The Next Step in Religion: An Essay toward the Coming Renaissance

by Roy Wood Sellars

It is very interesting to study the development of the idea of providence. It means foresight and the care which renders foresight praiseworthy. The more the gods were given character and identified with the life of the community, the more they were thought of as guardians anxious for the good of their people. As superhuman, they were gifted with knowledge of events to come and with plans for the welfare and happiness of their worshipers. The social relations of the gods inevitably brought them into transforming touch with the ethical progress of humanity. They became ideals reflecting back the highest of which man could conceive.

In Christianity, we have a most striking instance of this ethical transformation of the one deity who is the superhuman agent par excellence. He is the father, kindly and loving, merciful and bountiful, who looks after the welfare of his children and plans their individual lives and the course of civilization. The evolution of God on its ethical side has reached its high point. From the philosophical side, this evolution was practically a foregone conclusion. Just because God was conceived socially, he could not escape this goal. Hosea and Jesus took the direction which ethical idealists could not help but take.

Let us examine the consequences of this assumption of an omnipotent, omniscient and ethically perfect agent who acts in nature and in human history. Simply by deducing the implications of the concept, we find that it involves a plan for the world. Such a plan is called by theology God's providence. For one who accepts the assumption, the only sane attitude to take is that of submission to the course of events as manifestations of God's will and wisdom. The heart of religion thus becomes a joyous acceptance of life's portion through a willed union with the purposes of this perfect being. The most religious souls in history have drawn this conclusion and acted it out in their lives. In this way, they taste of an exaltation similar to that which the patriot experiences when he identifies himself, without reservation, with the hopes and plans of his country at some time of crisis. They have, moreover, this advantage that disappointment is impossible, since they can never know the actual plans of God nor the time when they are to be fulfilled. If they anticipate and set their heart on some event which kindles their enthusiasm and it does not come to pass, they can assuage their disappointment with the remembrance that God's ways are past finding out and that he has an eternity in which to work. From the very nature of the hypothesis, the course of history can never disprove this outlook which is the logical end-term of the god-idea. This impossibility of test makes it, however, unscientific. Nothing can be deduced from it. As an hypothesis, it must always remain unfruitful. When we come to treat of the problem of good and evil, we shall see other difficulties which it must face.

But the idea of a grand plan from which God cannot be swerved by intercession and supplication is far from the thought of the usual level of religion. It is the creation of reflective thought, and does not find a ready welcome in the minds of people at large. For them, there is no such thing as complete determination of the course of events. God is a powerful agent who is able to bring to pass what he wills but he does not always intervene in particular cases unless he is asked. It is this situation, in which God is only one of the forces at work in nature, that gives the setting for the idea of a special providence and the answer to prayer. Is it not evident that we have in these beliefs the expression of personal agency, an idea continuous with mythology?

There are many examples of the appeal to a special providence which awaken the curiosity of the modern man. In cases of severe sickness, prayer for restoration to health is offered in the churches and homes. If God is a personal agent affected by the desires of his worshipers, this act is perfectly logical. Yet the nature of sickness is now so well known that we see in it a cause and effect relation of a definite sort. Knowledge of impersonal agency is undermining the faith in super-human agency. Perhaps the fact that such prayers have never stayed a plague, while active measures of a scientific sort have done so, has had something to do with the purely formal and traditional character of such prayers among civilized men. Another instance which has caused many cynical comments is the appeal to God to bring victory to the nation in time of war. Both combatants pray to the same deity with about equal fervency and, at the same time, make as careful preparations as possible for the actual warfare. The religious ceremonies appear to play the part of an emotional accompaniment for the grimmer proceedings on the battle-field. To the soldier, God stands for the element of chance; otherwise, the main precept is to keep the powder dry.

