Image provided by: University of Oregon Libraries; Eugene, OR
About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 6, 1972)
| Coaoentary Do men need God? Yes By SIR FREDERICK CATHERWOOD (C) 1971, The Manchester Guardian (Sir Frederick, a former head of Britain’s National Economic Development Council, is a leading British Christian Layman.) The average Christian may be permitted a small groan when yet another cleric announces in a blaze of publicity that he no longer believes in God. However, Ray Billington makes his case very well and he deserves some dialogue with an orthodox Christian. The first of his arguments seems to be that God is an invention set up by society to preserve order and the second that man is now sufficiently mature to dispense with the invention. The trouble with most of today’s clergy is that they allow themselves to be driven back from the first argument to the second and end up either with the law and order brigade or, in a small minority of cases, with revolution. Faced with a public argument about God, too many religious officials melt away like summer snow. They explain apologetically that if they talk about God, no one will listen, so they try to get on the wave length and in remaining very finely tuned to all its moods. The Christian church has no business to alter its message according to the mood of society. Its job is to stand for what it believes to be right and true against what it believes to be wrong and untrue. It is the job of Christians in South Africa, in Northern Ireland as it was in Nazi Germany to stand out against the mood of racialism, not to adapt to it. The Christian faith stands over against the spirit of the age as an objective yard stick. But it cannot do this unless it believes that its yardstick is true. The church in Nazi Germany had thrown away its yardstick and when the crisis came it was too late to fetch it back. Of course, the non-Christian can argue as Pilate did. “What is truth?” No Christian can prove that his faith is true, that the Christian God is not man’s invention, but actually exists. But it is the job of the Christian Church to demonstrate so far as they can that contrary to Ray Billington there is evidence for God “other than that which is self-induced” or instilled by others. The best way the Christian knows of demonstrating this is by living up to his profession and when he cannot do this we don’t make much impact. But we are also meant to give a reason for our faith. We find it a good deal more credible to believe that the human eye was designed by a creator than to believe that it just hap pened by chance. We find that the Christian moral law corresponds more closely than other moralities to the conscience of mankind, that the Christian picture of the good and evil in human nature is more realistic and more credible than those which deny the existence of evil altogether. But, above all, the Christian finds a third dimension to body and soul, a spiritual life which he did not ex perience before he was a Christian but as much of a reality as any of the other senses. The witness of millions of Christians of all races, ages, class and psychological types through 20 centuries is as much evidence as any laboratory experiment and really cannot be laughed off or explained away. And though there are, of course, spurious psychological conversions, no one who has witnessed the autonomous power of Christian con versions to change men’s natures can doubt that this power is external and is directly related to Christian faith. But the Christian’s belief that the Christian moral law is right does not relieve him of the obligation to spell out its logic. Christians believe that acceptance by society of an external moral code is the only method of preserving freedom and that the rejection of an external code is the high road to tyranny. We are interdependent all right,but who is to be dependent on whom? If there is to be no external code to which the rulers are subject, then what is to keep the rulers in check? Do democratically elected majorities have the reversion to divine right? Does it go to those like the South African government who believe that their system is not only true but may be imposed by force on unbelievers? Those who have been eyeball with the tyrannies of mankind find it a little difficult to believe that these are just a little “teething stage in the process of replacing the divine human authority.” But is Christianity itself a tyranny? Christ said not. He said that his service was perfect freedom. Christians say not, they feel that at last they have been liberated from evil, oppression and anxiety. Is the Christian moral code a tyranny to those who are not Christian? Again Christians say not. The moral law must stand on its merits. Is it a tyranny to preach that man is more than an animal, that death is an obscenity caused by sin and not the most natural thing in the world? Is it a tyranny to rely on persuasion rather than on force, to try to change men’s minds—to preach the futility of changing their actions without changing their minds? It is no part of the Christian creed that power comes from the barrel of a gun. The Christian church has been a great power over the centuries and hard men have forever tried to harness that power to their own ends. But fortunately the teachings of Christ and the Apostles is quite explicit and rather awkward to mold to the purposes of power politics. That is why Christians are sensitive to officials of the church who try to harness Christianity to the ideology of the age. The power of the church has come not from misbegotten alliances with Caesar’s emperors and kings or from riding the crest of a fashionable philosophy, but from its strong appeal to the consciences of society. It is this ability to strike a chord in the most unexpected places which has enabled the Christian ethic to produce reform without revolution and to maintain order without oppression. I doubt whether the gospels according to Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Russell are strong enough yet to take over this task. No Christian can be entirely surprised