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

50 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
longings, and aspirations can be explained entirely in terms of a blind cacophony
of indifferent forces and if they are impotent to change the world
in any way, then my seeing and caring about the state of the world is functionally
irrelevant. This is what the materialistic determinists maintain
and what the vitalists, with Shaw in their vanguard, so intensely deny. Yet
volition—if it is genuinely efficacious—is clearly not capricious. It follows
that there exists some kind of will-principle, that there is a force in the
world, following its own rules, that is not blind or indifferent to the state of
the universe. Shaw called it the Life Force.
Shaw’s Religion: What It Is and Is Not
Most studies of Shaw’s religious ideas stress its harmonies with traditional
religion, but Shaw came to religion in a roundabout way, through science
and rationalism. He insisted that religion must be both rational and practical.
His belief in Creative Evolution required a leap of faith but one that
sprang from a solid rational foundation. It was not a leap away from reason,
not a defiance of logic and evidence, but a calculated leap into the
unknown under the guidance of good sense. Religion must respect facts
and reason; “the law of God in any sense of the word which can now command
a faith proof against science is a law of evolution” (Pref. Saint Joan
6:57).
Shaw sometimes spoke of religion as a means to an end, which could
lead one to suspect the sincerity of his “religious” commitment. He felt
that society desperately needs religion, declaring that he had become “a
religious agitator because I have observed that men without religion have
no courage” (Collected Letters 2:672). He elaborated on this observation in
the preface to Back to Methuselah, where he implied that social progress is
dependent on a positive religion. In 1948, looking back on the manifestations
of moral and political chaos that erupted during the first half of the
twentieth century, he declared that they were “all the aberrations that can
occur in the absence of a common faith and code of honor” (Preface, Miraculous
Birth 18). But if he stressed the social need for a religion, his
insistence on a faith that could be subscribed to by intelligent, thoughtful,
and skeptical people, together with his persistent devotion to religious issues,
make it impossible to believe that he was not sincere.
Shaw’s religion was no opiate; it was a call to realism and responsibility.
When he declared that the Holy Ghost was the “sole survivor” of the