Upon the right answer to these questions the whole meaning of the Universe and of our own lives depends. If we get it wrong, all is wrong, down to the least details. All is warped, diseased, increasingly unsatisfactory, and running down to some chaos. All is sick and ultimately doomed; not in our speculation, but in our action and being. If we get it right all falls into order, down to the smallest actions of daily life. The picture falls into perspective. We are one with reality; we are sane men; and we may, if we choose, go forward towards our end—which is an eternal happiness.
If God be and is our Creator, performs in us His works and makes of Himself our end, then the great structure of doctrine reposes upon a firm foundation. For there could not but be between That which made all things and ourselves the link of the intelligent creature with his Maker. There could not but be some intuition and some communion. Reason being present in man, there could not but be a process of striving for the fullness of being. Correspondingly, it becomes rational that the Creator should reveal Himself. It becomes rational, though awfully mysterious, that the Fatherhood should accept redemption. The Incarnation falls into place; and from thence onwards everything—to the last bead of the Rosary.
But if all this be an illusion, if (to summarize St. Thomas again, in his famous Two Objections to the Being of God), “Nature be sufficient to herself” (“Ea quae sunt naturalia reducuntur in principium quod est natura”), then everything of the Creed fails, and so do all mortals. Whence we come and whither we go, and how we so proceed, are left at large and appear indifferent. Each man will adopt some petty object of his own for living, or deny that living has any object at all. Men will despair and satisfy the moment only. Lacking God, Unity and consecutive effort are dissolved.
“Utrum Deus Sit.” “Whether God Be.”
“Is Religion from God or from Man”?
Now these questions Mr. Wells’s Outline of History proposes to answer simply enough. To the first, “No”: God is Not. He is a figment of man’s imagination. To the second, “From man”: Man invented the idea of God: it is a phantasm of his brain.
I owe to a man for whose talents I have so great an admiration (though none for his culture or instruction) to say here, that I am not judging Mr. Wells’s private opinion upon the existence or non-existence of God. Indeed, that is not very important. Further, he is so impressionable, so carried away by his emotions, and so unaccustomed to close, consecutive thinking, that his decisions vary, as it would seem, with the last thing he happens to have read. In such and such a book he invented a new kind of Trinity. In another place he protests against what he elegantly calls the “stuffed Nicæan God.” In another he protests against the idea of God’s omnipotence. In general, he is in a state of flux, very characteristic of his time. He has thought nothing out.
But in this book (and it is with this book alone that I am concerned here) he quite definitely answers the essential question in that way which I have described. Religion is of man. God is a figment of our human imagining. He sets down again for us in 1926, at too great length (pp. 68 to 73), the old vacuous guesswork of the seventies and eighties on how man came to imagine God, first as a projection of a man they knew, then by extension into a greater and greater being. With characteristic confusion of mind, he calls this process (p. 72) “Discovering God.” But that’s exactly what it isn’t. It’s inventing God—and one can’t have it both ways. I know Mr. Wells honestly wants to have a sort of God, and, being a typical Modernist, he insists on combining what his emotions crave with what his creed denies. To say that primitive man “discovers God” when, as a fact, he is making Him up out of his head, is a contradiction in terms. There are not two truths, an historic and a moral. There is only one truth.
Of two processes, one must have been the actual process at work in man’s mind from the moment when a true man existed and could think at all. Either he first felt instinctively that there was an external power upon which he was dependent, and later, perhaps, corrupted that instinct by identifying such power with lesser things; or he had no such intuition, but from having at first, though intelligent and a true man, no idea whatever of the spiritual life and of such an invisible external power, he came later to imagine it, to suffer the illusion of a god, by an erroneous taking of confused mental habits within for reality without.
No one can say the two processes could mingle or exist side by side. You do not mix a northward direction with a southward one. There is contradiction. Either the process was in one direction or the reverse. If the historical order was in the direction, “First a recognition of God ... then the corruption of that idea by visible association ... then idolatry, perversion, and all the rest of it” (as the very slight evidences and analogies suggest, and as common sense suggests also), that is one thing. If it was “A confused memory of being bullied by the Old Man of the Tribe—then perversions such as human sacrifice—idolatries—later vague imagining of some overshadowing spirit,” that is the opposite. To postulate the first process is to say, in terms of Theology, that man had an original apprehension of God, and later often overlaid it with false worship:—even to the degree of losing the original idea. To postulate the second is to lay down the definite affirmation that God is but a fiction, man-made: and therefore has no being: is not. And it is the second which Mr. Wells repeats once more in this book, from the popular materialist works of our boyhood.