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Dear Mr. Brown:

Thank you for your recent letter! The question which you raise is naturally suggested by our previous correspondence. We have been arguing about religious truth, about God and alternative explanations of the universe. But argument and speculation do not carry us through to the place where we want to be; they deal with possibilities and probabilities and, as you say, we want certainties.

You are disturbed, you say, by the contrast between your college courses in science and your courses in philosophy. In mathematics and physics you get Q.E.D. answers, but when in philosophy you discuss life’s ultimate origin, meaning, and purpose, it often sounds like guessing, intelligent guessing but still ending in surmise and conjecture rather than provable certainty. In the realm of religion, you ask, is there any escape from problematical conjectures to solid convictions that one can feel sure about?

This question obviously needs answering, but, before I tackle it, let me remind you that science is not so full of certainties as you seem to think. In my day Jeans and Millikan have been two major interpreters of modern science. They have radically differed as to what is happening to the physical universe as a whole. Jeans thought that it is dispersing at so prodigious a rate that it might be said to be blowing up, while Millikan thought that it is being inwardly recreated so that it might be said to be building up. At last Millikan, after discussing this difference between Jeans and himself, wrote, "The one thing upon which we can agree is that neither of us knows anything about it." Some time ago I sat with a group of medical research scientists and, to my amazement, heard one of our leading biologists assert that at present biologists do not really understand the why and wherefore of a single basic biological reaction. Or take light -- one would suppose that the physicists would understand that. Yet one of them tells us that there are two theories of light, that which of them is true science is not sure, and then he adds whimsically that one of them is used on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and the other on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. As for the basic secrets of the cosmos, Jeans says, "The ultimate realities of the universe are at present quite beyond the reach of science, and may be -- and probably are -- forever beyond the comprehension of the human mind."

Indeed, listen to Thomas Edison himself:

So, science is not so cocksure and so free of guesses and conjectures as some suppose.

Nevertheless, there is a difference between the Q.E.D. provability of wide areas of science and the speculative nature of philosophy in general and of religious theory in particular. You are right about that, and your question is relevant to the need of many people: "But how can we be sure?"

One difficulty is that many start with the assumption, which you seem to share in your letter, that there is only one roadway to assured truth -- the scientific method. May I beg to differ? I know that Beethoven’s Concerto in D Major is beautiful. Moreover, I know it with a final certainty that nothing can disturb. Were I to live as long as Methuselah, I would see endless changes in science -- it may be even some of Einstein’s formulas upset -- but I never would have to change my mind about the beauty of sunsets and rose gardens and Beethoven’s concerto. That assurance is not irrational or antiscientific, but obviously science alone could never have led me to it.

Moreover, I know some persons whom I completely trust and love. For over fifty-six years I have been married to the same girl and, believe me, I know her. My knowledge of her is not antiscientific but no scientific investigation led me to fall in love with her. Love is not simply an emotion; it is one of our most important means of cognition; some things, especially persons, we never can know unless we love them. Amelia Burr was a good friend of mine, and I have always been grateful that, thinking of someone whom she loved, she allowed herself poetic license and wrote,

You see what I am trying to say: scientific methods of investigation are not the only road to truth. A color-blind man can know all the scientific theories about color, but there is another kind of knowledge he will altogether miss when the dogwood trees break into bloom or the setting sun lights up the evening sky. The most important truths cannot be reached by theory, speculation, induction alone; they must be experienced if they are to be known. How do we know what even anger is? By being angry. How do we know what romantic love is? Surely not merely by hearing Freud analyze it or Browning sing about it as "all a wonder and a wild desire," but by experiencing it. How do we know what a lovely home is? By having one. We can look up "courage" in the dictionary but we cannot possibly know what it really means if we never have experienced it. We cannot even tell an unkissed person what a kiss is so that he will really understand it. In this scientific age some highbrow circles are so obsessed by the restricted notion of truth as the mere mating of intelligence with facts that they think of intelligence as in itself a sufficient implement for the discovery of truth, whereas the fact is that the areas where we can get at truth by intelligence alone are few. Mathematics, physics -- such are the special preserves where intellectual processes alone can arrive at certain knowledge, although even there one must enlarge intelligence to include imagination. But move even a little away from such restricted areas and it becomes clear that, if we are to know any great things, something more than scientific exploration, induction, and verification is required. It was not a preacher but Dr. Alexis Carrel, the scientist, who said, "Intelligence is almost useless to those who possess nothing else. The pure intellectual is an incomplete human being. He is unhappy because he is not capable of entering the world he understands." If you wish to pursue this matter further, go to the library and get The Ways of Knowing, written by William Montague when he was a professor of philosophy in Columbia University. There are five major highways to knowledge, he says -- not one, five! -- and scientific induction is only one of them.

Now, with regard to religious truth, I am convinced, as I have shown in my previous letters, that both science and philosophy point in the direction of theism. But you are right in thinking that this alone leaves us with a probability and you are right in asking, "How can we turn this probability into assured certainty?" Before I tackle that let me quote Kierkegaard: "Existence must be content with a fighting certainty." What we are dealing with is the attempted explanation of an infinite universe by a finite mind, and while we do need, and I am convinced can have, a confident assurance about our faith in God, humility must be mingled with our confidence in any formulation of that faith. As Browning put it,

Nevertheless, multitudes of history’s noblest souls have had a "fighting certainty" about the reality of God. They may have had puzzling and confused days, saying as even Martin Luther said once, "Sometimes I believe and sometimes I doubt," but underneath was a confident certitude like Paul’s: "I know whom I have trusted." And the basis of that assurance is the same as that which sustains so many of our certainties in everyday life -- not theory but experience.

Said Canon Streeter of Oxford, "I have had experiences that materialism cannot explain." So have I and so have you. Let us consider a few of them.

The experience of wonder. Some years ago a young man came to see me who, arriving in New York City to start his business career, sought in the church a spiritual home. I asked him about his college days and whether they had involved a religious upset, and when he answered with a decisive "No," I inquired the explanation. He said, "Mountaineering! I always loved mountaineering. I used to go off for days alone in the High Sierras, and on so many mornings at sunrise I have been on a mountaintop and have seen God remake the world, that religion dug into me. I always knew, for all they said, that the Eternal is real." Well, read the eighth Psalm and see what a long history that approach to assurance about God has had.

The experience of vocation. Centuries ago a young man, worshipping in the temple in Jerusalem, heard an inner voice saying, "Whom shall I send and who will go for us?" and he answered, "Here I am! Send me." That was Isaiah, one of an endless multitude of history’s most useful lives who were sure that they were called from on high to challenging tasks. Without that experience Livingstone never would have gone to Africa, nor Grenfell to Labrador, nor Schweitzer to Lambarene. And in humbler ways every one of us has felt that vertical relationship, involving duty, responsibility, obligation -- a call to make the most of our best for the sake of others.

The experience of conversion. For twenty years I spoke regularly on Sundays over a large national and international radio network, and the man who directed the program and cared for all the details was my warm friend. He had been a professional gambler. Then a noted preacher had come to town and had aroused such public interest that my friend, out of sheer curiosity mingled with scorn, went to hear him. And something utterly unexpected happened. A Power, greater than his own, took hold of him and remade him. In Paul’s phrase he was "transformed by the renewing of his mind," and he became an able, dedicated Christian layman. That may be more than ordinarily dramatic, but it is a kind of experience which has marked the crucial turning point in innumerable lives. Ask anyone who has ever had such an experience of inner transformation, and you always face the certitude that he did not change himself -- he was changed by a Power greater than himself. As one young man, saved from tragic moral failure, said to me, "If ever you find someone who does not believe in God, send him to me. I know."

The experience of prayer as communion with God. When Jesus said, "I am not alone, for the Father is with me," he voiced an experience to the reality of which centuries of religious living bear witness. "God," said Emerson, "enters by a private door into every individual." He certainly does. Even unbelievers have hours when they feel that they are not simply talking to themselves, but that they are listening and speaking to a Presence greater than themselves. As for devout folk who, like Jeremy Taylor, think of prayer as "making frequent colloquies and short discoursings between God and his own soul," that divine Presence is indubitably real. God to them is not a theoretical discovery made at the end of an argument, but a day-by-day certainty and an indispensable reliance.

The experience of inward reinforcement in times of trouble. As Paul put it, writing from a Roman prison, "In him who strengthens me I am able for anything." Millions of gallant souls have known that experience, and instead of being wrecked by life’s tragedies or driven into skepticism and cynicism, they have found an inner resource which brought them through their hardships radiant and triumphant. So a woman, struck blind in her sixtieth year, said to me, "You needn’t argue with me about God. I see him." Trouble may seem an unlikely place to find God, as I said in my last letter, but nevertheless that is where multitudes have found him. The eighteenth Psalm was written, as the author says, "In my distress," but listen to him!

That is not speculation but very realistic experience.

