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

54 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
The Darwinians simply ignore the first part or the argument, which enables
them to dismiss the second as wishful thinking. Since this controversy
is at the heart of Shaw’s claim that his religion was proof against
science, it is a crux of his dispute with most modern scientists.
(6) While the Darwinians find salvation from the specter of a malicious
and capricious deity in a mindless and indifferent universe, the religious
people are unsatisfied. The way out of their dilemma, Shaw says, is Creative
Evolution. God cannot be both omnipotent and benevolent. But the
assumption that God must be omnipotent is gratuitous. Why would an
omnipotent God create something inferior and imperfect: us? If you combine
the evidence for evolution with the plain fact that will and consciousness
exist in each of us, you have the argument that we are all part of God,
that God is Becoming rather than Being, and that God is in the process of
manifestation. Evil is no longer problematic because it is not the deliberate
mischief of a malicious deity, only the mistakes of a yet imperfect one.
Two Syllogisms; Two Denials
Thus Shaw’s religion is based on the logical denial of the foundations of
the two major competing metaphysical systems of the modern world: the
traditional religious cosmos governed by an omnipotent, omniscient, and
benevolent deity and the scientific materialist universe conceived as a
mindless, purposeless machine. The first argument is familiar: attempts to
deny it refer to it as “the problem of Evil.” It has been formulated in many
ways, but a simple version goes like this:
A God who was omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent could not
create an imperfect world, a world soiled by evil.
Our world is imperfect and rife with evil.
Therefore, if a god created our world, she or he is not omnipotent,
omniscient, or benevolent.
Scientific materialism concludes that God does not exist. But scientific
materialism provides a faith of its own. It declares that the universe is
orderly and knowable and that the laws of physical science provide the
keys to all its mysteries. “Faith in the inerrancy of the Bible is childish,
ignorant superstition,” it boldly declares, “and the one true faith is in the
inerrancy of the laws of physics.” The universe is a giant machine. Shaw’s
refutation of this metaphysic is equally logical. Although Shaw disdained
formal logic, it might be phrased as a syllogism thus: