Compelling Reason Read online

  The first eight chapters of my book attempted to meet the prima facie case against Theism based on human pain. They were the fruit of a slow change of mind not at all unlike that which Dr Joad himself has undergone and to which, when it had been completed, he at once bore honourable and (I expect) costly witness. The process of his thought differed at many points (very likely for the better) from the process of mine. But we came out, more or less, at the same place. The position of which he says in his article ‘So much I understand; so much, indeed, I accept’ is very close to that which I reached in the first eight chapters of my Problem.

  So far, so good. Having ‘got over’ the problem of human pain, Dr Joad and I both find ourselves faced with the problem of animal pain. We do not at once part company even then. We both (if I read him correctly) turn with distaste from ‘the easy speeches that comfort cruel men’,8 from theologians who do not seem to see that there is a real problem, who are content to say that animals are, after all, only animals. To us, pain without guilt or moral fruit, however low and contemptible the sufferer may be, is a very serious matter.

  I now ask Dr Joad to observe rather closely what I do at this point, for I doubt if it is exactly what he thinks. I do not advance a doctrine of animal sentience as proved and thence conclude, ‘Therefore beasts are not sacrificed without recompense, and therefore God is just.’ If he will look carefully at my ninth chapter he will see that it can be divided into two very unequal parts: Part One consisting of the first paragraph, and Part Two of all the rest. They might be summarized as follows:

  Part One. The data which God has given us enable us in some degree to understand human pain. We lack such data about beasts. We know neither what they are nor why they are. All that we can say for certain is that if God is good (and I think we have grounds for saying that He is) then the appearance of divine cruelty in the animal world must be a false appearance. What the reality behind the false appearance may be we can only guess.

  Part Two. And here are some of my own guesses.

  Now it matters far more whether Dr Joad agrees with Part One than whether he approves any of the speculations in Part Two. But I will first deal, so far as I can, with his critique of the speculations.

  (1) Conceding (positionis causa)9 my distinction between sentience and consciousness, Dr Joad thinks it irrelevant. ‘Pain is felt,’ he writes, ‘even if there is no continuing ego to feel it and to relate it to past and future pain,’ and ‘it is the fact that pain is felt, no matter who or what feels it … that demands explanation.’ I agree that in one sense it does not (for the present purpose) matter ‘who or what’ feels it. That is, it does not matter how humble, or helpless, or small, or how removed from our spontaneous sympathies, the sufferer is. But it surely does matter how far the sufferer is capable of what we can recognize as misery, how far the genuinely pitiable is consistent with its mode of existence. It will hardly be denied that the more coherently conscious the subject is, the more pity and indignation its pains deserve. And this seems to me to imply that the less coherently conscious, the less they deserve. I still think it possible for there to be a pain so instantaneous (through the absence of all perception of succession) that its ‘unvalue’, if I may coin the word, is indistinguishable from zero. A correspondent has instanced shooting pains in our own experience on those occasions when they are unaccompanied by fear. They may be intense: but they are gone as we recognize their intensity. In my own case I do not find anything in them which demands pity; they are, rather, comical. One tends to laugh. A series of such pains is, no doubt, terrible; but then the contention is that the series could not exist for sentience without consciousness.

  (2) I do not think that behaviour ‘as if from memory’ proves memory in the conscious sense. A non-human observer might suppose that if we blink our eyes at the approach of an object we are ‘remembering’ pains received on previous occasions. But no memories, in the full sense, are involved. (It is, of course, true that the behaviour of the organism is modified by past experiences, and we may thus by metonymy say that the nerves remember what the mind forgets; but that is not what Dr Joad and I are talking of.) If we are to suppose memory in all cases where behaviour adapts itself to a probable recurrence of past events, shall we not have to assume in some insects an inherited memory of their parents’ breeding habits? And are we prepared to believe this?

