The Silence Of God

Contents Updated: Friday, May 14, 1999

• The Silence of God
• Who Made the World?
• Does Evolution Exclude God?
• The Voice of Conscience
• The Religious Instinct
• Disproofs

The Silence Of God

Disgusting things have been done and grotesque things believed in the name of god. The god wants victims. The priests say so. In an ancient American city, priests stretched their victims on a slab to pluck out the still-beating heart and offer it to the sun-god. Mothers had to stifle their distress in thanksgiving.

In ancient Rome, in Carthage, in Britain, in Syria—these senseless sacrifices had been demanded. During countless ages of human history men and maidens had been slain in the name of gods. Gods still clamoured for blood only a few decades ago. Now, what was the god of love doing while all this went on?

Christians tell us there is a good god. The call him simply God. Where was God when people were being killed for religious reasons? For countless centuries, the Christian God looked down complacently from his state of blessedness upon all the grisly ignorance and tortures of the children of men, yet might have ended the whole gruesome folly. “We know not why he takes time,” you say, “but the hour comes”. When?

At Cholula is a Christian church perched on the top of a pyramid which once bore one of these bloody Mexican temples. To the Catholics of the district it is a symbol of the triumph of revelation and mercy over human error and brutality. God made those blundering and brutal humans of long ago, and He could have made them wiser in a year as easily as in a hundred thousand years.

Hearts are not physically plucked out of living bodies in the Roman Church. They are sacrificed in a different way. Near by is a nunnery, and priests lead prettily dressed maidens to the altar to make the vow of celibacy which they understand little more than does the babe in arms, and which means living death to the heart.

The Mayas and Aztecs went, but cruel things were still done for centuries, and are done today all over the world, in the name of God. God was silent.

• He was silent when women were drowned as witches, and honest men were burned as heretics.
• He was silent when the savage and demoralizing doctrine of eternal torment was, in his name, imposed upon the whole earth, four thousand years after the founding of civilization.
• He is still silent when an ignorant preacher tells an agonized mother that the soul of her dead and unbaptized babe burns, and will burn forever, in the most appalling fires the human imagination ever pictured.

People believe most deeply in God just where life is most treacherous, where poverty stings worst, where hearts are still torn out and sacrificed. And these men and women know less, and are less capable of thinking, than those in the skeptical cities where disease has been checked, where the burden is lighter.

As conditions improve, belief in God declines. Belief in God is strongest among those who have least to thank God for—it is weakest among those who have knowledge. It is universal where life is abject and people are too ignorant to see they are not indebted to God.

Belief in God is rocked least amongst the backward nations of the earth. It is rocked most in the cities of advanced nations, and is extinct among educated people except those of them who have chosen to make a living by gulling the ignorant.

People might pray for heavenly help and assistance with their personal problems but God is not invited to solve the world’s serious economic and political problems at Geneva, Brussels or in the White House or the Pentagon. Prayers for divine guidance in these places are pious habits that no one believes will have the least practical effect. Does a motor mechanic pray for god’s help before he addresses the knock in our car’s engine? Do doctors rely on praying to God or on their skill and training? Do judges pray for guidance then draw their judgement from a hat?

God has no place in practical life. He is confined to the church. In our great cities, only a small minority ever go to a place of worship—nine out of ten do not. Only those few people whose piety exceeds their common sense plead for God outside the Christian Churches. God is silent. God could still write in letters of fire across the night sky, and no one could disbelieve. He writes nothing, and says nothing. He is silent.

It does not occur to believers that their fantasies might be in the only place where fantasies ever are. Instead, whenever they are in difficulties, Christians plead that the finite mind cannot comprehend the infinite. The truth is that Christianity is in a direct line of inheritance from religions of human sacrifice—remember the story of Abraham and Isaac—and are purely human constructions.

From the days of Plato, from the time of Job, thoughtful men have racked their brains to find and formulate proof of the existence of God.

Plato, the great Greek Philosopher, gave the world two thousand five hundred years ago what men regarded as the most brilliant proofs of the existence of God. No one sees any force in them today. Aristotle, another great thinker of the same age, gave other and quite different proofs. No one follows him today, either. St. Augustine tried. No one follows him. From those days to this people have been inventing new arguments and none of them agree with another.

