League of Nations.
Religion and Science
Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the
satisfaction of felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this
constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their
development. Feeling and desire are the motive forces behind all human
endeavour and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may
present itself to us. Now what are the feelings and needs that have led men to
religious thought and belief in the widest sense of the words? A little
consideration will suffice to show us that the most varying emotions preside
over the birth of religious thought and experience. With primitive man it is
above all fear that evokes religious notions--fear of hunger, wild beasts,
sickness, death. Since at this stage of existence understanding of causal
connexions is usually poorly developed, the human mind creates for itself
more or less analogous beings on whose wills and actions these fearful
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happenings depend. One's object now is to secure the favour of these beings
by carrying out actions and offering sacrifices which, according to the tradition
handed down from generation to generation, propitiate them or make them
well disposed towards a mortal. I am speaking now of the religion of fear.
This, though not created, is in an important degree stabilized by the formation
of a special priestly caste which sets up as a mediator between the people and
the beings they fear, and erects a hegemony on this basis. In many cases the
leader or ruler whose position depends on other factors, or a privileged class,
combines priestly functions with its secular authority in order to make the
latter more secure; or the political rulers and the priestly caste make common
cause in their own interests.
The social feelings are another source of the crystallization of religion. Fathers
and mothers and the leaders of larger human communities are mortal and
fallible. The desire for guidance, love, and support prompts men to form the
social or moral conception of God. This is the God of Providence who
protects, disposes, rewards, and punishes, the God who, according to the
width of the believer's outlook, loves and cherishes the life of the tribe or of
the human race, or even life as such, the comforter in sorrow and unsatisfied
longing, who preserves the souls of the dead. This is the social or moral
conception of God.
The Jewish scriptures admirably illustrate the development from the religion of
fear to moral religion, which is continued in the New Testament. The religions
of all civilized peoples, especially the peoples of the Orient, are primarily
moral religions. The development from a religion of fear to moral religion is a
great step in a nation's life. That primitive religions are based entirely on fear
and the religions of civilized peoples purely on morality is a prejudice against
which we must be on our guard. The truth is that they are all intermediate
types, with this reservation, that on the higher levels of social life the religion of
morality predominates.
Common to all these types is the anthropomorphic character of their
conception of God. Only individuals of exceptional endowments and
exceptionally high-minded communities, as a general rule, get in any real sense
beyond this level. But there is a third state of religious experience which
belongs to all of them, even though it is rarely found in a pure form, and which
I will call cosmic religious feeling. It is very difficult to explain this feeling to
anyone who is entirely without it, especially as there is no anthropomorphic
conception of God corresponding to it.
The individual feels the nothingness of human desires and aims and the
sublimity and marvellous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in
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the world of thought. He looks upon individual existence as a sort of prison
and wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole. The
beginnings of cosmic religious feeling already appear in earlier stages of
development--e.g., in many of the Psalms of David and in some of the
Prophets. Buddhism, as we have learnt from the wonderful writings of
Schopenhauer especially, contains a much stronger element of it.
The religious geniuses of all ages have been distinguished by this kind of
religious feeling, which knows no dogma and no God conceived in man's
image; so that there can be no Church whose central teachings are based on
it. Hence it is precisely among the heretics of every age that we find men who
were filled with the highest kind of religious feeling and were in many cases
regarded by their contemporaries as Atheists, sometimes also as saints.
Looked at in this light, men like Democritus, Francis of Assisi, and Spinoza
are closely akin to one another.
How can cosmic religious feeling be communicated from one person to
another, if it can give rise to no definite notion of a God and no theology? In
my view, it is the most important function of art and science to awaken this
feeling and keep it alive in those who are capable of it.
We thus arrive at a conception of the relation of science to religion very
different from the usual one. When one views the matter historically one is
inclined to look upon science and religion as irreconcilable antagonists, and
for a very obvious reason. The man who is thoroughly convinced of the
universal operation of the law of causation cannot for a moment entertain the
idea of a being who interferes in the course of events--that is, if he takes the
hypothesis of causality really seriously. He has no use for the religion of fear
and equally little for social or moral religion. A God who rewards and
punishes is inconceivable to him for the simple reason that a man's actions are
determined by necessity, external and internal, so that in God's eyes he cannot
be responsible, any more than an inanimate object is responsible for the
motions it goes through. Hence science has been charged with undermining
morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behaviour should be based
effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is
necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by
fear and punishment and hope of reward after death.
It is therefore easy to see why the Churches have always fought science and
persecuted its devotees. On the other hand, I maintain that cosmic religious
feeling is the strongest and noblest incitement to scientific research. Only those
who realize the immense efforts and, above all, the devotion which pioneer
work in theoretical science demands, can grasp the strength of the emotion
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out of which alone such work, remote as it is from the immediate realities of
life, can issue. What a deep conviction of the rationality of the universe and
what a yearning to understand, were it but a feeble reflection of the mind
revealed in this world, Kepler and Newton must have had to enable them to
spend years of solitary labour in disentangling the principles of celestial
mechanics! Those whose acquaintance with scientific research is derived
chiefly from its practical results easily develop a completely false notion of the
mentality of the men who, surrounded by a sceptical world, have shown the
way to those like-minded with themselves, scattered through the earth and the
centuries. Only one who has devoted his life to similar ends can have a vivid
realization of what has inspired these men and given them the strength to
remain true to their purpose in spite of countless failures. It is cosmic religious
feeling that gives a man strength of this sort. A contemporary has said, not
unjustly, that in this materialistic age of ours the serious scientific workers are
the only profoundly religious people.