Once more, the experience of inspired hours. We all have them, when

-- when vision clears, and horizons widen, and we become even for a little while more and better than our ordinary selves. We have our low hours -- sullen, disillusioned, discouraged, skeptical, cynical -- but we have inspired hours too when, as Emerson put it, "we wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight." Mark this notable fact: it is in our low hours that we find it easiest to disbelieve in God; it is in our best hours that we find it easiest to believe in him. I recall the days when Professor Edward Bosworth of Oberlin was a powerful influence among the younger generation of that time. One day a youth asked him why he believed in God, and he answered, "Once I saw a boy flying a kite which had gone so high that it was invisible, and I said to him, ‘How do you know there is any kite there at all?’ and quick as a flash he replied, ‘I feel the pull of it.’ " So in our best hours we feel the pull of the invisible. Something eternally real is there. Faith in God is faith in the validity of our best hours. As one of my theological professors used to say, "All the best in us is God in us."

Again, the experience of inspiring persons. All of these aspects of experience which I have mentioned have one thing in common: they are responses to revelations from beyond ourselves. Wonder and awe before the majesty of the Creator, answering a high call to service, being transformed by a Power greater than our own, being aware of a Presence in whose fellowship we find our strength, being reinforced by the divine help so that we triumph over trouble, opening our lives to inspired hours when the best seems the most real -- all these are responses to revelations of reality above and beyond ourselves, but nowhere is such revelation so compelling as when it comes incarnate in a person. So the central driving power of Christianity is response to a person. Paul did not say, I know what I have believed. Probably at times he didn’t know what he believed, in some area where, as he wrote, "Now we see in a mirror dimly." But he could always say, "I know whom I have trusted." Christianity at heart is thus a personal relationship, and that is always an experience which one does not get at by scientific exploration or philosophic speculation. Love, trust, loyalty to a person, bring with them the most inescapable certitude we know. Speculative metaphysics sometimes seem, as another put it, like a search at midnight in a dark room for a black cat that is not there, but your knowledge of your father is not like that. Neither is my experience of Christ. I am absolutely sure about him and about the kind of life he reveals.

Of course, these seven kinds of spiritual experience which I have noted do not cover the whole field. I have selected them from many more, hoping that they would indicate to you how it is that the great souls in the Christian tradition have come to possess their "fighting certainty."

One remark of yours calls for special comment. You say that some of your fellow students find their religious certitude by relying on an external authority. True! Our Roman Catholic friends believe in the Pope’s infallibility, when he speaks ex cathedra. Far from despising reason, they use all of it they can get their hands on, but when the Pope speaks on matters of faith and morals, that is final. Similarly, fundamentalist Protestants, believing in the inerrancy of the Bible as though every word of it, dictated by God himself, was to be accepted as indubitably true, ultimately rely in all their arguments on an external authority. You cannot accept this kind of authoritarianism, and neither can I. Nevertheless, "authority" can have an admirable meaning, and we could not live without it for a single day. What do I know by firsthand personal investigation about our many scientific specialities? Yet I am a fairly intelligent citizen of this modern world, because I rely on the honesty and intelligence of the great scientists. That is not slavish surrender to a mental dictatorship, but a welcome enrichment of life and thought. We would be foolish not to recognize that, in one realm after another, there are minds that have gone farther and eyes that have seen deeper than we have. They do speak with authority, not to enslave but to enlighten us. So in the field of religious truth I listen reverently to great souls who, if I will let them, will share their experience and faith with me. Jesus in the spiritual realm is certainly an authority, but he does not ask me to put out my eyes and use his. He wants to help me to see for myself -- "Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God." So, while you cannot be a Roman Catholic or a fundamentalist Protestant, "authority" can still have a rich meaning for you. Indeed, look at the choice you have. If you choose theism, you necessarily think that the disbelieving skeptics and cynics have been deluded; but, if you choose atheism, you have to think that all mankind’s prophets and saints, its supreme souls, Christ over all, were deluded. That is one consequence of atheism which I cannot face. I feel absolutely certain that it is not true,

One final comment on a sentence in your letter where you speak of science as depending on knowledge, while religion depends on faith. Think again, my friend! When you speak of faith you apparently picture a church with a congregation of people reciting a creed. Let me change the picture! When I think of faith, I think of Cape Canaveral in Florida. What built that rocket base? Faith --amazing faith that we can conquer space, put men in orbit, reach the moon, perhaps reach Mars and Venus. And there at Cape Canaveral, as everywhere in science, faith is marshaling intelligence, organizing experimentation, leading the way to knowledge. If you think that this is just a clergyman’s view, listen to Dr. Prichett when he was president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology: "Science is grounded in faith, just as is religion." Of course, it is! Watch Christopher Columbus sailing west and guess what is in his mind! Faith in the unproved proposition that the earth is round and that, if he sails far enough, he will find land -- probably Asia. Granted that, as President Lowell of Harvard used to say, when Columbus started he did not know where he was going, when he arrived he did not know where he was, and when he returned he did not know where he had been! Nevertheless his faith and the venture it produced added immeasurably to man’s knowledge. So in the realm of religion faith leads through experience to knowledge. I hope that you will travel that road until you can say, like the Samaritans in John’s Gospel, "It is no longer because of your words that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is indeed the Savior of the world."

Cordially yours,

Dear Mr. Brown:

I have felt sure that, if our correspondence continued, the problem of evil would certainly turn up. Indeed, I have been rather surprised that it has not turned up before this, for plainly it is the most enormous obstacle confronting faith in a good God. Even as a young man you feel this but, as you grow older and see more and more of what Keats called "the giant agony of the world," you will feel ever more deeply the seeming contradiction between Christian faith and the hideous, tragic evil on this earth.

So, let us not mince matters! There is a dark side to this universe which, at least at first sight, seems utterly inconsistent with faith in a good God. Consider what we have recently read in newspapers. A volcano erupts, killing people, burning villages, ruining farmlands. An earthquake, followed by a tidal wave, strikes North Africa, destroying a whole city and slaying thousands. Lightning blasts an airplane, which falls a blazing mass upon a home and kills all the family, as well as all the passengers. Rivers overflow their banks in disastrous floods, demolishing churches, homes, schools, exhibiting a ruthless indifference to everything that Christian faith holds sacred. Such pitiless events are not human sins; they are nature’s deeds. As John Stuart Mill put it, "In sober truth nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are Nature’s everyday performances."

Why the ruthless evolutionary process -- parasites, insects, beasts with claws and beaks, preying on one another? Why cancer cells and polio? Why little children born blind, deformed, perhaps Mongolian idiots? And when one turns from nature’s pitiless acts to man’s, the suffering is so dreadful that one wonders how any God there may be can stand it. So, in one of Richard Jeffries’ books, a young boy looks long at the picture of Christ’s crucifixion until, perturbed by its cruelty, he turns the page to escape the sight of it, saying, "If God had been there, he would not have let them do it." And yet -- strange paradox -- it is at Calvary that Christian faith most clearly sees God revealed.

First of all, then, don’t think that you are outside the Biblical tradition when you complain that this is a difficult world in which to believe in a good God. From Moses, crying, "O Lord, why hast thou done evil to this people?" and Gideon, exclaiming, "If the Lord is with us, why then has all this befallen us?" the Bible is full of honest questioning concerning the goodness of God in a world like this. Elijah cries, "O Lord my God, hast thou brought calamity even upon the widow with whom I sojourn, by slaying her son?" Habakkuk complains, "Why dost thou look on faithless men, and art silent when the wicked swallows up the man more righteous than he?" Jeremiah asks God, "Wilt thou be to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail?" The Book of Job is history’s classic confrontation of the problem of evil. "I loathe my life," says Job, "I will give free utterance to my complaint; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul. I will say to God . . ., Does it seem good to thee to oppress, to despise the work of thy hands and favor the designs of the wicked?" As for the New Testament, remember that cry from the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" The Bible is a book of triumphant faith -- yes! But not blind faith. It faced all the cruel facts that make faith difficult.

Moreover, don’t think that you lack good Christian company when the world’s evil causes you to doubt God’s goodness. John Knox won Scotland for Christ, but in those days when he was chained in the galleys, his soul knew "anger, wrath, and indignation, which it conceived against God, calling all his promises in doubt." Increase Mather was a doughty Puritan defender of the faith, but dark times came when in his diary he wrote, "grievously molested with temptations to atheism." Martin Luther was a man of tremendous faith, but once he wrote, "Who among men can understand the full meaning of this word of God, ‘Our Father who art in heaven.’ Anyone who genuinely believes these words will often say . . . ‘The Angel Gabriel is my servant, Raphael is my guardian, and the angels in my every need are ministering spirits. My Father, who is in heaven, will give them charge over me lest I dash my foot against a stone.’ And while I am affirming this faith, my Father suffers me to be thrown into prison, drowned, or beheaded. Then faith falters, and in weakness, I cry, ‘Who knows whether it is true?’ " That is much stronger language than you used in your letter -- very much stronger. You are in good company when you find the problem of evil difficult to solve. Plenty of people who ended with victorious Christian faith have gone through experiences like Luther’s.

