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

Realism 25
sage and confuse and dismay his audience. It is, unfortunately, not the only
way in which the emotional Shaw (however vital a component of Shaw the
dramatist) blinded both us and himself to the practical implications of his
fundamental philosophy. He was blind to the spiritual promise in Tyndall
and the careful optimism of Eliot, and both could have been useful to him.
Shaw was not deceived about one thing: Eliot was unquestionably a
determinist. Science, she said, is not incompatible with the revelations of
divine inspiration: “The master key to this revelation, is the recognition of
the presence of undeviating law in the material and moral world—of the
invariability of sequence which is acknowledged to be the basis of physical
science, but which is still perversely ignored in our social organization, our
ethics and our religion” (“Progress of the Intellect” 31). Elsewhere she
stresses the central importance of the concept of “established law” governing
all phenomena “without partiality and without caprice” (“Influence of
Rationalism” 413). For Shaw, the reduction of everything to scientific law
had an unacceptable consequence, made clear by Darwin’s theory of natural
selection. Shaw said Darwin “had shewn that many of the evolutionary
developments ascribed to a divine creator could have been produced accidentally
without purpose or even consciousness” (Sixteen Self Sketches
122). Shaw may have encountered this logical result of Darwinism in
Samuel Butler’s Luck or Cunning? (1886), but Huxley, one of Shaw’s early
intellectual guides, made the connection startlingly apparent in his 1874
essay “On the Hypothesis That Animals Are Automata.” Huxley rejected
the idea that animals lack consciousness but concluded that all animals,
ourselves included, “are conscious automata” (142). This doctrine, which
has come to be known as “epiphenomenalism,” holds that physical events
cause mental events, but mental events are powerless to affect the body.
Consciousness is an epiphenomenon; in Huxley’s words, consciousness is
related to the mechanism of the physical body “simply as a collateral product
of its working” (140). This is the idea Butler objects to when he accuses
the Darwinians of “pitchforking . . . mind out of the universe” (18). For if
epiphenomenalism is true, there is no such thing as design in the universe;
nothing that has happened, is happening, or ever will happen requires the
existence of consciousness. Houses are built, wars waged, cities constructed,
and art created by processes that are purely physical in nature
and require only physical laws for explanation. Our awareness is along for
the ride but is helpless to change a thing. It would be more accurate to say
that will, rather than mind, was banished from the universe. Not surprisingly,
this doctrine was and still is highly controversial, even among Dar-