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

Foreword
“I believe because it is absurd,” said Søren Kierkegaard, speaking for all
those who think a religious belief unworthy unless it can’t be proved and is
even contrary to Nature. After all, they reason, the gap between God and
man is so great that it must require a “leap of faith” to bridge it. But in an
age of science such as ours, in which the gap has perhaps lessened, there are
many who think that such leaps of faith may be from the factual to the
factitious and therefore too often dangerous and destructive, both to the
individual and to society. To those looking for a faith that better “fit the
facts,” Bernard Shaw for half a century offered a fascinating, seemingly
new religion that attempted to answer the need for up-to-date factuality in
its being based on evolution. Shaw’s remarkable departure in theology, in
fact, tempted some to try to explain his artistically and prophetically expressed
religion in more conventional and literal terms and even to convert
it into something more systematic and analytical, something more
akin to formal philosophy and theology. The latest, and I believe most
successful, attempt to explain and update Shaw is Stuart Baker’s Bernard
Shaw’s Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts, which is all the
more valuable because it shows the increasing relevance of Shaw’s religious
insights to this age of, on the one hand, fundamentalist backlash and
rising religious intolerance and, on the other, a nihilistic rejection of all
religion.
Baker presents Shaw as an original religious thinker, perilously asserting
the unity of knowledge in the face of the dialectical tensions of the day
between the extremes of skepticism and blind faith, naturalism and supernaturalism,
materialism and spiritualism, summarized as the conflict between
science and religion. The peril was in this “jesting apostle’s” often
inviting misunderstanding and sometimes outright hostility in the rather
reckless and playful way he expressed himself. Shavian speech was typically
a high-wire act, balancing between trying to make do with language