Moreover, remember that all the great religions have had to wrestle with this problem. Hinduism has its trinity -- one God with three faces. One face, austere and aloof, is Brahma, the Ultimate Reality; another face, gracious and gentle, is Vishnu, the Savior; the third face, cruel and frightening, is Siva, the Destroyer. Buddhism starts with the pessimistic premise that to exist is itself an evil, and that to escape from existence and its multiplied rebirths by the suppression of all desire, even the desire to live, is the way to nirvana. Zoroastrianism tried to solve the problem by believing in two deities, the god of light and the god of darkness, and traditional Judaism and Christianity tried the same solution in a modified form by positing Satan over against God. I never think of that endeavor to rid God of responsibility for evil by believing in a bad anti-God, without recalling the primitive tribe which one of our missionaries found in Africa. They believed in a good god, but, alas! they said that he had "a half-witted brother," who was always messing things up. Thus picturing Satan, or God’s "half-witted brother," or what-you-will, as the devilish source of the world’s evil is no solution of our problem. For an all-powerful God of love then has Satan to explain. No! The ancient question still remains: "Si deus bonus, unde malum ?-- If God is good, whence comes evil?"

Moreover, this question is nowhere presented in so acutely difficult a form as in the Christian faith. For there God’s goodness is pictured in such terms of mercy and compassion that one sometimes despairs of reconciling such grace with the world’s hideous evils and mankind’s frightful sufferings. "God is love"; "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son" --against that background you are right in feeling that the problem of evil reaches its most difficult form. A materialist faces no such dilemma -- what else except ruthlessness and pain could one expect in a mindless, purposeless physical system? But if God is love, no wonder an American surgeon says that, if ever he comes face to face with God, he will carry a cancer cell with him and will show it to the Almighty, crying Why?

In one of Hugh Walpole’s novels one of the characters, a young man, says, "You know there can’t be a God, Vanessa. In your heart you must know it. You are a wise woman. You read and think. Well, then, ask yourself. How can there be a God and life be as it is? If there is one He ought to be ashamed of Himself, that’s all I can say." So, you too are tempted, sometimes at least, to feel indignant doubt. You are not alone in that. But now let us see if this is really the end of the matter.

Certainly to let the problem of evil drive one into atheism is no solution of our perplexity. For, if there is no God, then one faces the problem of goodness, beauty, truth, all that is lovely in music and art, all that is admirable in character, and that problem of good seems to me far more important and more difficult to solve than the problem of evil. Any way you look at it, this is a mysterious world, but of all the ways in which the mystery can be stated none seems to me so improbable, so irrational, as to say there is no God, no Mind or Purpose in the universe, and all that is beautiful and right here is the accidental result of physical atoms going it blind. To be sure there is a dark side to life, that often seems inexplicable, but there are also glorious aspects of life which need to be explained. As Archibald MacLeish sang it:

Mothers and music and the laughter of children at play, great minds discovering truth, great artists creating beauty, towering characters, Christ over all, lifting human life to new levels -- there, in goodness, is the problem I want solved, and atheism has no explanation to offer.

Let us start, then, with the proposition that God is, and try to see what light we can shed on the mystery of evil. We may help ourselves by imagining ourselves in the place of God, facing the responsibility of creating and managing the universe. Just what would we do about the major causes of human suffering?

First, there is the law-abiding nature of the universe. A little child falls out of a tenth-story window, and the law of gravitation is merciless. Cause and consequence, bound together in unbreakable succession -- how much of the world’s agony springs from that! But if omnipotence were put into our hands, would we abolish nature’s law-abiding order, and let creation become chaotic, haphazard, fortuitous, undependable? As Dr. J. S. Whale exclaims, "If water might suddenly freeze in midsummer; if the specific gravity of lead might at any time become that of thistledown; if pigs might fly or the White House turn into green cheese -- man’s life would be a nightmare." So, despite all the agony that nature’s law-abiding forces inflict on mankind, we would not dare substitute a lawless for a law-abiding world.

Second, obviously our world is not finished yet. It is in the making -- a creative process is afoot here, with a long evolutionary story behind us and unforeseeable possibilities ahead. Call that exciting, if you will, but think of the suffering that has been and still is involved in being born into a world racked by growing pains. Conceivably, God might have made a finished universe, perfect, static, all-complete, with nothing more to be done in it. Let your imagination dwell on that possibility! Do you like it? Can you conceive anything more intolerably boring? Could creative minds or courageous characters ever develop in such a finished paradise? No! Despite the agony involved in an evolutionary universe, we would not dare to substitute a static world with no progress in it, no future of open doors before it, nothing to work and fight for, nothing to surpass and improve.

Third, we have the power of choice. If I should tell you that Gene Neely made the all-American team in football, played a crack centerfield in baseball, that he could handle a golf course in the eighties, and was a master at tennis, you would say, would you not, that he must have had a magnificent physique. Upon the contrary he had only one arm. He lost the other as the result of a gunshot wound. But, you see, he was not a mere thing, a robot helplessly pushed about by circumstance; he was a person with the power of decision, who could choose his own kind of response to any situation, and stand up to life, saying, Come on now, I’ll show you! Just because we are human beings we are not automatons; we do make choices and decisions, we do exercise this power of personal initiative. But think of the evil that mankind suffers from the misuse of this marvelous power! Most of what Gibbon calls "the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind" come from the ignorant or wicked abuse of our free will. All the way from intimate personal hurts and tragedies to the vast catastrophe of war, how much of human agony springs from the personal choice of evil instead of good! What Caliban said to Prospero in The Tempest,

the whole world, in one way or another, is saying today, You taught me physics and my profit on’t is, I know how to make the H-bomb; you taught me flying and my profit on’t is, I know how to destroy whole cities; you taught me the conquest of distance and my profit on’t is world-wide total war.

Nevertheless, if you were in charge of the universe, would you dare to take from man his freedom of choice and make him a mere puppet, a marionette mechanically pulled by the strings of circumstance, with no liberty to shape his own conduct, no power to make decisions? Well, when I think of Gene Neely and millions like him, I am sure that I would take the calculated risk which the Creator took when he gave man power to choose between good and evil.

Fourth, another source of human suffering is the fact that we are not merely separate individuals, but are woven together, by loyalty, love, mutual need and interdependence, into homes, friendships, communities. This fact of inescapable fellowship is alike the source of our deepest joys and our most heartbreaking tragedies. "Where I love, I live" is at once a beautiful and a dreadful fact. A catastrophe befalling my children or grandchildren would be to me a far more tragic hurt than anything that could happen to me as an individual. Let your imagination play upon this universal source of heartbreak, until you feel how much of mankind’s agony is due to the very relationships which make life most worth living, but in which the ills that happen to one thereby happen to all who most dearly love him. Then picture yourself as the Creator, managing this universe, and tell me whether you would dare make men and women isolated individuals, incapable of affection or loyalty, with no families, no friendships, no capacity for fellowship or fraternity. What an utterly useless, meaningless world that would be!

You see what I am driving at. These four factors -- the law-abiding order of the world, the progressive, evolutionary nature of the world, the human power to choose and to decide, and the human loves and loyalties that create homes and friendships -- account for all the tragedy and suffering on earth. And yet, were we possessed of the power to eradicate a single one of the four, we would not dare to do so. Do not misunderstand me! I do not think that this answers all our questions. Countless protests and queries still confront our minds. Why cancer? -- to that kind of question I can find no adequate reply. Why did the evolutionary process have to involve such beastly cruelty? Why the kind and degree of deprivation and suffering which, far from building character, almost inevitably cause madness and depravity? Nevertheless, from the facing of the fourfold source of human suffering, I do come to a reassuring conclusion: on the basis of no-God I can see no possible explanation of the problem of good, but on the basis of faith in God I can see the wide-open possibility of Mind and Purpose here and of an ultimate outcome which will vindicate the Creator.

Meanwhile, there is a very important implication in what I have been saying, which many people miss. They call God omnipotent or all-powerful, as though that means that God can do anything whatsoever, that he confronts no limits, faces no obstacles, but has a free hand to do anything he pleases. That, however, is nonsense. Grant God’s existence, a being involving mind and purpose, and at once it is obvious that there are all sorts of things he cannot do. He cannot make two plus two equal five or create a triangle the sum of whose angles does not equal two right angles. He cannot give man the power of choice without granting him power to choose evil as well as good. Whatever purpose he may have in mind, he must fulfill conditions to achieve his goal. He cannot eliminate all hardship, risk, pain, and difficulty from life and still expect courageous characters and venturesome minds to develop here. Omnipotence is not magic. God could not make Hitler a good man without Hitler’s consent and co-operation. Read the Bible with such facts in mind, and see how far from being all-powerful, as many conceive that term’s meaning, God is pictured as being. Throughout the Bible God has a struggle on his hands. He is up against something. He will conquer in the end, but even for him the price is costly. God in the Bible does not sit in blissful solitude, throned on high in absolute all-mightiness. He is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, and that means that he is a God with purposes for this world which face enemies and have to be sacrificed for.

Well, how inadequate are human words to deal with such deep mysteries! Go as far as we can, but then,

But I am convinced of this: the no-God theory leaves the most important facts in human life utterly without possibility of explanation, while theism opens wide the door to an outlook on life which makes even the world’s evil seem ultimately soluble.