Who Made The World?

The most common argument for God takes the form of a question: Who made the world, if there is no God? Why not, What made the world? Indeed how do you know that the world ever was made? Philosophers and scientists do not believe that the world was made.

You assume that the world was made. By made you mean created. You take it for granted that at the word of God it sprang into existence. The question assumes the answer. If something was made, it necessarily had a maker. Everybody assumes it, because Genesis, in its first line, says so. But you cannot quote the word of God until you have proved that there is a God. And apart from Genesis there is no ground for saying that the world was ever made, so there is no meaning in asking who made it. It is for the person who says that it was made to prove the assertion. Until some sort of proof is given that the world was made, it is useless, surely, to ask anyone to speculate as to who made it.

The stars differ from each other in age by billions of years. The old idea that for an eternity there was a void, and then, for some unknown reason, God spoke and the universe leaped fully formed into being, is certainly wrong. The stars would be of the same age if that were true.

Perhaps God merely created the material of the universe and allowed it to evolve. If he did he is not therefore interfering in its evolution, and cannot be answering prayers. This God as a prime mover becomes no God in practice. If there is no practical God then why should there be any God at all?

There are causes and effects in the universe, one argument runs, and therefore there must be a First Cause. There are movements in the universe, so there must be a Prime Mover, something ultimate which moves all and is not itself moved. There are things in the universe which exist by chance or contingency, but at the base of all there must be something that exists necessarily.

Take the supposed argument for a First Cause. The idea of cause and effect expresses what we see in nature. Heat causes evaporation, electricity in the clouds causes lightening and thunder, and so on. And of course you must come ultimately to a fundamental cause or causes. There is no clear reason for saying that ultimately there is just one First Cause. There is no reason for giving it (or them) capital letters.

There are “laws of nature,” they say. Every page of a scientific work talks about them. Very good, then there must be a law-giver. A great mind stamped these laws upon the material universe and so set it evolving.

Laws of nature, as we use the phrase in science, have not the least resemblance to human laws, and have no relation whatever to a “legislator” or a mind. We say, for instance, that there is a law of gravitation. But we do not mean that there is a code of behavior drawn up in advance which things must obey. We mean simply that things do behave consistently in certain ways. The “law,” as we call it, is simply a human description of their behaviour.

A stone, let us say, always falls to the ground unless it is prevented. Why should it, unless there is a law imposed upon it? Nature acts uniformly, or consistently. But if nature is blind and unconscious, ought we not to expect things to act erratically, not uniformly?

Not in the least. It is a very poor fallacy. Consistent behavior is just what we ought to expect from blind mechanical things. A ball will roll in a straight line unless something interferes with it. It is will, or mind, that we might expect to act otherwise. It would be a proof of mind in nature if things at times did not act uniformly. The contrary is when we find them acting uniformly.

Does Evolution Exclude God?

Does evolution undermine or destroy the belief in God?

Certain men of science in the United States go about loudly proclaiming that evolution is quite consistent with religion. They have no right whatever to say this in the name of science, for the great majority of men of science and evolutionists do not believe in God.

Science as such is never concerned with religion. No branch of science deals with God or the soul or Christ. Yet science tells us truths which are inconsistent with the belief in God and the soul.

Atheism began long ago, in ancient Greece, and religious thinkers like Socrates worked out the argument that the order and beauty and purposiveness of nature proved the existence of a God. That controversy was suspended by Europe passing into the Dark Ages, but after the Renaissance men began to think again and the old issue returned.

Deists rejected the Christian religion, but they believed in God, and they turned again to the old proofs of God’s existence and developed them. Atheism was arising once more. By the middle of the nineteenth century there was a whole library of books proving that the order of the heavenly bodies and the beauty of nature pointed triumphantly to the existence of a supreme intelligence and designer. Science seemed to be full of evidence for God.

Then came Charles Darwin. Darwin never attacked religion. Indeed, he was cowardly about it. He believed sincerely in God at the time when he wrote The Origin of Species and, although he came some years later to reject the belief, it was difficult to get him to speak on the subject. He was a delicate and retiring man, and he looked on with some bewilderment when the brilliant Professors Huxley and Haeckel, showed that evolution put an end to God and the soul.

