God The Invisible King by H. G. Wells (best value ebook reader .txt) 📕

THE RELIGION OF ATHEISTS

1. THE SCIENTIFIC ATHEIST

It is a curious thing that while most organised religions seem to

drape about and conceal and smother the statement of the true God,

the honest Atheist, with his passionate impulse to strip the truth

bare, is constantly and unwittingly reproducing the divine likeness.

It will be interesting here to call a witness or so to the extreme

instability of absolute negation.

Here, for example, is a deliverance from Professor Metchnikoff, who

was a very typical antagonist of all religion. He died only the

other day. He was a very great physiologist indeed; he was a man

almost of the rank and quality of Pasteur or Charles Darwin. A

decade or more ago he wrote a book called “The Nature of Man,” in

which he set out very plainly a number of illuminating facts about

life. They are facts so illuminating that presently, in our

discussion of sin, they will be referred to again. But it is not

Professor Metchnikoff’s intention to provide material for a

religious discussion. He sets out his facts in order to overthrow

theology as he conceives it. The remarkable thing about his book,

the thing upon which I would now lay stress, is that he betrays no

inkling of the fact that he has no longer the right to conceive

theology as he conceives it. The development of his science has

destroyed that right.

He does not realise how profoundly modern biology has affected our

ideas of individuality and species, and how the import of theology

is modified through these changes. When he comes from his own world

of modern biology to religion and philosophy he goes back in time.

He attacks religion as he understood it when first he fell out with

it fifty years or more ago.

Let us state as compactly as possible the nature of these changes

that biological science has wrought almost imperceptibly in the

general scheme and method of our thinking.

The influence of biology upon thought in general consists

essentially in diminishing the importance of the individual and

developing the realisation of the species, as if it were a kind of

super-individual, a modifying and immortal super-individual,

maintaining itself against the outer universe by the birth and death

of its constituent individuals. Natural History, which began by

putting individuals into species as if the latter were mere

classificatory divisions, has come to see that the species has its

adventures, its history and drama, far exceeding in interest and

importance the individual adventure. “The Origin of Species” was

for countless minds the discovery of a new romance in life.

The contrast of the individual life and this specific life may be

stated plainly and compactly as follows. A little while ago we

current individuals, we who are alive now, were each of us

distributed between two parents, then between four grandparents, and

so on backward, we are temporarily assembled, as it were, out of an

ancestral diffusion; we stand our trial, and presently our

individuality is dispersed and mixed again with other

individualities in an uncertain multitude of descendants. But the

species is not like this; it goes on steadily from newness to

newness, remaining still a unity. The drama of the individual life

is a mere episode, beneficial or abandoned, in this continuing

adventure of the species. And Metchnikoff finds most of the trouble

of life and the distresses of life in the fact that the species is

still very painfully adjusting itself to the fluctuating conditions

under which it lives. The conflict of life is a continual pursuit

of adjustment, and the “ills of life,” of the individual life that

is, are due to its “disharmonies.” Man, acutely aware of himself as

an individual adventure and unawakened to himself as a species,

finds life jangling and distressful, finds death frustration. He

fails and falls as a person in what may be the success and triumph

of his kind. He does not apprehend the struggle or the nature of

victory, but only his own gravitation to death and personal

extinction.

Now Professor Metchnikoff is anti-religious, and he is anti-religious because to him as to so many Europeans religion is

confused with priestcraft and dogmas, is associated with

disagreeable early impressions of irrational repression and

misguidance. How completely he misconceives the quality of

religion, how completely he sees it as an individual’s affair, his

own words may witness:

“Religion is still occupied with the problem of death. The

solutions which as yet it has offered cannot be regarded as

satisfactory. A future life has no single argument to support it,

and the non-existence of life after death is in consonance with the

whole range of human knowledge. On the other hand, resignation as

preached by Buddha will fail to satisfy humanity, which has a

longing for life, and is overcome by the thought of the

inevitability of death.”

Now here it is clear that by death he means the individual death,

and by a future life the prolongation of individuality. But

Buddhism does not in truth appear ever to have been concerned with

that, and modern religious developments are certainly not under that

preoccupation with the narrower self. Buddhism indeed so far from

“preaching resignation” to death, seeks as its greater good a death

so complete as to be absolute release from the individual’s burthen

of KARMA. Buddhism seeks an ESCAPE FROM INDIVIDUAL IMMORTALITY.

The deeper one pursues religious thought the more nearly it

approximates to a search for escape from the self-centred life and

over-individuation, and the more it diverges from Professor

Metchnikoff’s assertion of its aims. Salvation is indeed to lose

one’s self. But Professor Metchnikoff having roundly denied that

this is so, is then left free to take the very essentials of the

religious life as they are here conceived and present them as if

they were the antithesis of the religious life. His book, when it

is analysed, resolves itself into just that research for an escape

from the painful accidents and chagrins of individuation, which is

the ultimate of religion.

At times, indeed, he seems almost