In the meantime evil presents us with a problem not merely speculative but very practical. How to be the kind of person who can stand up to life, face its difficult challenges and hardships, and carry off a victory in quality of character and useful living -- that central problem confronts us all. Jesus never said, I have explained the world, but he did say, "I have overcome the world." I happen to be writing this on Good Friday. Nearly two thousand years ago they spat on him, jeered him, scourged him, crowned him with thorns, and crucified him. How little they guessed the outcome! They were committing history’s worst crime, and it has turned out to be mankind’s supreme blessing. No cross, no Christ! I tell you there is a Power behind and in this mysterious universe who will yet bring victory to the best over the worst, and will vindicate the faith of those who have believed in him.

Cordially yours,

Dear Mr. Brown:

In your recent letter you say that some of my references to the Bible in our correspondence have aroused your curiosity. Let me be frank with you: when referring to the Bible, in the instances which you quote, I positively hoped that what I said would be provocative. For I have wondered how much of your religious perplexity is due to the contrast between the world view of the Bible and the world view of modern science. Now you indicate that this problem is in the background of your thinking. You write that you recall your father’s amused comments on William Jennings Bryan’s famous saying, that he believed the whale swallowed Jonah because the Bible says so, and if the Bible said that Jonah swallowed the whale, he would believe that. "Obviously," you write, "you hold no such idea of the Bible’s inerrancy, but what do you think about it? How do you reconcile the Bible with modern science?"

My answer is: I do not reconcile the two. They are utterly irreconcilable. Take the Bible’s picture of the universe, for example. According to that the earth is flat with the "fountains of the great deep" underneath it; it is stationary, "established, it shall never be moved"; within the earth is a great pit, sheol, where all the dead go; the sky is a solid firmament, "hard as a molten mirror"; beyond it are "the waters which are above the firmament"; the rain comes from that supercelestial sea, down through "the windows of the heavens"; and the sun, moon, and stars move across the underside of the stationary firmament to illumine man. In common with their contemporaries the writers of the Bible held in their minds that picture of the world. From the Bible’s beginning to its end that cosmology is presupposed. In that kind of cosmos a poem about the sun’s standing still can come to be taken as literal fact; Elijah can be carried up from earth to heaven in a chariot of fire; Jesus can be pictured as ascending from the earth to the sky by physical levitation, and his second coming can be pictured as a physical return from the firmament to earth.

I am putting this bluntly, not to trouble you but, if possible, to set you free from needless shackles. You are a young man, going out into this new space age and, whatever else in the Bible you may believe, you cannot possibly believe its cosmology. Don’t even let it puzzle you. No intelligent Christian today feels under any constraint to thrust his mind back two thousand years into a prescientific world view.

That is to say, the Bible is not a book of science. It contains many literary types -- history, poetry, fiction, biography, drama, preaching, letters -- but it contains no book that can be called scientific. I take my hat off to the man who wrote that first chapter of Genesis. Of course, I do not believe that the world was made in six days, or that light was created on the first day and the sun on the fourth. But that is not what the first chapter of Genesis is chiefly affirming. Someday you may read the creation story as the Babylonian tablets contain it, which quite possibly the author of the story of Genesis knew. There you will find in the end the same general picture of the universe which the Hebrews held, but their fellow Semites in Babylonia got at it by having the god, Marduk, slit his enemy, Tiamat, in two, like a flat fish, and then use the upper half to make the sky and the lower half to make the earth. Turn from that to the stately opening of Genesis, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," and you move up to a loftier level, and sense what the author is really driving at in those first chapters: one God the Creator, and men and women his children.

The Bible is to me a priceless treasury of spiritual truth, and from it have come the basic ideas and ideals on which the best of our democratic culture is founded. It is inspired and inspiring, filled with divine deeds and teachings, but it is not a textbook on science. One of the most lamentable aspects of the Christian Church’s history is the way religious leaders have insisted on clinging to the outmoded world view of the Bible and have fought every new expansion of knowledge about the universe. If only they could have foreseen how ridiculous they would look in retrospect!

While I say this, however, I feel a certain sympathy with those misguided Christians who fought the idea of a round earth rotating about the sun, and I wonder, if I had been in their place, whether I too might not have been misguided. That old world of theirs had plenty of troubles but, religiously speaking, it was rather cozy. The flat earth, with the heavens a little way above, and the sun and stars shining for no other purpose than to illumine man -- that picture put man at the center of everything. And then came the idea that the earth is round, and that perhaps people live on the other side of it. How crazy that must have seemed at first! So Lactantius (?250-?317 A.D.) cried, "Is there anyone so senseless as to believe that there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads? . . . that the crops and trees grow downward? . . . that the rains and snow and hail fall upward toward the earth?" If you and I, and our ancestors for thousands of years, had lived on a flat earth, wouldn’t we think the idea of a round earth insane?

Troublesome as the earth’s sphericity was to Christians, however, it was when Copernicus and Galileo started this stationary earth rotating around the sun that Christians felt their faith threatened with complete disaster. That idea spoiled everything. Man would not be the central concern of the universe any more, they cried; he would be on a planet with the sun central, and the whole sacred picture of the world according to Scripture would be destroyed. So in 1631 Father Melchior Inchofer exploded, "The opinion of the earth’s motion is of all heresies the most abominable, the most pernicious, the most scandalous; the immovability of the earth is thrice sacred; arguments against the immortality of the soul, the existence of God, and the incarnation, should be tolerated sooner than an argument to prove that the earth moves." If the Bible is scientifically authoritative, the good father was certainly right. No one in Biblical times ever dreamed that the earth moves.

It is a lamentable story -- this long record of the Bible’s misuse as a book of science. Sir Isaac Newton was a deeply religious man but, when he announced the law of gravitation, churchmen, in the name of Holy Scripture, fell upon him with tooth and claw. They said that he "took from God that direct action on his works so constantly ascribed to him in Scripture and transferred it to material mechanism," and that he "substituted gravitation for Providence." Even John Wesley said that ideas like gravitation "tend to infidelity." So the sorry tale has gone on, until in my generation I have seen evolution attacked because it is not in the Bible. Of course it is not in the Bible. No modern science -- not even the earth’s sphericity -- is in the Bible. But that does not in the least prevent me from singing gratefully,

I can see from your letter that, taking it for granted that I am scientifically modern-minded, you wonder what that does to my idea of the Bible’s being inspired. Consider, then, that there are two theories about inspiration. One represents God as dictating the Bible. Word for word he is pictured as dictating to various amanuenses across some ten or twelve centuries all the books of the Bible. That seems to me sheer nonsense. If God dictated the Bible he certainly changed his style again and again between Genesis and Revelation. And he certainly contradicted himself repeatedly, from the two stories about Noah’s ark, in one of which God orders Noah to take into the ark two of every sort of animal and bird, and in the other seven pairs of each, to the inscription on Jesus cross, which is reported in the four Gospels in four different ways. Did God dictate that he made the world in six days, each with an evening and a morning? Did God dictate to Paul that Jesus was going to return to earth before Paul’s generation was all dead? Did God dictate Psalm 137, "Happy shall he be who takes your little ones and dashes them against the rock," or did he dictate, "Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you"? Surely, he could not have dictated both. Did God dictate, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," and many another passage from which cruel consequences have come, so that as Shakespeare says in The Merchant of Venice,

No! The dictation theory is incredible.

Inspiration means something else altogether. The Bible is rich in spiritual insight, vision, enlightenment, illumination. As another put it, "I know that the Bible is inspired because it inspires me." I turn to the Bible, not for scientific instruction, but for spiritual illumination, to share in the most influential development of religious ideas in man’s history, to watch divine deeds that have changed human destiny, to sit at the feet of great prophets, to learn from the insights of the seers, to find guidance in distinguishing right from wrong, and above all to come under the saving influence of Jesus Christ.

You are right, however, in feeling, as your letter reveals, that the prescientific world view which is the matrix in which the Bible’s treasures are set, does pose some difficult problems -- miracles, for example. A letter offers no adequate space for the treatment of that problem, but I venture some homely advice.

First, remember that the ancient world took what we would call miracles for granted. Not having even the idea of natural law in their heads, "signs and wonders," as the New Testament calls them, did not bother the ancients intellectually at all. Almost anything could happen. The records of Buddhism and Islam are full of miracle stories. A contemporary of Jesus, a man named Apollonius, had his biography written, and the miracles ascribed to him are so like those attributed to Jesus that some at first supposed the biography to be a deliberate attempt to discredit the Gospels. No! That whole ancient world thought in terms of miracles, and one often feels that they represent real events, looked at and thought about in a way utterly different from ours. Mohammed, for example, was credited with having made the sun stand still, with having obtained water from a flinty rock, with having fed thousands with a little food.

