I have been asked to tell you what Christians believe, and I am going to begin by telling you one thing
that Christians do not need to believe. If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the
other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main
point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian, you are
free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth.
When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been
wrong about the question that mattered to them most; when I became a Christian I was able to take a
more liberal view. But, of course, being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs
from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong. As in arithmetic—there is only one right
answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong: but some of the wrong answers are much nearer
being right than others.
The first big division of humanity is into the majority, who believe in some kind of God or gods, and
the minority who do not. On this point, Christianity lines up with the majority—lines up with ancient
Greeks and Romans, modern savages, Stoics, Platonists, Hindus, Mohammedans, etc., against the
modern Western European materialist.
Now I go on to the next big division. People who all believe in God can be divided according to the
sort of God they believe in. There are two very different ideas on this subject One of them is the idea
that He is beyond good and evil. We humans call one thing good and another thing bad. But according
to some people that is merely our human point of view. These people would say that the wiser you
become the less you would want to call anything good or bad, and the more dearly you would see that
everything is good in one way and bad in another, and that nothing could have been different.
Consequently, these people think that long before you got anywhere near the divine point of view the
distinction would have disappeared altogether.
We call a cancer bad, they would say, because it kills a man; but you might just as well call a
successful surgeon bad because he kills a cancer. It all depends on the point of view. The other and
opposite idea is that God is quite definitely "good" or "righteous." a God who takes sides, who loves
love and hates hatred, who wants us to behave in one way and not in another. The first of these
views—the one that thinks God beyond good and evil—is called Pantheism. It was held by the great
Prussian philosopher Hagel and, as far as I can understand them, by the Hindus. The other view is
held by Jews, Mohammedans and Christians.
And with this big difference between Pantheism and the Christian idea of God, there usually goes
another. Pantheists usually believe that God, so to speak, animates the universe as you animate your
body: that the universe almost is God, so that if it did not exist He would not exist either, and anything
you find in the universe is a part of God. The Christian idea is quite different. They think God
invented and made the universe—like a man making a picture or composing a tune.
A painter is not a picture, and he does not die if his picture is destroyed. You may say, "He's put a lot
of himself into it," but you only mean that all its beauty and interest has come out of his head. His
skill is not in the picture in the same way that it is in his head, or even in his hands. expect you see
how this difference between Pantheists and Christians hangs together with the other one. If you do not
take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find
in this world is a part of God. But, of course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good,
then you cannot talk like that.
You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are
contrary to His will. Confronted with a cancer or a slum the Pantheist can say, "If you could only see
it from the divine point of view, you would realise that this also is God." The Christian replies, "Don't
talk damned nonsense." (*)
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For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world—that space and time, heat and
cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God "made up
out of His head" as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone
wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them
right again.
And, of course, that raises a very big question. If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong?
And for many years I simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept
on feeling "whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn't it much simpler and easier
to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren't all your arguments simply a
complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?" But then that threw me back into another difficulty.
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this
idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line.
What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and
senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in
such violent reaction against it? A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water
animal: a fish would not feel wet.
Of course I could have given up my idea of justice by saying it was nothing but a private idea of my
own. But if I did that, then my argument against God collapsed too— for the argument depended on
saying that the world was really unjust, not simply that it did not happen to please my private fancies.
Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality
was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of
justice—was full of sense.
Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should
never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and
therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
The Rival Conceptions of God
[*] One listener complained of the word damned as frivolous swearing. But I mean exactly what I
say—nonsense that is damned is under God's curse, and will (apart from God's grace) lead those who
believe it to eternal death.
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