is named Dorothea and the phrase “my dear Dorothea”
occurs often in the novel. There are other echoes in Shaw. Indeed, the thematic
core of Middlemarch, the education and spiritual development of a
young woman, is one of Shaw’s most persistent dramatic themes. (The
older male in the role of teacher and mentor, nearly inevitable in Shaw, is
significantly absent in Eliot’s novel.) It is easier to understand why he admired
Eliot than why he later renounced her. There is a clear puritan streak
in both writers. Both have been criticized for being overly intellectual and
for allowing ideas to intrude upon or overwhelm pure character development.
Eliot unquestionably identified herself with the rationalist and scientific
movement of the period, but she did not present science as an infallible
beacon of wisdom trying to penetrate the darkness of religious
superstition; she even anticipates Shaw’s contention that belief, whether in