Theologians shuddered when evolutionists began to show that things gradually evolved over tens of millions of years. If these structures had come into existence all at once, we would have to consider a creator, but, if they evolved gradually, one form leading to another, the situation is different. Unconscious nature may do, by innumerable trials and errors, in a million years, what would be impossible in a year by the greatest intellect.

That is how evolution undermines religion. The basis of the religious argument from design in nature is that there is no other possible explanation of the organs and instincts of animals except a divine plan drawn up in advance. No plea for the supernatural origin of anything is valid as long as there is a possibility of a natural explanation of its origin. Even if we do not see the explanation today, we may see it tomorrow.

Moreover, the argument from the supposed order and beauty of the universe was equally undermined. This “order” had been found mainly in the movements of the heavenly bodies. No distinguished astronomer now traces “the finger of God” in the heavens.

As to beauty—the beauty of flowers and birds, of shells and scenery—evolution explains it just as it explains instincts and organs. It evolved. The argument was always very one-sided, for there is as much ugliness as beauty in nature, as much brutality and bestiality as mutual help. Both are now understood, though. Nature knows nothing of order and beauty, or disorder and ugliness. It evolves without a plan. Then man develops a sense of beauty, and the rose or the orchid appeals to it. We can trace their evolution, and it would now be absurd to say that the flowers evolved in order to please man a few million years later.

Thus the entire argument of design, the greatest triumph of the theologians, fell to pieces. The argument for a Designer is as dead as the argument for a First Cause, a Prime Mover, a Creator, or a Legislator of the laws of nature.

And this applies almost with the same force to what is called creative evolution—the theory of Henri Bergson, George Bernard Shaw and a few others. Their theory is that, though a personal God does not exist, a sort of Vital Force works through matter and finds expression in the myriads of animals and plants and man. All one can say is that nature has evolved ways of evolving which seem to show a purpose, but it is done through murtation, just as all evolution is, so is simply part of the whole.

Sometimes Theists fancy that they get rid of difficulties by sacrificing the “personality” of God. We here:

There is no personal God but there must be a cosmic mind.

Another calls it a Cosmic Power, another the Energy of the Universe, and so on. Personality means mind or self- consciousness. There is no aspect of nature today which even suggests the existence of God. There is a very great deal in nature, as we shall see, which suggests that there is no God, no sort of God..

The Voice Of Conscience

Science gives us a natural interpretation of nature. To take some part of nature which is at present obscure and say that the hand of God must be there is a fallacy. Our ignorance of natural causes probably is only temporary.

To be valid these arguments require, not merely that science cannot today explain some phenomenon in nature, but that it can never explain it because an explanation is impossible except via God. Who will venture to attempt that?

The ordinary believer in God must realize that popular preachers and Christian writers deceive them: either deliberately or owing to the limitations of their education. They use discredited arguments which no scholar will admit but which they hope to use to fool the gullible and ignorant.

The more honest religious writers, the better educated clergy, like the controversial former bishop of Durham, do not boast they can demonstrate the existence of God. The glory of God, which was once thought to fill the universe, is now regarded as a purely spiritual thing.

It is precisely in the case of man, where we ought to find divine action, that we have least trace of it. The history of man is now written without the smallest need to introduce supernatural action. Whatever has been accomplished was accomplished by man. The prehistory of man—the millions of years of primitive savagery—is no more brutally godless than present politics. Though humans can now destroy the world, instead of showing restraint, they seem madder than ever. The human world today, which we know so well, nowhere suggests a finger of God.

Let us take first the best that there is in man. It is in man’s moral emotions, in his conscience, that theologians generally claim to find evidence of the existence of God. He perceives moral law, and moral law implies a legislator. Natural laws may be mere descriptions, moral law is a code drawn up in advance for humans to obey.

You say that God imposed this law. The legislators were human, and the conscience of the individual is an outcome of causation. A supernatural explanation is superfluous when a natural explanation is likely. Why? For this simple reason: if a thing which actually exists is enough to explain a phenomenon, you have not the least reason for the existence of something else, otherwise unknown, to be called in to explain it. It may be more poetic to regard thunder as the voice of God, but, since electricity fully explains it, you give up the idea of a God in the sky or on the mountain top.

