When man was not yet fully man, but still of a bestial type, the brutes went about in little groups, consisting of a father, several mothers, and a lot of young. The father was a vile bullying beast, and the subordinate members of the little group lived in terror of him. As the younger males grew up he got jealous of them and chased them out. What with one thing and another his horrid cruelty, his vicious temper, his jealousy—the dread of him filled the mind of all his wretched dependants. The mothers would tell their children hair-raising stories about him. He became an obsession. When this “Old Man” grew to be a little over forty, and lost some of his original vigour, he was knocked on the head by a younger male, or if that did not happen to him, something else got rid of him. He went off to die, or another rather younger “Old Man” supplanted him. But his legend was firmly fixed, and that’s where we got the idea of God.
Personally, I think it a more unpleasant suggestion by far than the still older ineptitudes of men making God up out of Dreams, or the Sun, or even than that ubiquitous modern mania of Sex and the rest of it. In my judgment, the “Old Man” rubbish is an awful example of what happened to the nineteenth-century child who suffered a Calvinistic upbringing. There must, I fear, have been many “Old Men” at the head of suburban households forty to fifty years ago to give rise to this disgusting vision.
But what I would like to point out is not so much the offensiveness of the picture (and of the minds that entertain it) as its gratuitous inanity.
It is one thing to confuse hypothesis with fact—and bad enough, God knows—but it is a still more degraded thing for the human intelligence to descend to mere unsupported affirmation.
Let us get this point quite clear—for it applies to the whole of Mr. Wells’s work. Not only is hypothesis stated as fact, but things are stated as fact which aren’t even hypothesis—which have no evidence at all in their favour.
If I see a man throw away an old pair of boots by the roadside, I can register the fact that he threw them away. That is science; that is ascertained fact.
If I see an old pair of boots by the roadside I can, if I like, attempt to account for their presence by an hypothesis, that is, by a suggestion which (if I am a reasonable man who can distinguish knowledge from guessing) I do not affirm, but only put forward as a possible explanation. I say, “These boots may have been thrown away by the man who stole a new pair of boots from my neighbour Brown.”
But what should we say of a man who, although no old boots had been found, made up a circumstantial story of the thief, saying, “This is where he threw away his old boots. His name was Archie Williams, he had red hair, he was a teetotaller, a widower, and had been in gaol for assaulting the police”?
Now this exactly corresponds to the process by which the Victorian Materialist group got its idea of God deriving from the “Old Man.”
He is not even an hypothetical “Old Man,” for he corresponds to no known human habit. All vertebrates have fathers, and all fathers grow old. Some sorts are polygamous, others pair in couples. But of a vertebrate ancestral to man, polygamous, and possessing these habits of bullying his “group” of terrorized wives and young, there is no trace. There is not a shred of evidence in bone or flint or prehistoric painting or tradition. The whole thing was spun entirely out of the Victorian writer’s head. It gave him pleasure in this, as in other points, to think himself much nicer than his ancestors, because that flattered his pride. He liked to suppose the idea of God a figment of man’s brain, because that left him free from moral responsibility; but of evidence there is not a fragment. This fairy (or ogre) tale corresponds to nothing in the human spirit; it has no relation to the reverence, the exaltation, the affection which we instinctively feel for that by which we come to be: not only for God, but for our parents and our country. It is not the way in which our minds work from childhood to maturity—at least it is not the way in which the minds of normal children work. I cannot answer for the workings of the mind in children brought up in strange heresies.