  (3) Of course my suggested theory of the tame animals’ resurrection ‘in’ its human (and therefore, indirectly, divine) context does not cover wild animals or ill-treated tame ones. I had made the point myself, and added ‘it is intended only as an illustration … of the general principles to be observed in framing a theory of animal resurrection’.10 I went on to make an alternative suggestion, observing, I hope, the same principles. My chief purpose at this stage was at once to liberate imagination and to confirm a due agnosticism about the meaning and destiny of brutes. I had begun by saying that if our previous assertion of divine goodness was sound, we might be sure that in some way or other ‘all would be well, and all manner of thing would be well’.11 I wanted to reinforce this by indicating how little we knew and, therefore, how many things one might keep in mind as possibilities.

  (4) If Dr Joad thinks I pictured Satan ‘tempting monkeys’, I am myself to blame for using the word ‘encouraged’. I apologize for the ambiguity. In fact, I had not supposed that ‘temptation’ (that is, solicitation of the will) was the only mode in which the Devil could corrupt or impair. It is probably not the only mode in which he can impair even human beings; when Our Lord spoke of the deformed woman as one ‘bound by Satan’ (Luke 13:16), I presume He did not mean that she had been tempted into deformity. Moral corruption is not the only kind of corruption. But the word corruption was perhaps ill-chosen and invited misunderstanding. Distortion would have been safer.

  (5) My correspondent writes ‘That even the severest injuries in most invertebrate animals are almost if not quite painless is the view of most biologists. Loeb collected much evidence to show that animals without cerebral hemispheres were indistinguishable from plants in every psychological respect. The instance readily occurs of the caterpillars which serenely go on eating though their interiors are being devoured by the larvae of some ichneumon fly. The Vivisection Act does not apply to invertebrates; which indicates the views of those who framed it.’

  (6) Though Dr Joad does not raise the point, I cannot forbear adding some most interesting suggestions about animal fear from the same correspondent. He points out that human fear contains two elements: (a) the physical sensations, due to the secretions, etc.; (b) the mental images of what will happen if one loses hold, or if the bomb falls here, or if the train leaves the rails. Now (a), in itself, is so far from being an unmixed grief, that when we can get it without (b), or with unbelieved (b), or even with subdued (b), vast numbers of people like it: hence switchbacks, water-shoots, fast motoring, mountain climbing.

  But all this is nothing to a reader who does not accept Part One in my ninth chapter. No man in his senses is going to start building up a theodicy with speculations about the minds of beasts as his foundation. Such speculations are in place only, as I said, to open the imagination to possibilities and to deepen and confirm our inevitable agnosticism about the reality, and only after the ways of God to Man have ceased to seem unjustifiable. We do not know the answer: these speculations were guesses at what it might possibly be. What really matters is the argument that there must be an answer: the argument that if, in our own lives, where alone (if at all) we know Him, we come to recognize the pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova,12 then, in other realms where we cannot know Him (connaître), though we may know (savoir) some few things about Him – then, despite appearances to the contrary, He cannot be a power of darkness. For there were appearances to the contrary in our own realm too; yet, for Dr Joad as for me, they have somehow been got over.

  I know that there are moments when the incessant continuity and desperate helplessness of what at least seems to b
e animal suffering makes every argument for Theism sound hollow, and when (in particular) the insect world appears to be Hell itself visibly in operation around us. Then the old indignation, the old pity arises. But how strangely ambivalent this experience is: I need not expound the ambivalence at much length, for I think I have done so elsewhere, and I am sure that Dr Joad had long discerned it for himself. If I regard this pity and indignation simply as subjective experiences of my own with no validity beyond their strength at the moment (which next moment will change), I can hardly use them as standards whereby to arraign the creation. On the contrary, they become strong as arguments against God just in so far as I take them to be transcendent illuminations to which creation must conform or be condemned. They are arguments against God only if they are themselves the voice of God. The more Shelleyan, the more Promethean my revolt, the more surely it claims a divine sanction. That the mere contingent Joad or Lewis, born in an era of secure and liberal civilization and imbibing from it certain humanitarian sentiments, should happen to be offended by suffering – what is that to the purpose? How will one base an argument for or against God on such an historical accident?