Now every feature of the moral life is consistent with the theory that moral law is a code of behavior imposed on the individual by the community. The nature of the law, the clauses and precepts of it, points to this. Justice, honesty, and truthfulness are social laws, obviously. Social life improves in so far as they are observed, and it is disturbed in so far as they are ignored. Nothing could be clearer than that nine-tenths of the moral code represents rules of social conduct.

The evolution of morals quite confirms this. The earliest peoples of the human family had no need of moral laws because they behaved perfectly well by instinct. Moral law takes shape in harmony with expanding consciousness and its effect on social life—it is consciously altered and instinctive reactions become inappropriate.

Religious creeds pervert the code. Local circumstances and needs shape it differently in different places. But the general development is clear. Man gradually formulates his moral or social law. Then the priests take it over and ascribe the law to a divine legislator.

People do not need a God to teach them that justice and honesty are laws or ideals. And the different emphasis put on different clauses of the law is equally human. Lying, for instance, is (where no great harm is done) regarded as a light offense. To get drunk once in a while is not a serious matter. To get drunk habitually and ruin your family is a crime. Murder is the greatest of crimes. It is all perfectly human. It is social law.

The only difficulty is about sex-morals, and precisely on this point there is no such thing as a universal and consistent human conscience. This is, plainly, very significant.

In some cultures, your host offers you the companionship of his wife for the night and is offended if you decline. It was a virtue of hospitality in ancient Scotland and other places. Polygamy might be moral or immoral but even a Christian moralist like St Augustine would allow a man to beget children by another woman, if his wife was barren. Jesus would not! There is no limit to the vagaries of conscience in the field of sex.

This is in perfect harmony with the view that moral law is human law, and it is quite inconsistent with the belief that an autocratic legislator framed the law. The Christian code of conduct contained things which were purely ecclesiastical in origin. Separating moral and social law from sectarian additions is difficult, if not impossible. And the standard of most people is a social standard: Does the act do harm to others? The Golden Rule is the ultimate moral principle. Behave toward others as you wish them to behave toward you. Nothing could be more clearly social.

The Religious Instinct

One school of philosophers follows the German philosopher Hegel and believes in a very abstract and impersonal God, without recognizable characteristics, which they call the Absolute.

Another school of philosophers call themselves Personal Idealists. They believe in a Personal God, and they find evidence for Him in the mind of man and its ideals. Evolution explains man’s ideals without any metaphysics of this kind.

Then there is the small school of Pragmatists or Humanists, which says, our beliefs are not due to reason alone. Our whole nature, even our needs and interests, enter into them. The theory does not help any man who wants to be sure that God really exists. At the most it may approve of belief in God as useful. It is of no use unless it is true.

No matter how little trace of God there is in the external world, man has a religious sense or instinct which bears witness to him. All peoples that exist or have ever existed, it is said, believe in God.

The whole human race has until modern times been wrong on most things except those which are quite obvious. And most people believe in God for false reasons.

All peoples do not believe in God. Emerging humans could not believe in God. The belief evolves through consciousness as a primitive way of explaining or justifying inexplicable things. Now, there is no justification for keeping it. The supposed “consent of the whole human race” is a lie.

Well, the new apologists say, let us take the belief in God as it actually exists. Belief in the existence of God is so widespread, so nearly universal, that there must be some instinct or special religious sense in man for perceiving it. Just as one part of a man perceives color, another hears sounds, and another feels heat or cold, so there may be a spiritual faculty for perceiving God. We may feel his presence, not infer it from nature, and many believers say that this is their experience.

In view of the collapse of all the arguments for God from the external world there is naturally a tendency to concentrate on and develop this argument. It seems safe against any advance of science. You know more about your own consciousness, you think, than the man of science does. If you feel the existence of God, how can a man of science tell you that you do not?

The first difficulty is that belief is strongest where education is poorest. If God has implanted a religious instinct, why should it grow feebler in proportion to education and generally disappear where knowledge is greatest? In the better educated middle class, the majority have no such inner sense or belief in God. And in the circles of highest culture, of science and philosophy, the belief is feeblest of all.

Learned clergymen rely no longer on arguments from design and First Causes. They appeal to the inner religious sense or instinct. Yet, the more the world grows in wisdom, the less belief in God there is.