Second, consider the fact that some miracle stories in the Bible are more easy to believe now than they were a generation ago. This is especially true about miracles of healing. How many bodily ills, which in my youth were supposed to be physically caused, are now known to be caused or complicated by mental and emotional disorders! If you know anything about the development of psychosomatic medicine, you will understand this. When one considers that over half the beds in all the hospitals in the United States are filled with mental patients, and that many more are filled with patients whose physical ills are emotionally caused, so that cure must come rather from the spiritual than from the bodily end, Jesus’ healings become much more credible than they used to be.

Third, don’t suppose that a miracle means the breaking of natural law. I do not think that natural laws are ever broken. Ask nature the same question in the same way and it will always give you the same answer. But our knowledge of nature’s laws is limited. When I consider how many new regularities in nature have been discovered in my lifetime, I am sure that there are infinitely more yet to be discovered. Indeed, if we are tempted to look back two thousand years and condescend to the writers of the Bible because our science is so superior to theirs, we had better watch our step. Imagine the science of two thousand years ahead! How will men then think about us? They will be doing many things then that are absolutely incredible now. So a marvelous occurrence, then or now or in the ancient world, could conceivably be not a rupture of nature’s laws but a fulfillment of laws beyond our ken. Every time we learn a new law we get our hands on a new law-abiding force and can do a new thing. Cannot God do at least that?

Fourth, don’t suppose that you have to believe every miracle story just because it is in the Bible. Dr. W. E. Orchard was orthodox enough -- he ended in the Roman Catholic priesthood -- but he said once, "If I saw someone walking on the sea, I would not say, ‘This man is Divine’: I would say, ‘Excuse me, do you mind doing that again? I didn’t see how you did it.’" That is the typical modern-minded attitude, and you are in good Christian company if you feel the same way about some miracle stories in the Bible. Moses is said to have cast a stick on the ground and it became a snake, and to have seized the snake by its tail and it became a stick. Well, I wonder! Certainly my Christian faith does not depend on believing things like that.

Fifth, don’t complicate your problem by being a wooden headed literalist. The way many Western Christians think about the Book of Jonah, for example, is a tragedy. That book is one of the most magnificent affirmations of God’s universal care for all mankind, across all boundaries of race and nation, that ever was written in the ancient world. Some scholars call the book fiction with an ethical purpose, others call it a parable or an allegory, but no competent scholar that I know of thinks that the book was intended to be taken as historical fact. Of course it wasn’t. At the time the book was written -- probably somewhere around 300 B.C.-- there was developing in Israel an embittered hatred of the Gentiles. Israel was God’s chosen people, and he would destroy the others, who so often had mistreated Israel. Well, Jonah is Israel, refusing God’s commission to be a missionary to Nineveh, the Gentile city, and fleeing across the Mediterranean to escape. But God proves himself omnipresent: he sends a deadly storm; Jonah, spotted by lot as the guilty man, is thrown overboard; a great fish swallows him and three days later disgorges him. I wonder whether that is not an allegory of the exile in Babylon and the return. At any rate postexilic Israel still begrudged any help from God to Nineveh, and when, in response to Jonah’s reluctant preaching, the city repented, "it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry." Read the book and see how it ends, with God rebuking the surly Jonah and saying, "Should not I pity Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also much cattle?" How utterly ridiculous to interpret this moving and prophetic affirmation of God’s universal care for all mankind as a literal miracle story about a whale swallowing a man!

Sixth, don’t be afraid to doubt certain miracles which some Christians consider essential to their faith. If, for example, you doubt the virgin birth of Jesus, you have plenty of good Christian company. I am not trying to tell you what you should think about the virgin birth; I am simply indicating that personally I cannot believe it. Paul apparently never heard of it; Mark, the earliest Gospel, does not mention it; John in his first chapter seems deliberately to bypass it. Only twice in the New Testament is it mentioned -- in Matthew and Luke -- and even there it seems to be a late addition, because the two genealogies of Jesus both come down to Joseph, not to Mary. In the monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai I have myself seen a Syriac translation of Matthew --evidently from an earlier Greek version than the one we now have -- in which the genealogy of our Lord ends as it must logically have ended: "Joseph begat Jesus." Moreover, so many Christians seem to think that the story of the virgin birth confers uniqueness on Jesus, whereas the fact is that miraculous birth, without human fatherhood, was a familiar explanation of distinguished persons in all the ancient world. Such miraculous birth, in one form or another, was ascribed to Buddha, Zoroaster, Lao-tse, and Mahavira in the religious realm, and to personalities like Persius and Augustus Caesar in the secular realm. A familiar argument among early Christian apologists was that, if the Romans and Greeks believed that so many other people were born of a virgin, why could they not believe that Jesus was so born. Anyway, whatever conclusion you come to, don’t treat that kind of miracle story as basic to your Christian faith. Jesus’ divinity surely was not physical -- what could that mean? His divinity lay in his spiritual quality.

Finally, never forget that, despite modern science, this is still a miraculous world. As Walt Whitman said,

Imagine yourself back millions of years ago, when earthquakes and volcanoes ruled the uninhabited earth, and along the ocean’s edge the first microscopic forms of cellular life were emerging --on which would you have placed your bet, volcanoes or cells? How utterly unpredictable the future of life on earth then was! So modern science has not reduced this universe and us within it to dull, monotonous, predictable uniformity. Something marvelously creative and unforeseeable is going on here. And, as for the New Testament, think as honestly and intelligently as you can about miracles attributed to Christ, but don’t forget the major fact: he is the miracle. Who ever could have foreseen a life like that?

Very cordially yours,

Dear Mr. Brown:

I am finding this correspondence very interesting, because you certainly are asking me some decidedly important questions. In your recent letter you say that one of your professors has been attacking the idea of supernaturalism. You write that the professor is not an atheist, but that despite his theism he calls "supernatural" a "bad word," and you say that this has confused you. Well, some time ago a group of college students came out of a long bull session where they had discussed religion, and one of them summed up the result. "You always do get into trouble," he said, "when you try to think." Nevertheless, let’s keep on trying!

Hoping not to shock you too much, I agree with your professor. "Supernatural," in my judgment, is just about the most unredeemable word in the religious vocabulary. It has a bad history, and the picture of God’s relationship with the world, which it conjures up in many minds, is one of the chief blockades to intelligent faith in God.

To be sure, some theologians still try to save the word from its old associations and to use it intelligently. Let me put the common-sense use of the word into an analogy. When snow falls it can be removed in various ways. The sunshine or the rain may melt it -- they would be natural causes. Or a man with a shovel may clear the walk and, as the sunshine and the rain represent natural causation, so his volitional activity represents supernatural causation. If, whenever personal will steps in to do something that nature by itself would not do, we call that supernatural, we obviously cannot get supernaturalism out of religion, because we cannot get it out of life. When, however, this analogy is applied to God’s relationship with the world, there are some dangerous consequences.

All too commonly today supernaturalism means splitting the universe in two -- on one side nature, run by natural laws, on the other side the supernatural that ever and again breaks into the natural, disturbs its regular procedures, and suspends its laws. Usually, in the natural order, iron sinks in water, but the supernatural, if it wishes, can intervene so that an axhead floats at the behest of a prophet. That is to say, supernaturalism to many people means that this cosmos is a kind of duplex apartment: downstairs the ordinary course of procedure goes on its customary way, but ever and again from upstairs something comes down to break up the ordinary procedure on the main floor. So God becomes indeed "The Man Upstairs." This, in a few rough strokes, is the supernaturalism I deplore.

Take a brief look at its history. In ancient times everything that happened was regarded as the result of personal causation. Either God or Satan, angels or demons, men or women, did everything that was done. Nobody had yet dreamed of what we call natural law, a vast system of law-abiding procedures by which we explain everything that happens in the universe. In the Bible there is no word that can be translated "nature," in the sense in which we constantly use that word, to mean a universal, law-abiding order. Of course, men had come to recognize the way some things usually happened -- as children know that stones thrown in the air customarily fall to the ground, so that they would be surprised if a stone failed to do that. But anything like the law of gravitation the ancients had never dreamed of. Miracles to them did not involve any broken laws, for there were no laws to break; miracles to them were simply happenings that were unusual, unfamiliar, surprising. So, if the sun stood still at Joshua’s order or a man walked on water, that was amazingly out of the ordinary, but it was not a violation of any natural law.

Turn from that world view to ours, and what a difference! First, in Greek philosophy a general idea of cosmic order was, developed, and then science came, making cosmic order a matter of specific laws, mathematically stated, controlling everything from molecules to stars. So the natural order grew and grew, extending its domain even into realms like psychology and sociology, until religion, often fighting fiercely against the advance of science and the expansion of the natural order, invented a new word, "supernatural." That word never had been needed before, but now religion thought it necessary. What happened, however, was that more and more, as the natural order expanded, the supernatural, as religion had conceived it, dwindled.

Consider thunderstorms, for example. Once everybody thought devils caused them. Martin Luther said that repeating the first chapter of John’s Gospel was the best way he knew to frighten away the demons and stop the storm. About the time of Charlemagne, Christians began putting bells into church steeples to scare the devils out of the thunderclouds. All over Europe today you will find in the churches bells engraved -- as one in Basel, Switzerland, is engraved -- with mottoes like this: "Ad fugandos demones -- for frightening away the devils." That was honest-to-goodness supernaturalism.

