Joad's New Testament On God And Evil

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 108, 8 May 1943, Page 4

Joad's New Testament On God And Evil

IT is no good becoming preinaturely exultant when one finds a former agnostic leaning heavily towards Theism. Such undue exultation might easily swing the "prospect" the other way again., I know, enough about salesmanship .to know that there's many a slip 'twixt a verbal decision.and a dotted,'.line. If, however, the angels in heaven can exult By Ret). C. Chandler over one sinner? that f epenteth, surely we can feel pleased when we find a man like Dr.- C. E. M. Joad. heading full-speed for a broadly religious conception of the universe. "God and Evil" , is-an intensely personal document. In this book Dr. Joad re-examines, with his customary thproughness, positions which, in former publications, he has strongly held with regard to religion and the existence of .eviL- - , ;. : "I would examine again the arguments which seemed to me to tell finally and. convincingly against the theistic hypothesis some thirty years ago, in the hope that what seemed convincing then may now seem convincing no longer." That comprises the object of this frank and open confession, wherein, in a later chapter, he states that there were certain virtues, chastity and humility, for examgte, to which he was almost a complete stranger. But now, "if the uaiverse has any meaning that we can understand, then what we understand by moral experience and moral conflict must be part of that meaning." This represents a 1 tremendous change of opinion, and a few months ago, when registering a cha"nge in my own opinion with regard to pacifism, I was led to suggest that opinions are the hardest things of all to change. Intellectual pride prevents many people from courageously facing up to a complete revaluation of life, Jn. the terms of broader intellectual grasp of facts that emerge during years of mental growth. "I -have come to a sense of sin." "I have seen that the times are wicket, and that I myself am wicked." What more could be desired as a prelude to a full and free "conversion" in its most orthodox sense? These are not the words of a London derelict at a "Gospel" meeting, but \they are the words of one of the keenest brains of our generation. The basic conclusion to which the author of this book has come is that evil "is a positive brute force rooted in the heart of things," and that the Prayer Book position wherein we confess that we are "miserable sinners" is not so far from the truth after all. He says he can now enter wholeheartedly into Saint Paul's confession of the good I would that I do not, and of the evil that I would not that I do.

Science and the Cosmos In the section of the book dealing with science and religion, he deals some stunning blows at what he calls "nineteenth century scientific opinion." He says science was a double-edged tool which was to endow man with powers that he did not know how to use, increase his efficiency in slaughter, and bring his civilisation, to the verge of destruction. Last century only the progress of science wa's noted. It was left to us to observe that the progress of science had been accompanied by the retrogression of man. Even to-day the exponents of nineteenth century scientific materialism betray an. almost "mystical faith in the omnipotence of science," forgetting that science is purely quantitative, and can have nothing to say about the qualitative facts of life, which qualitative factor is the sole province of art and religion. "The life that lacks religion," continues Dr. Joad, "lacks fullness and roundness, and the desire to find that true which I have always believed to be false, and to know something of that which I have thought to be unknowable, grows as the years Eass." These statements are not eing made by a man in hla mental dotage—by one who has drained the cup and now seeks the consolations of religion to quiet his troubled conscience, and thus prepare him to meet a seemingly inevitable doom, but by one who is at the zenith of Ihis intellectual powers. ■ "Indeed, I have come to believe that questions touching the nature of life and mind are not, in the last resort, scientific questions at all, but belong to the spheres of philosophy and religion." I would that every freethinker who hugs his free-thought as tenaciously as an African savage hugs his idol of stone could read this book, and that every Christian who has never come to grips with intellectual unbelief could read it also. The real enemies of the spiritual progress of mankind are not those who deny the existence of God, no matter how vehemently, but they are those who are just ignorantly apathetic, and who do not bother to use their God-given mental faculties in an effort to make sense out of life—who do not reject religion as unbelievers, but who act like sheep and cows by being seemingly unconscious of anything beyond sense experience. ("God and Evil," toy C. E. M. Joad, and published by Faber and Faber.)