that the decline of Christendom coincides with the rise of nationalism and racialism. Christianity is multi-racial and multi-national in its very essence. It does not believe in natural man as an animal hunting in herds. It does not believe in natural selection by brute force. If its unifying beliefs are removed, then a new tribalism is not too far away. Do men need God? No By RAY BILLINGTON (C) 1971, The Manchester Guardian .... (Ray Billington was expelled by Britains Methodist Church this year because his book, “The Christian Outsider,” was held to be in conflict with Methodist doctrine. In the article below, he outlines his belief that God is an invention which men no longer need. In an accompanying article, a British layman replies that Christian Faith is not a human creation, but “an ob jective yardstick” against the spirit of the age.) These are great days for prophets of doom. With crimes of violence on the increase, sexual fidelity on the decrease, pron proliferating, and drugs debilitating, it is easy to understand the urge to indulge in the lamen tations of a new Jeremiah. Add to all this the warnings of the environmentalists who question the very future of western civilization in its pursuit of economic growth, and the impulse is clearly overwhelming to link the whole lot together as evidence of the dawning of a new dark age. Among these gloomy prophets (and, come to think of it. whoever heard of a cheerful one?) are to be found a fair number who attribute the general decline in our standards to the waning of religious belief and ob servance. As C.S. Lewis said “we only learn to behave ourselves in the presence of God, and if the sense of that presence weakens, humanity tends to lark about.” Or. as Luther said more bluntly: “If you believe in no future life then do as you like. For, if no God, then no Devil, no Hell Then plunge not lechery, rascality, robbery and murder.” This, the gloomy brigade argue, is precisely what is now happening Without the dimension which religion gives, men become a prey to their immediate sense experiences. What they need is an authority set over them, an overlord to whom they are responsible and on whom they depend. And if no such overlord exists he must be invented. Of course, some contemporary theologians reject the earlier personalized image of God in favor of what may be termed a theistic Metaphysic, arising from the alleged objectivity of certain moral principles, such as that benevolence, justice, equality are to be pursued. These theologicans harp less than their more traditionally minded colleagues on the God who keeps people on the straight and narrow. But however progressive this group, it willy nilly unites at one fixed point with the prophets of doom; in the conviction that human beings are by nature too frail, too incompetent, too selfish to order their own lives. So we are left with the general plea of man’s need for God, whether this be expressed in philosophical or an thropomorphic terms. This sense of need, it is argued, keeps men humble, aware of their dependent status, knowing they cannot stand on their own two feet without a helping hand: this has always been human experience, and is therefore perfectly reasonable, natural and healthy. For me this viewpoint has none of these qualitities. It is unreasonable because there is no evidence for God other than that which is self-induced or instilled by others. (If there is an objective morality, this can be posited as a branch of necessary truth, like mathematics, or logic. Or it can be viewed as a biological fact of life which has enabled the race to survive.) It is unnatural because men do, as they are con stantly demonstrating, have the potentiality to stand on their own feet, even if not many actually achieve their potential. It is unhealthy because it discourages human wholeness. It allows men to pass the buck, to shirk responsibility, to leave decisions to the overlord who holds the whole world in his hands. This does not imply that human beings are to be completely independent, self-sufficient. There is a further alternative to dependence besides in dependence: this is interdependence, the awareness that each of us needs other people to help us fulfill various needs, as they in part need us. Inevitably, thi3 raises questions about the type of man-made environments we are creating. In many of which human contacts are made difficult to achieve. People who appear selfish or withdrawn may well be simply victims of housing without any natural meeting places. The acts of violence which gain so much publicity may well be the consequence of cooping men up in the broiler houses which are modern factories, causing a sense of frustration, or no-purpose, of lack of fulfilment. Assembly lines were made for men, not men for assembly lines. Today’s emphasis on sex may well reflect the lack of adventure in life generally, so that people seek relationships where every encounter is a potential adventure. And in a society which tries to pigeon-hole its members to the exclusion of personal initiative, it is understandable that some reject it and try to find themselves through psychedelic drugs. What seems intolerable is that people shall continue to be indoctrinated into acceptance of the God-myth as the only basis for dealing with these problems. Of course, the lack of wholeness in western civilization continues to encourage those who wish society to be more overtly theocratic. But to return to this would be as retograde step as forcing a new nation back into colonial status because of rash decisions made under the headiness of its newly achieved freedom. The fact is that the sanctions which men place on their behavior must spring from the human cir cumstances of life from conditions and relationships, tensions, and opportunities as men experience them. He is only just beginning to realize this, and if he makes mistakes, by substituting anarchy for freedom (which involves constraint), then this must be viewed as the teething stage in the process of replacing the divine by human authority. To advocate otherwise is to imprison men perpetually in the nursery.