  No. Not in so far as we feel these things, but in so far as we claim to be right in feeling them, in so far as we are sure that these standards have an empire de jure over all possible worlds, so far, and so far only, do they become a ground for disbelief – and at the same moment, for belief. God within us steals back at the moment of our condemning the apparent God without. Thus in Tennyson’s poem the man who had become convinced that the God of his inherited creed was evil exclaimed: ‘If there be such a God, may the Great God curse him and bring him to nought.’13 For if there is no ‘Great God’ behind the curse, who curses? Only a puppet of the little apparent ‘God’. His very curse is poisoned at the root: it is just the same sort of event as the very cruelties he is condemning, part of the meaningless tragedy.

  From this I see only two exits: either that there is a Great God, and also a ‘God of this world’ (2 Corinthians 4:4), a prince of the powers of the air, whom the Great God does curse, and sometimes curse through us; or else that the operations of the Great God are not what they seem to me to be.

  20

  IS THEISM IMPORTANT?1 (1952)

  I have lost the notes of what I originally said in replying to Professor Price’s paper and cannot now remember what it was, except that I welcomed most cordially his sympathy with the Polytheists. I still do. When grave persons express their fear that England is relapsing into Paganism, I am tempted to reply, ‘Would that she were!’ For I do not think it at all likely that we shall ever see Parliament opened by the slaughtering of a garlanded white bull in the House of Lords, or Cabinet Ministers leaving sandwiches in Hyde Park as an offering for the Dryads. If such a state of affairs came about, then the Christian apologist would have something to work on. For a Pagan, as history shows, is a man eminently convertible to Christianity. He is essentially, the pre-Christian, or sub-Christian, religious man. The post-Christian man of our own day differs from him as much as a divorcée differs from a virgin. The Christian and the Pagan have much more in common with one another than either has with the writers of the New Statesman; and those writers would of course agree with me. For the rest, what now occurs to me after rereading Professors Price’s paper is something like this.

  (1) I think we must introduce into the discussion a distinction between two senses of the word Faith. This may mean (a) a settled intellectual assent. In that sense faith (or ‘belief’) in God hardly differs from faith in the uniformity of nature or in the consciousness of other people. This is what, I think, has sometimes been called a ‘notional’ or ‘intellectual’ or ‘carnal’ faith. It may also mean (b) a trust, or confidence, in the God whose existence is thus assented to. This involves an attitude of the will. It is more like our confidence in a friend. It would be generally agreed that Faith in sense A is not a religious state. The devils who ‘believe and tremble’ (James 2:19) have Faith-A. A man who curses or ignores God may have Faith-A. Philosophical arguments for the existence of God are presumably intended to produce Faith-A. No doubt those who construct them are anxious to produce Faith-A because it is a necessary precondition of Faith-B, and in that sense their ultimate intention is religious. But their immediate object, the conclusion they attempt to prove, is not. I therefore think they cannot be justly accused of trying to get a religious conclusion out of non-religious premises. I agree with Professor Price that this cannot be done: but I deny that the religious philosophers are trying to do it.

  I also think that in some ages, what claim to be Proofs of Theism have had much more efficacy in producing Faith-A than Professor Price suggests. Nearly everyone I know who has embraced Christianity in adult life has been influenced by what seemed to him to be at least probable arguments for Theism. I have known some who were completely convinced by Descartes’ Ontological Proof:2 that is, they received Faith-A from Descartes first and then went on to seek, and to find, Faith-B. Even quite uneducated people who have been Christians all their lives not infrequently appeal to some simplified form of the Argument from Design. Even acceptance of tradition implies an argument which sometimes becomes explicit in the form ‘I reckon all those wise men wouldn’t have believed in it if it weren’t true.’

  Of course Faith-A usually involves a degree of subjective certitude which goes beyond the logical certainty, or even the supposed logical certainty, of the arguments employed. It may retain this certitude for a long time, I expect, even without the support of Faith-B. This excess of certitude in a settled assent is not at all uncommon. Most of those who believe in Uniformity of Nature, Evolution, or the Solar System, share it.