Or consider comets, once regarded as the special messengers of God. Increase Mather was a contemporary of Sir Isaac Newton, but probably he never heard about the law of gravitation, and certainly he did not think the heavenly bodies were controlled by it. Once in Boston, when a comet hung over the city, Mather fairly paralyzed his congregation, crying, "The Lord hath fired his beacon in the heavens among the stars of God there; the fearful sight is not yet out of sight. The warning piece of heaven is going off." That is genuine supernaturalism.

I need not multiply instances. From that old bifurcated cosmos, split into an upstairs and a downstairs with the first occasionally invading the second, we have come into our modern world. It has been a staggering change. It still affects the thought and life of every one of us. In my time I have seen the change take place in Russia overnight. Only yesterday, when the peasants wanted fertile fields they called in the priests who sprinkled their farms with holy water. Now the peasants use scientific agriculture with rotation of crops.

By this time you may be saying, Why fuss about it; the change is all clear gain. Who wants to go back to the old supernaturalism? To which I answer, Nobody in his right senses does, but see what this change of world view has done to our idea of God! God as he was popularly imagined inhabited the supernatural. He made himself real to men by supernatural invasions of the world. When, therefore, the supernatural dwindled, God seemed to dwindle. As realm after realm was taken over by natural law, for many people God was escorted to the frontiers of the universe and bowed out. For many today the natural fills everything, is everything, explains everything. This consequence of the old supernaturalism is a major difficulty in many a modern man’s thinking about God.

One climactic event in the story of supernaturalism’s collapse was associated with Halley’s Comet. That comet was just about as important theologically as it was astronomically. For theology, clinging desperately to the supernatural as its only way of keeping God, had fought against one realm of law after another, even fighting the law of gravitation, until, beaten everywhere else, it was left with comets as about the only things that had not been captured by law. Then the specific date of another return of Halley’s Comet was predicted -- in 1758. So, that too was going to be made as law-abiding as the sun. Seldom has religious faith been so frightened. Some devout souls said that, if Halley’s Comet did return as predicted, they would have to give up faith in God. Well, the comet came back on schedule. After that the old style supernaturalism was in trouble. As for our modern thinking, this universe is certainly not split in two. If it is a materialistic system, then it is materialistic throughout. If it is a spiritual system, then it is spiritual throughout. One thing is sure: it is not a bifurcated cosmos with the natural downstairs and the supernatural upstairs.

No wonder that modern science has caused religious confusion! Many people, who do not understand what is the trouble, are upset -- every area of their religious thinking disturbed. Even you seem to feel that, if the supernatural goes, everything vital and valuable in religion goes too. Well, let’s see!

For one thing, the collapse of the old supernaturalism certainly need not mean the loss of God. Many thought it did. As the reign of law extended its domain over one field after another --astronomy, geology, physics, chemistry, biology, psychology --there was less and less room for supernatural intervention to operate in, so that, if God was located in the supernatural, he was being slowly crowded out. See! Supernaturalism is not the stronghold of religion. It nearly ruined religion.

Put over against each other two ways of conceiving God. God, said Paley, is like a watchmaker and the world is his watch. He made it and it mechanically runs on. Once in a while he tinkers with it, fixes it up, resets it to serve his special purposes, so that the strongest evidence of Christianity’s truth is this divine intervention in miracles, but generally the watch runs mechanically by itself. God a tinkering watchmaker -- that is one view. And now turn to another view which Wordsworth expressed:

Does anybody want to go back from that to the tinkering watchmaker? No! This is one world, God’s world throughout, whose law-abiding regularities, whose amazing artistries, whose evolution of ever higher structures, whose creation of personality, whose endless possibilities of spiritual growth and social progress indicate that it is a spiritual system. God is here, not an occasional invader of the world but its very soul, the basis of its life, its undergirding purpose, its indwelling friend, its eternal goal. That way of conceiving God saved my faith, after supernaturalism had well nigh ruined it.

To be sure, God is before, behind, above the law-abiding natural procedures which our science tries to understand, but when you wish to express that truth, don’t use the word "supernatural" -- that brings back the old picture of a split universe; use the word "transcendent." A transcendent God, yes! and an immanent God too --

Those two words are the best we have to express the truth.

Of course I am not supposing for a moment that, by what I have been saying, I have answered all the questions with which modern science confronts religious faith. That this one world is God’s world is more than some folk can believe. They gratefully accept this law-abiding cosmos and stop there. Sometimes they almost seem to be saying that scientific laws explain the universe. But after all, these laws are simply our human statements of the way the universe habitually acts. They are, as it were, the grammatical rules we have drawn up from observing the regular procedures of the world. Consider, for example, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. What a marvelous upthrust of creative genius it is! Nevertheless, grammatical rules are there and they can be set down in order. But grammatical rules do not explain Romeo and Juliet. They do not touch the hem of its explanation, nor do they set limits to the possible creativity of the genius that produced it. No more do our natural laws either explain or limit the creative processes of this living universe and its God.

Suppose someone should say to Shakespeare, You must not break the grammatical rules. Would that bother Shakespeare? Why should he want to break the grammatical rules? He can write Hamlet’s soliloquy, Portia’s plea for mercy, the love scene on Juliet’s balcony, without breaking any rules. The rules neither explain nor confine him; they express him. So this is a live universe, marvelously creative beyond our power to think, and all our scientific laws are but the grammatical rules, so far noted, according to which it expresses itself. As for me that last "it" is unsatisfactory; there is personal mind behind this amazing process and personal purpose through it.

Note another change that has been brought about by modern science’s new world view. Under the old supernaturalism religion was regarded as a way of getting special favors from on high. People stood in the natural and cried upstairs to the supernatural for something to be sent down to them. Many Christians still hold that picture of the world -- or, shall we say that they half hold it, thinking and acting one way in the world and in another way when they come to church? They pray for rain but, like a shrewd Maine farmer, they do not think rain likely with that west wind blowing. They pray against plague and pestilence, but they are glad that they have quarantines, sanitation, and inoculation to depend upon. Like Russian peasants they find rotation of crops and proper fertilization of the soil more effective than holy water, although they dislike giving up holy water. They still stand in the natural, feeling rather silly when they cry upstairs to the supernatural. What is really silly is that whole picture of a bifurcated cosmos. This is one world, a spiritual system throughout, where we never get what we want until we fulfill the conditions for getting it. If we want physical results we must fulfill physical conditions. If we want spiritual results, we must fulfill spiritual conditions. That is the real world we live in and it is both stern and magnificent.

As I see it, such modern-minded Christianity says to a man, Go out into this law-abiding world, God’s world, his ways of working woven into its very texture, and fulfill the conditions of high living. If you want health, fulfill the conditions of health, physical, mental, spiritual. If you want integrity and beauty of character, fulfill the conditions. Sow faith in God and reap courage. Sow prayer, openhearted responsiveness to the Eternal, and reap peace and power. Sow worship, the uplift of the heart toward the Highest, and reap a sustaining sense of his presence. Sow friendliness and reap friendship. Sow unselfishness and reap an enlarged life. Sow goodwill and reap a better world for our children to be born in. That seems to me to be vital religion. From inner communion with God to outgoing devotion to his kingdom, nothing that our fathers at their best found spiritually valuable has been lost out of it. This new world view does not make religion impossible; it makes impossible any kind of religion except the highest.

At any rate, I do not want my God to be anything like "The Man Upstairs." The story runs that an applicant for a position at a customs office once tried a civil service examination, in which he faced this question: "How far is the sun from the earth?" He answered, "I do not know how far the sun is from the earth, but it is far enough so that it will not interfere with the proper performance of my duties at the customs office." One need not look long to find people with a similar attitude toward God -- far back, far up, far off. No!

Cordially yours,

Dear Mr. Brown:

I am glad that, in my last letter, I happened to remark that some people who disbelieve in God are really disbelievers in some particular idea of God. You write now, wondering whether this may not be your trouble -- that you have in your mind a picture of God which makes belief in him difficult, if not impossible. This may very probably be a major factor in your problem. Men use the word "God" continually, but what varied pictures of him and ideas about him are in their minds! Whitehead, the philosopher, calls God "the Principle of Concretion" in the universe; and a young girl, surprised at first hearing that Jesus was a Jew, says, "Jesus may have been a Jew, but God is a Baptist." Between such extremes an endless variety of images occupy men’s minds when they think of God.

Inevitably, in this world of cause and consequence, we feel that there must be something causal behind existence. Canon Streeter of Oxford used to tell a story about a country mouse and a city mouse arguing about God, with the more sophisticated and skeptical city mouse getting the country mouse completely confused, until at last, trying to save some shreds of its faith, the country mouse exclaimed, "But, dash it all, there must be a sort of something!" Many people never get any clearer idea of God than that -- "a vague oblong blur," as one churchman described him. At the other extreme many retain into maturity the most vivid, detailed and picturesque portraits of God which their childhood’s imaginations knew. One college student wrote, "I have always pictured him according to a description in Paradise Lost as seated upon a throne, while around are angels playing on harps and singing hymns." No wonder that many people -- perhaps you yourself -- face as their central problem, not is there a God, but what idea of God am I either believing or disbelieving?

