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

The Will and Its Responsibilities 53
nevolent God of tradition as an inconsistent idol: “Now you cannot prove
that [the] force [behind the universe] is at once omnipotent and benevolent”
(17).
(4) Darwin was welcomed so enthusiastically because he offered a way
out: design was unnecessary; blind chance, in the shape of “natural selection,”
could account for everything. Darwin loomed so large in the minds
of the late nineteenth century because, as Shaw makes clear in the preface
to Back to Methuselah, he offered deliverance to almost anyone with a
complaint against the established order. The humanitarians embraced him
because they saw in him salvation from a cruel and capricious god. The
Almighty Fiend was an unnecessary hypothesis.
(5) There was a dark side to the theory of natural selection: it did away
with the need for a designer, but it also did away with the necessity of
consciousness and will. Nevertheless, consciousness, intelligence, will, and
design do exist. We all are aware of their existence in ourselves. Altruism
also exists; people do work that does not benefit them, and natural selection
cannot account for that. This is the crux of Shaw’s argument with
the Darwinians. It is a two-part argument: the first attacks the premises
of Darwinism and the second provides the “rational” foundation of his
“faith” in the Life Force. Here are Shaw’s words:
Men were able to demonstrate that, according to the theory of natural
selection, it was perfectly possible that all the books in the British
Museum might have been written, all the pictures in the National
Gallery might have been painted, all the cathedrals of Europe might
have been built, automatically, without one person concerned in the
process having been conscious of what he was doing. Some of the
natural selectionists used to make the demonstration themselves
with a certain pride in doing so. But the common sense of mankind
said, “If all the operations of the species can be accounted for without
consciousness, intelligence, or design, you have still got to account for
the consciousness, intelligence, and design that undoubtedly exist in
man.” The religious people naturally turn this argument to account,
saying, “It is all very well to say that life is a mere pursuit of pleasure
and gain, but many men do not live in order to get a balance of pleasure
over pain; you see everywhere men doing work that does not
benefit them—they call it God’s work; natural selection cannot account
for that. There is behind the universe an intelligent and driving
force of which we ourselves are a part—a divine spark. (16–17)