"In other words, your Original Sin is the church itself!" He sounded disturbed.
"It's—any ism. Any person or group with sure-fire dogmas that you have to accept on faith—as offering ends justifying physical means and psychological means that are illogical, unethical, unreasonable, that fail to take into account the innate facts of our animal instinct, that exclude valid opposites to their tenets, and so on."
"And you think God is what might be called the cause in instinct?"
"The cause, the pattern, the existence of it in animals and man, the physical laws and forms of the universe, and the instincts of living things that match those laws and forms. What's the difference between the laws of instinct—the great drives of life taken with the opposed drives that balance them and the harmony possible in a person who understands these—and other laws? The attraction and repulsion of electrical energy, for instance? We do not regard them as 'mutually exclusive.' What are you going to say about a question like Schrodinger's? He shows that one fragment of one atom hitting another atom in a gene will change the nature of the resulting being. I'd add that the instincts may change, too. Schrodinger shows you that what we know of energy lies at the heart of what we know of form. You can also see that form lies at the heart of what we know of behavior and of consciousness. When they understand the laws of the energy in atoms—they'll probably have a brand-new parallel, like that of other natural laws, for instinctual laws. They may even have a potential new insight into instinct. For how can anybody who notices the perfect instinctual pattern that corresponds with every living form, and who sees these forms evolving in awareness down the aeons, doubt that the universe has purpose or wonder what its purpose is? Unfortunately, in this putrid day and age, new discoveries in many fields are military secrets—so we, the people, won't be told them."
"You sound extremely bitter about that."
"Bitter? Yes, I'm bitter, in a way. All my life I've devoted myself to following the inquiry into the nature of Nature. This pursuit has led me—by way of psychology—into finding out a great deal about what is popularly called the nature of God. But now, knowledge at the source is restricted, classified, forbidden, secret—to protect the damned atom bomb. My government, as a security measure, has cut off my inquiry into God, my power to extend my own religion, my equivalent of your faith, my access to truth. Perhaps I'd never even manage to persuade anybody that the time has come to connect instinct and energy by theory. But the right that I hold most valuable has been taken from me. And from you. And from everybody—if they stopped to think. Freedom—that precious necessity—is actually freedom for the mind. There is no other pure liberty. All other freedoms stem from intellectual freedom—but all others are qualified by the material, social, political, and spiritual desires of people. What we call liberty in America is the right to know and to change: to extend or limit this liberty for the sake of that advantage or because of that prejudice—and then to learn better and shift the position once again—and so on forever. That is all there is to liberty insofar as it concerns behavior. But when the behavior of the mind is circumscribed, liberty is dead in its one absolute sense. It is dead today. We live in a midnight imposed by fear—a time like all dark ages. Truth and learning have gone underground. I am forbidden to know any more. What I think might be centuries in advance of what common people are thinking. It is still—at least potentially—obsolete, or inadequate, in relation to what other men may know—that I am not allowed by my government to find out. Wouldn't you be bitter—or sad—if your church were shut up by the Congress, if you were forbidden to learn more about your God, and if you were obliged to confine even your thinking to bootlegged guesses?"
"It's a pretty remote argument," he said.
"Is it? Remote to destroy the source of freedom?"
"Would you have us tell the Soviets how to make a bomb?"
"Is that the question? They know how! You have been told and told and told that they know how and have known since the Smythe Report appeared. And even that's not the point. When it became evident that the people of the United States faced the alternatives of maintaining the freedom of knowledge—at the risk of atomic conflict—or of destroying liberty at the source to gain the dubious advantage of a few years' time—the people chose the phony safety of secrecy for a mere unknowable dozens of months. They were too dumb to see they had sold their birthright."