* Book II. What Christians Believe
1. The Rival Conceptions Of God
I have been asked to tell you what Christians believe, and I am going
to begin by telling you one thing that Christians do not need to believe. If
you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions
are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe
that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one
huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these
religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth.
When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human
race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most;
when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view. But, of
course, being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs
from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong. As in
arithmetic-there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers
are wrong: but some of the wrong answers are much nearer being right than
others.
The first big division of humanity is into the majority, who believe in
some kind of God or gods, and the minority who do not. On this point,
Christianity lines up with the majority-lines up with ancient Greeks and
Romans, modern savages, Stoics, Platonists, Hindus, Mohammedans, etc.,
against the modern Western European materialist.
Now I go on to the next big division. People who all believe in God can
be divided according to the sort of God they believe in. There are two very
different ideas on this subject One of them is the idea that He is beyond
good and evil. We humans call one thing good and another thing bad. But
according to some people that is merely our human point of view. These
people would say that the wiser you become the less you would want to call
anything good or bad, and the more dearly you would see that everything is
good in one way and bad in another, and that nothing could have been
different. Consequently, these people think that long before you got
anywhere near the divine point of view the distinction would have
disappeared altogether. We call a cancer bad, they would say, because it
kills a man; but you might just as well call a successful surgeon bad
because he kills a cancer. It all depends on the point of view. The other
and opposite idea is that God is quite definitely "good" or "righteous." a
God who takes sides, who loves love and hates hatred, who wants us to behave
in one way and not in another. The first of these views-the one that thinks
God beyond good and evil-is called Pantheism. It was held by the great
Prussian philosopher Hagel and, as far as I can understand them, by the
Hindus. The other view is held by Jews, Mohammedans and Christians.
And with this big difference between Pantheism and the Christian idea
of God, there usually goes another. Pantheists usually believe that God, so
to speak, animates the universe as you animate your body: that the universe
almost is God, so that if it did not exist He would not exist either, and
anything you find in the universe is a part of God. The Christian idea is
quite different. They think God invented and made the universe-like a man
making a picture or composing a tune. A painter is not a picture, and he
does not die if his picture is destroyed.
You may say, "He's put a lot of
himself into it," but you only mean that all its beauty and interest has
come out of his head. His skill is not in the picture in the same way that
it is in his head, or even in his hands. expect you see how this difference
between Pantheists and Christians hangs together with the other one. If you
do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is
easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of
course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you
cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world
and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will.
Confronted with a cancer or a slum the Pantheist can say, "If you could only
see it from the divine point of view, you would realise that this also is
God." The Christian replies, "Don't talk damned nonsense." (*)
----
[*] One listener complained of the word damned as frivolous swearing.
But I mean exactly what I say-nonsense that is damned is under God's curse,
and will (apart from God's grace) lead those who believe it to eternal
death.
----
For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the
world-that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes,
and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God "made up out of His
head" as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things
have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and
insists very loudly, on our putting them right again.
And, of course, that raises a very big question. If a good God made the
world why has it gone wrong? And for many years I simply refused to listen
to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling
"whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn't it much
simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent
power? Aren't all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the
obvious?" But then that threw me back into another difficulty.
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and
unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call
a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I
comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was
bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to
be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? A man
feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a
fish would not feel wet.
Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was
nothing but a private idea of my own. But if I did that, then my argument
against God collapsed too- for the argument depended on saying that the
world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my
private fancies. Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not
exist-in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless-I found I was
forced to assume that one part of reality-namely my idea of justice-was full
of sense.
Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe
has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just
as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with
eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