When we enter the domain of science, we at once realize that a different conception of agency is held. The universe is regarded as a closed system of causal relations which spring from the nature of its parts. It is a systematic and self-contained world whose activities can be explained by the discovery of laws which constantly hold and which grow out of the stable properties of nature itself. As the result of a close and accurate study of the various aspects of nature, science has come to the conclusion that the large bulk of the world is lifeless and that its parts react in habitual or mechanical ways which are invariable. The planets circle about the sun in accordance with the pull and haul of forces which work in the same direction from year to year and lead to the same mathematically describable result. By means of measurements and calculations, celestial mechanics has been able to predict eclipses centuries ahead and to test historical records in regard to those which happened thousands of years ago. The paths of comets have been calculated and their return to the solar system foretold. Thus the mass-movements of the universe have been seen to be mechanical in nature and expressive solely of the energies and configurations distributed throughout its parts. The events which happen are inevitable and arise out of the impersonal agency of spatially existent things. In what sharp contrast is this view of nature to the interpretation primitive man made for himself when he read his own emotions and desires into the things around him. Caprice and whim have no place in this regular procession of the heavens.

Impersonal agency conquered, not only in man's conception of the larger relations of bodies to one another, but also in his idea of those events, like sickness and death, which strike nearer home. While the agencies at work may not be considered mechanical, they are yet seen to be natural and regular in their working. The characteristic of the personal agency to which religion makes appeal is that it disregards space; it works here and there at its own will and leaps across intervening distances as though they had no reality. Just because it is spaceless, it is supernatural. It cannot be localized, and brought into definite relations with other things in the universe. The more we conceive the universe as a spatial, self-contained system of things and processes, the more it excludes the presence of an agency which intervenes in it but is not really of it. So long as events can be explained as the effects of the natural working of things in nature, the assumption of a supernatural agent is unmotived.

The conflict between science and religion has thus passed beyond the stage where a primitive and childish idea of the extent and origins of the visible world struggled against a more rational and better-founded outlook. No educated man to-day would seriously defend the cosmical theories of ancient times. It is simply absurd to deny that we have outgrown them once and for all. But this first victory of science only involved the capture of the weakest outposts of the religious view of the world. The heart of traditional religion seems to be the belief in a personal, superhuman agency at work in nature or, rather, upon nature. Even the religious mind, however, admits that investigation has shown that there is a routine aspect to nature which covers the ordinary course of events. The final crux of the problem comes, then, to be whether there is good reason to believe that there are unusual events which cannot be accounted for by natural conditions. The victorious career of science has undoubtedly cast suspicion upon the occurrence of events which cannot be explained by means of regular changes in nature. The appeal to superhuman, personal agency to account for such events presupposes their occurrence, while the belief in their occurrence is psychologically based upon the acceptance of such supernatural agency. Hence it is probable that both beliefs will fall together. In the meantime, they give one another mutual support. He who believes in supernatural agency is the more likely to be credulous in regard to testimony advanced in its favor.

Nature was at first regarded as a realm in which personal agency ruled. Yahweh thundered from Sinai and rode in the tempest. Apollo guided the horses of the sun. The gods did things in nature directly, much as man does them, only they are able to do things that man cannot do. By will and word of command, they make the mountains tremble and the hills to shake. But gradually man came to conceive nature as a self-contained realm in which parts affected one another. We owe the beginning of this view to the Greeks. They developed, from the first, a way of approach to events which was absolutely opposed to the older outlook. As nature became, for man, more and more self-sufficient and capable of explaining what occurred within it, there was less need to appeal to an agent of the old mythical sort.

Religion is rightly anthropomorphic, just as ethics is. Man's welfare and destiny are properly and inevitably the important questions for man, and he naturally approached the world with these problems in mind. He used personal and social categories in his vague thinking about his environment. The discovery that nature did not work that way was made slowly and only after comparative civilization had brought leisure and safety. Even to-day, the intellectual restraint, which the application of impersonal and non-moral concepts to nature demands, is distasteful to the majority. But this restraint will become less and less as man is introduced from childhood to a world of law and order to which he can adapt himself with a fair measure of success. His eyes will remove themselves from far horizons and turn to the world around him, nor will he dream of a transcendent realm of which earthly things are only the appearance and veil. He will seek his welfare and find his destiny among his fellows during the normal time allotted to his species. Banded with them, he will become an active and clear-eyed worker for the four great blessings which, he finds, are within his grasp, health, knowledge, goodness and beauty. Many virtues and ideals which religion has sheltered and encouraged will find themselves at home in this valiant and intelligent world, but the religion of the past must shed many things before it will feel in harmony with its new setting. Will sufficient identity remain to make the term still significant? Frankly, it is very hard to say—impossible to say with certainty.