Indeed the argument from a religious sense is even feebler than that from a moral sense. We all have a moral sense, a perception of moral distinctions and obligation, and it generally grows with one’s progress in knowledge and refinement. It is just the reverse with this supposed religious sense. It decreases with knowledge and generally with refinement.

The believer in God ought easily to understand why so many are now disposed to regard preachers and religious writers as not honest. They constantly use arguments which have been long discredited and are not true to the facts of life. They talk of man as “eternally religious” while they see the educated modern world surrendering religion on a phenomenal scale, and refusing to accept the new religions or versions of religion that arise. The cities of the world have done with religion. The claim of a religious sense is a flagrant defiance of plain facts.

As to children, in whom this religious sense is supposed to dawn, the statement is easily tested. Children who are taught neither religion nor anti-religion never show the least inclination to believe. It is the consistent experience of Agnostic families.

Disproofs

Must we then be Atheists? Most people who do not believe in God will not call themselves Atheists—those who deny the existence of God—on the grounds that it is not proved. It is a cop out. They hang on to a straw of religion because they have not the courage to totally deny God, believing that as long as they do not, there is a thread of hope left to them should they find themselves being judged after death.

People used once to belief in phlogiston. They do not now say they are agnostic about it. They no longer believe it because there are better theories of combustion. Laplace had no need of the hypothesis of God. Why has anyone else? We know things can be explained without the need of the hypothesis of God, therefore why pretend that we might need it.

If some incredible proof of God should suddenly arise, then is the time to adopt the hypothesis. There is no need to half believe it on the ground that it is not disproven. That is not scientific or sensible.

A Theist is anyone who believes in God. A Deist is one who believes in God but rejects revelation. An Atheist does not believe in God. An Agnostic does not know whether there is a God or not. A Pantheist is one who believes that God is not a separate reality from the universe. Adelphiasophists are pantheists but consider the universe as a female principle.

Admittedly, the Agnostic proper does not think it is an open question whether there is a God or not. There is no respectable evidence whatever for God, and there is a mass of evidence which disposes us to believe that there is no God. The case for Theism is very feeble: the case for Atheism is very strong.

Imagine the arguments weighed in the balance. In one scale are all the affirmative arguments. The ancient arguments of Plato and Socrates and Aristotle. The antiquated arguments of the Christian Fathers and Schoolmen, of St Augustine and St Anselm, St Thomas and St Bonaventure. The arguments of the Deists, of Paley, of Kant, of Fiske, of all the poets and philosophers of the nineteenth century. The arguments of Bergson, of the Absolute Idealists and the Personal Idealists, of Kelvin and Lodge and Gould. The scale is full of self contradiction.

In the other scale? All the tears and blood that mankind has ever shed, all the pain and disease and suffering that have darkened this planet, all the brutality and injustice ever perpetrated, all the blunders and crimes that wisdom might have prevented.

The Modernist preacher and the religious scientist say that evolution is a more impressive revelation of God’s power and glory than creation. Look at the daily news-sheet of crime, brutality, death, suffering, stupidity, hatred, exploitation, privation, warfare and indifference. Does God see this? Evolution is incomprehendingly slow. Why is God’s revelation so slow?

Fundamentalists are funny when they quote as evidence against evolution the fact that large classes of animals make no progress whatever. Why should they? They are adapted to their environment. They change only when there is some stimulating change in their surroundings, new enemies, new parasites, new dangers, new catastrophes—fresh pain and blood and death. Great changes of climate, Ice Ages, have been a most important part of the machinery of evolution. They led to great advances through suffering and slaughter. Evolution requires species to alter to fit new surroundings. It is difficult and those that fail undergo terrible suffering and ultimately extinction.

Suffering chastens the soul and improves character, say some. If we bear our cross properly, there is heaven for us. If the idea of heaven is an illusion, the entire argument is vicious. But even if there were a heaven, the excuse would cover only a small part of the pain of the world. It does not touch the entire animal world. Why were they created at all if it be a necessity of their lives that hunger shall drive them to seek food and that one-half shall hunt and rend and devour the other half?