  (2) I doubt whether religious people have ever supposed that Faith-B follows automatically on the acquisition of Faith-A. It is described as a ‘gift’ (e.g. 1 Corinthians 12:1–11; Ephesians 2:8). As soon as we have Faith-A in the existence of God, we are instructed to ask from God Himself the gift of Faith-B. An odd request, you may say, to address to a First Cause, an Ens Realissimum, or an Unmoved Mover. It might be argued, and I think I would argue myself, that even such an aridly philosophical God rather fails to invite than actually repels a personal approach. It would, at any rate, do no harm to try it. But I fully admit that most of those who, having reached Faith-A, pray for Faith-B, do so because they have already had something like religious experience. Perhaps the best way of putting it would be to say that Faith-A converts into religious experience what was hitherto only potentially or implicitly religious. In this modified form I would accept Professor Price’s view that philosophical proofs never, by themselves, lead to religion. Something at least quasi-religious uses them before, and the ‘proofs’ remove an inhibition which was preventing their development into religion proper.

  This is not exactly fides quaerens intellectum,3 for these quasireligious experiences were not fides. In spite of Professor Price’s rejection I still think Otto’s account of the Numinous4 is the best analysis of them we have. I believe it is a mistake to regard the Numinous as merely an affair of ‘feeling’. Admittedly, Otto can describe it only by referring to the emotions it arouses in us; but then nothing can be described except in terms of its effects in consciousness. We have in English an exact name for the emotion aroused by the Numinous, which Otto, writing in German, lacked; we have the word Awe – an emotion very like fear, with the important difference that it need imply no estimate of danger. When we fear a tiger, we fear that it may kill us: when we fear a ghost – well, we just fear the ghost, not this or that mischief which it may do us. The Numinous or Awful is that of which we have this, as it were, objectless or disinterested fear – this awe. And ‘the Numinous’ is not a name for our own feeling of Awe any more than ‘the Contemptible’ is a name for contempt. It is the answer to the question ‘Of what do you feel awe?’ And what we feel awe of is certainly not itself awe.

  With Otto and, in a sense, with Professor Price, I would find the seed of religiou
s experience in our experience of the Numinous. In an age like our own such experience does occur but, until religion comes and retrospectively transforms it, it usually appears to the subject to be a special form of aesthetic experience. In ancient times I think experience of the Numinous developed into the Holy only in so far as the Numinous (not in itself at all necessarily moral) came to be connected with the morally good. This happened regularly in Israel, sporadically elsewhere. But even in the higher Paganism, I do not think this process led to anything exactly like fides. There is nothing credal in Paganism. In Israel we do get fides but this is always connected with certain historical affirmations. Faith is not simply in the numinous Elohim, nor even simply in the holy Jahweh, but in the God ‘of our fathers’, the God who called Abraham and brought Israel out of Egypt. In Christianity this historical element is strongly reaffirmed. The object of faith is at once the ens entium5 of the philosophers, the Awful Mystery of Paganism, the Holy Law given of the moralists, and Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified under Pontius Pilate and rose again on the third day.

  Thus we must admit that Faith, as we know it, does not flow from philosophical argument alone; nor from experience of the Numinous alone; nor from moral experience alone; nor from history alone; but from historical events which at once fulfil and transcend the moral category, which link themselves with the most numinous elements in Paganism, and which (as it seems to us) demand as their presupposition the existence of a Being who is more, but not less, than the God whom many reputable philosophers think they can establish.

  Religious experience, as we know it, really involves all these elements. We may, however, use the word in a narrower sense to denote moments of mystical, or devotional, or merely numinous experience; and we may then ask, with Professor Price, how such moments, being a kind of visio, are related to faith, which by definition is ‘not sight’. This does not seem to me one of the hardest questions. ‘Religious experience’ in the narrower sense comes and goes: especially goes. The operation of Faith is to retain, so far as the will and intellect are concerned, what is irresistible and obvious during the moments of special grace. By faith we believe always what we hope hereafter to see always and perfectly and have already seen imperfectly and by flashes. In relation to the philosophical premises a Christian’s faith is of course excessive: in relation to what is sometimes shown him, it is perhaps just as often defective. My faith even in an earthly friend goes beyond all that could be demonstratively proved; yet in another sense I may often trust him less than he deserves.