In considering this problem one basic fact confronts us: we cannot possibly jump outside of our human experience and find any terms with which to describe God except such terms as our day-by-day living provides. All our thinking about God has to be done with pictures, symbols, images, drawn from human experience. As a result, can anything we say about God be adequate to take him all in and describe him fully? Of course not! Since when has the Pacific Ocean been poured into a pint cup, that the God of this vast universe should be fully comprehended in human words? Nevertheless, even a pint cupful of the Pacific Ocean reveals its quality. So we go on trying to express what we think is true about God’s quality in symbols drawn from our experiences. In the Bible God is a rock, a fortress, a high tower; he is father, mother, husband, friend. Go to church any Sunday and what varied pictures of God are presented to us! The first hymn may be, "O worship the King, all glorious above." The second hymn may be, "Spirit of God, descend upon my heart." The third hymn may be, "The Lord’s my shepherd, I’ll not want."

This use of human symbols in describing God calls out the derision of the unbelievers. Watch these Christians, they say, trying to catch the sun at noon in their verbal butterfly nets! But the fact is that the unbelievers are doing exactly the same thing. They too are trying to describe the basic, creative fact behind the universe, and they too have to say: it is most like -- and then they have no choice except to use a symbol drawn from human experience. The cosmos is most like a machine, say the mechanistic materialists. Or, as Haeckel put it, the ultimate reality is most like "a chemical substance of a viscous character, having albuminous matter and water as its chief constituents."

So, we all alike confront the same necessity. As Goethe said, "The highest cannot be spoken." If we think at all about life’s underlying reality, we have to think in limited human terms. The question is: Which elements in our experience best express the truth? "Dynamic dirt going it blind," say the materialists. "The Great Architect of the Universe now begins to appear as a pure mathematician," says Sir James Jeans, the scientist. "Our Father, who art in heaven," says the Christian.

No wonder that many people have difficulty believing in God! Like all the rest of us, they start with childish ideas of God -- a venerable bookkeeper, with white flowing beard, standing behind a high desk and writing down everybody’s bad deeds, was the way Professor John Fiske of Harvard in his boyhood pictured God. All maturing minds, therefore, face this dilemma: either they must give up their belief in God or else they must get a worthier concept of him. So many "atheists" are not really atheists at all. Whenever I have the chance I ask them to describe the God they do not believe in and, when they have done so, I generally can say that I do not believe in that God either, but that we still have the universe on our hands, and do they really think that the cosmic scheme of things is mindless and purposeless, without meaning or destiny, that

That is what genuine atheists do think, but, in my judgment, there are not many such. I corresponded recently with a man who had sent me a manuscript in which he was plainly scornful of faith in God, but when I asked him whether he did not believe in Mind behind and in the universe, and Purpose running through it, he answered that of course he believed that. He was denying, not God, but some picture of God that insulted his intelligence.

Take Shelley, for example. He signed himself "Percy Bysshe Shelley, atheist." But, when John Keats died and Shelley was stirred to the depths, his faith in Eternal Beauty poured out of him in inspired verse, as though he had clean forgotten he had ever called himself an atheist.

What picture of God Shelley was denying, when he called himself an atheist, I do not know, but obviously he was a worshiper of "One" eternally beautiful.

You touch the very nub of the difficulty, which troubles many people, when you say that you find it hard to think of God as "a person." I quite agree with you. To say that God is "a person" seems to imply that a human personality is being used as a mold into which the idea of God is poured. That is what scholars call "anthropomorphism" -- making a man-sized God. Long ago the Psalmist rebuked that kind of idolatrous thinking, when he pictured God as saying, "You thought that I was one like yourself." Take one look at this immeasurable universe, and obviously no intelligent mind can believe in any such picture of the Eternal.

The real problem calls for another kind of approach. Granted that the whole truth about God is infinitely beyond our comprehension -- as the Bible says,

-- the question still remains: starting as we must with our limited human experience, what is the road our thoughts ought to travel out toward the truth about God? Shall we take the lowest roadway, matter, and say that down in that direction through protons and neutrons lies the course our thinking should travel? Or shall we take the best we know, personality -- consciousness, intelligence, purposefulness, goodwill -- and say that up that road, infinitely beyond our understanding, lies the truth about God? Well, you know what I think. God is not "a person" in any man-sized sense, but I am sure that he is personal, in the sense that only up the highway of man’s best can our thinking rightly travel toward the ultimate truth about the Eternal. And because man’s best is so marvelously revealed in Jesus Christ, he is my picture, my symbol, my image of God -- "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ."

When I deal with a young man like you, doubting God, I always think of George Matheson. His faith and courage inspired multitudes, and two of his hymns we are singing yet: "O Love that wilt not let me go," and

In his early ministry he had a parish in the Scottish highlands. He resigned it. He had lost his faith. He could no longer believe in God as he had always conceived him. He decided to leave the ministry. But, though his kirk was in the Scottish highlands, they would not let him go. The Presbytery told him that he was a young man and would yet solve his theological problems. He did. He remained in the church, preaching as much vital Christianity as he could believe in, until his ideas of God expanded,

That kind of experience is normal. The greatest men of faith have always had to work their way out of old concepts, truthfully dealing with their doubts, and winning through at last to convictions honestly their own because they had to fight for them.

This is true of the Bible itself. God, at the beginning of the Bible, walking in a garden in the cool of the day, making a woman from a man’s rib, confounding men’s speech lest they build a tower too high, trying to slay a man at a wayside inn because his child was not circumcised, or dwelling on Mt. Sinai, where he says to Moses, "You shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen," is a very different deity from the one you find at the Bible’s end, "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth." The story goes that a young girl was very much troubled by some passages in the Old Testament where God, for example, commanded Saul to smite the Amalekites, and "not spare them, but kill both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." So the girl’s father read to her some passages from the later Hebrew prophets -- such as "What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"-- and from the New Testament: "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God." The girl was silent for a moment and then said, "Daddy, God grew better as he got older, didn’t he?" Well, that is one way of putting it! Certainly no intelligent man can retain his faith in God unless his God does grow better as he, the man, gets older.

Let me try another approach to your problem. Many people, puzzled about God, keep asking, Who is God? What kind of being is he? Another question, however, goes much more closely to the heart of the matter: Where is God? We do not want merely to believe theoretically that God is; we want to find him, experience him. Where, then, do we expect to find him? Where is he? The thoughts of many, when they face that question, do not turn inward to the depths of their own souls, but go out into the physical universe. God, they think, is a dim figure behind the universe. Vague and gigantic, he is off somewhere, the one who created the cosmos, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and when in religious poetry they try to picture him, they sing,

Now, we may believe in the existence of a being like that, but certainly Christian faith at its best has always meant more than that. What possible meaning could ever get into the idea of loving such a gigantic cosmic sovereign? One might fear such a God, stand in awe of him -- but love him? When, however, one turns to the New Testament one finds those first Christians talking, not simply about belief in God, but about loving him. Their language is lyric. Their faith in the Divine is no cool or fearful credence, but a passionate devotion. And the reason for this goes back to their answer to the question, Where is God? Listen to them! "Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s spirit dwells in you?" You see, ask them where God is and their thought does not shoot off among the stars but goes deep down within human life -- there is God. "Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come to him and eat with him, and he with me." That is where God is, in all beauty and excellence inspired by his presence within man’s life. "God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him." That is where we discover the Divine, wherever love illumines life.

Over thirty years ago I preached a sermon in which I used this analogy:

I still believe that to be a true analogy. The cosmic end of God I marvel at, but the near end of God I love the Divine close to us wherever there is beauty, love, integrity, truth. No one ever can believe in all of God. He is too great for even our faith to grasp. Believe in as much of God as you can -- that is the way to start. Begin with the near end of God and think your way out through that toward the whole of him.

Begin, for example, with the moral order where "whatever a man sows, that he will also reap." We live not simply in a law-abiding physical system but in a moral order also. Pilate sat in judgment on Jesus but now Jesus sits in judgment on Pilate. In the long run the Bible is right: "Be sure your sin will find you out." How ever could a chaos of aimless atoms eventuate in a system of moral cause and consequence?

Or begin with the mathematics in the universe. Einstein condenses the truth about cosmic energy into a mathematical formula, E=MC². Man did not create this mathematical order; he discovered it. Mind meets mind at every step in our exploration of the world we live in. How can aimless, purposeless chance be the explanation of such a system?

Or begin with the beauty that Shelley sang about. There is plenty of ugliness here, but why should "dynamic dirt going it blind" make symmetry and rhythm and light and color and the endless charm of their variety? How can such an explanation account for a scarlet tanager playing in a dogwood tree, or Chopin’s nocturnes and Beethoven’s symphonies? Sometimes I think that if all other evidence for the divine should vanish, I still should have to believe that there is an artist somewhere at the heart of things.