Moreover, the argument does not even apply to the human family. If the accepted version of the conditions of admission into heaven be true, the part of the race which suffers most—the majority—will never enter heaven. Of all the men who lived before Christ, during many millions of years, you will expect to meet very few in Paradise. Suffering does not generally purchase heaven. It is usually a foretaste of hell.

What other justification of the ways of God will you attempt? Nothing new has been discovered since the days of Job. It is a mystery. It is a mystery if you believe in God. It is no mystery in a true philosophy of life. Nature is unconscious. Out of its dark womb a dull glow of consciousness at last emerges, and living things begin to suffer. But mother-nature knows nothing of their sufferings. At last proto-humans appear. For millions of years they do not differ from other animals. They know little of the world about them. They foresee no future and have no god. At last self-conscious, civilized humans appear, and science is evolved. Then, with the great powers of the material world at their service, they begin to do things for themselves. Is that philosophy not true to the facts of life as you know them?

One grows weary of following the changes of religious thought and argument of the log rolling Christians. The supposed constant changes of science, which are really, for the most part, developments of what we already knew, are slight in comparison with the changes in theology, and science claims no divine inspirer who might be assumed to have an interest in guarding the race from error.

The latest plea is that, after all, perhaps God is not infinite in power. Perhaps there are limits to what he can do. Perhaps he could not prevent the pain and evil in the world. We save his benevolence, at the cost of his omnipotence.

This theory, which was adopted by John Stuart Mill long ago, leaves us in a state of mind of the utmost confusion. English wits called it, when Mill introduced it, a limited liability God. What proof do you offer of the existence of this finite God? The answer is the order and purposivness of the universe, as usual. The finite God is, if not the creator, at least the designer of the universe, the mind guiding the forces of nature.

Then he directed the forces of life to produce the germs of typhus and cholera, the teeth of the sabre-tooth tiger and of twenty-foot sharks, the lust for blood of the lion and the wolf, the spider and the serpent. If he did not, why do you claim that he paints the sunset and the orchid, shapes the beautiful shell, or fashions the human eye?

You want to leave the simplest microbes, when they are pernicious, entirely out of the list of things which He guided the forces of nature to produce and to include in that list the fashioning of such complex things as the human brain and heart. You want to ascribe to your finite God all the good impulses of the mind and heart and leave all the bad impulses as things which his limited power could not control.

Certainly a naive proposal to make to us! It is like saying that all the good things in nature clearly require an intelligent principle to explain them, and all evil things, which are just as intricate, do not require one.

But perhaps you would like to help out the argument with the hackneyed phrase that evil is only negative. So when your nerves tingle with the pain of toothache or headache or appendicitis, the sensation is merely “the absence of good”. The teeth and claws of the lion are as negative as the pain of the deer, perhaps. The toxins which poisonous microbes put in the blood are negative, and, of course, death is only the cessation of life. Poverty is only the absence of wealth.

Face the facts candidly. This world contains a mass of evidence that it was probably not designed by a God, and there is no serious evidence that it was.

But there is another new apology for God, and it is very proud of itself, because it is actually based upon evolution. We admit, it says, that there have been hundreds of millions of years of pain and brutality. We admit that the finger of God is not very obvious in the world today. But a brighter age is coming. A far higher race and better earth will yet appear. The dark tragedy of the past will be crowned by a glorious final scene.

We are only just learning the elements of civilization. We could rise as high above the life of today as it is above the life of the ape.

But the idea that a few million years of happiness at the close justify a process of evolution (if it was consciously guided) which entailed hundreds of millions of years of misery for beings that die before the happiness begins is one of the most flagrant applications I ever read of the pernicious principle that the end justifies the means.

Whatever be God’s future, we shall never forget his past.

Let us take it soberly. There seems to be nothing in the whole of nature which now seriously persuades us to believe that a God must have made it. On the other hand, there is a vast amount in nature that favors Atheism. Nothing in mankind’s nature compels us to assume that the evolutionary agencies which developed them were guided. His faults and brutality, suggest they were not guided. There is no finger of God in history from the first page to the last. Mankind’s blundering, evolving intelligence and ideals account for everything, the good and the evil. In the long, torturous, bloodstained process of the evolution of his religions there is no more trace of divine wisdom than elsewhere.

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