Or begin with great character in persons who have made this world a more decent place for the human family to live in. If you have a father and mother such as I had, if through the reading of biography you have fallen in love with history’s transcendent souls, if Jesus Christ has captured your imagination and devotion, you simply cannot believe that blind, aimless matter can explain them. No! They are the near end of God.

Or begin with your own inspired hours, when you experienced what Hugh Walpole, the novelist, once described: "I affirm that I have become aware, not by my own wish, almost against my will, of an existence of another life of far, far greater importance and beauty than this physical one." You must have had hours like that. When John wrote about "the true light that enlightens every man," he was talking about all of us. There is a spark of the Divine in each of us, and sometimes it surprises us with an hour of insight, vision, and faith.

See all these near ends of God with which we can start and think our way out through them toward the whole of him. And if you say that this is too good to be true, I am sure of the answer: it is too good not to be true.

Faithfully yours,

Dear Mr. Brown:

I am not surprised at the position you take in your recent letter. While I hope it does not represent your final stand, it is a logical next step. You say that you still find any confident belief in God impossible, but at the same time -- partly because of my last letter -- you find an atheistic, materialistic explanation of the universe and of man’s life in it equally incredible. You write that one of your professors recently quoted Lotze: "Chaos cannot have cosmos for its crown." You agree that, starting with a chaotic mass of physical particles, it seems unbelievable that this law-abiding cosmos and man’s life, rising into goodness, truth, and beauty, should have issued from their blind, accidental operation. So, unable to be either a theist or an atheist, you write, "Why not throw in the sponge? Why not acknowledge that the understanding of this universe’s source is beyond our ken? Why not say frankly that we do not know? Why not be agnostic?"

Let me say first that, as contrasted with a know-it-all dogmatism, agnosticism can be a very healthy attitude.

-- that is from the Book of Job in the Old Testament. "Now we see in a mirror dimly." "How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!" -- that is Paul in the New Testament. John Calvin has a reputation as a stern dogmatist, but he said about God, "His essence indeed is incomprehensible, utterly transcending all human thought." All intelligent faith in God has behind it a background of humble agnosticism. The ultimate truth about this universe cannot be caught and cabined in our limited minds. Even with regard to knowledge of the physical universe Sir Isaac Newton compared himself, despite his marvelous discoveries, to a boy playing on the seashore, "whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." To put it mildly, a similar modesty befits those who try to formulate their faith in God. Insofar as your agnosticism expresses intellectual humility before the unfathomable mystery of the universe, I applaud it.

Something tells me, however, that standing between theism and atheism you are going to find it very difficult to be permanently neutral. The matter at issue is not merely abstract and speculative; it is intensely practical: What does life basically mean? Listen to the atheist! "The outstanding fact that cannot be dodged by thoughtful men is the futility of it all" -- that is Clarence Darrow. "Life, fundamentally, is not worth living. . . . What could be more logical than suicide? What could be more preposterous than keeping alive?" -- that is H. L. Mencken. They both were able, successful, distinguished men, frankly candid about the logical consequences of their atheism. Life born accidentally from the dust, no ultimate meaning or purpose in it, and no destiny ahead of it except annihilation -- that on one side; and on the other what Benjamin Franklin called "Powerful Goodness" at the heart of things! Do you really think that you can live as long as I have and not at least drift toward one side or the other? Agnosticism about the basic meaning of life is difficult to maintain. You may hold your mind in suspense, but how can you hold your living in suspense? Your life inevitably tends to get made up one way or the other.

If only faith in God were a parenthesis in the sentence of life, one could drop it out and forget it. But instead faith in God, or the lack of it, determines the meaning of the whole sentence. Of course, there is plenty of trivial religion that can well be forgotten, but God stands for Intelligence behind the universe, Purpose running through it, and a worth-while Destiny for its outcome. When Dr. Irwin Edman was professor of philosophy at Columbia University he wrote about nontheists: "They find that this God whom they have read out or presumed to be read out of the universe has carried with him into oblivion any discernible direction of things, any significance of life or any logic of destiny."

I grant that some people are so shallow and superficial that they apparently can live without thinking about the ultimate meaning of life, but I do not believe that you can. You are going to be haunted by something above yourself. When my friend, Robert Wicks, was dean of the chapel at Princeton University he came upon a student who insisted emphatically that he had no religion. Dean Wicks by-passed the youth’s statement and asked him what it was in college that so far had given him deepest satisfaction. He answered that probably it was managing the baseball team and trying to do it as perfectly as it could be done. Said Dean Wicks: "Managing the team as perfectly as it could be done -- you were not paid for that." "Of course not," said the student. "So," said Dean Wicks, "you have not simply horizontal relationships with other people, but an interior, perpendicular relation with an Ideal, so that at your best you love to do good work as perfectly as it can be done." "Well," continued Dean Wicks, "let’s start talking about religion right there." That is an excellent place to start, for there is nothing in us more profoundly significant than this strange perpendicular relationship, so that we cannot help looking up to something above us. We never are at our best until we are carried out of ourselves by something greater than ourselves to which we give ourselves. Your agnosticism is going to be haunted by that fact.

Listen to this from H. G. Wells, who called himself an agnostic: "At times in the silence of the night and in rare lonely moments, I experience a sort of communion of myself with Something Great that is not myself." That sounds strange from an agnostic, but he is talking about something profoundly human. Theologically such a man may say that he does not believe in God, which generally means that he disbelieves in some particular idea of God, but psychologically there is no escape from this inward, vertical relationship, which expresses itself in varied ways -- admiration, reverence, worship, devotion, selfcommittal, sacrificial loyalty. Here is a mysterious fact, which you will find it very difficult to explain on a materialistic basis. It is bound to haunt your agnosticism.

In my generation, Robert Browning was widely read. Perhaps in your generation he seems old hat. But once in a while he surely does say something profoundly true. All right! Try to be an agnostic, but --

Yes, as long as you try to be an agnostic, that "grand Perhaps" will haunt you.

You see, while philosophically we may doubt God, psychologically we always have a god. Each of us is instinctively a worshipper, giving himself to something, making a god of it and serving it, so that even when we get rid of God philosophically, we never get rid of him psychologically. As Martin Luther put it, "Whatsoever, then, thy heart clings to, I say, and relies upon, that is properly thy God."

Many people, giving up God philosophically, have concocted all sorts of psychological substitutes for him -- saying, for example, that God is like Uncle Sam or Alma Mater, a picturesque, imaginative symbol of our group devotion, so that, when at commencement time we go back to our college and sing praise to Alma Mater, that is exactly like religious worship. God is not actually real, they say, but the idea of God is useful as an imaginative picture of our social loyalties. That leaves a man, so it seems to me, with his noblest, inward needs pulling in one direction and his intellectual convictions pulling in another, wanting a transcendent object of loyal devotion in a universe where he thinks there is nothing to be transcendentally loyal to.

I for one cannot escape the conviction that there is at the heart of this universe a "Powerful Goodness," deserving our supreme loyalty. During World War II the Midshipmen’s Corps, training at Columbia University, held their services of worship in the Riverside Church. To me the most moving moment in the worship of the midshipmen came when, at the close of the service, the color-bearers entered the chancel to get the flags -- the flag of the corps and the flag of the nation -- and then turned in solemn silence toward the altar and dipped the colors before the cross, as though to say that above all earthly devotions there is in this universe One to whom our supreme loyalty belongs, and that the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.

On the contrary side listen to one atheist, describing what he believes!

Can you believe that? Can that explain the law-abiding cosmos, the beauty of nature, history’s creative minds and towering characters? Can that account for man’s long, evolutionary, upward climb, and for all the best that he has done and been? Was Christ just a tiny lump of impure carbon and water? Even when one states atheism in less blunt and offensive terms, can any purposeless, mindless, physiochemical mechanism, accidentally coming from nowhere and headed nowhither, explain anything like beautiful family life, superb music, or the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians? I know all the difficulties which confront theism -- especially the problem of evil -- but I am sure that Professor William Montague was right when he said that the chance of atheistic materialism’s being true would have to be represented by a fraction, with one for the numerator and a denominator that would reach from here to the fixed stars. So, as between theism and atheism I cannot be neutral. Agnosticism is at best a temporary retreat.

Agnostics commonly seem to suppose that their attitude is a modest and harmless neutrality. No! Faith in God and the experience of his sustaining presence -- "strengthened with might through his Spirit in the inner man" -- are positive matters which have to be positively chosen if we are to possess them. Agnosticism leaves us empty of them just as truly as atheism does. I hope that sometime you will marry a lovely girl. When you do you will, of course, believe in her fidelity. Suppose now that something happens which makes you suspect her of infidelity. Then suppose that, unable to prove that she is either faithful to you or unfaithful, you decide to be agnostic about the matter and say, I don’t know. You see what will have happened: you will have lost all the positive values of a happy marriage. That, I am sure, is a true analogy of what happens when a man, facing theism vs. atheism, says that he is going to choose indecisive neutrality.

Let me briefly list a few of the positive contributions which faith in God makes to a man’s life.

First, a basic confidence in the soundness and security of the universe. On shipboard sometimes an individual is decidedly uncomfortable. The wind is high; the sea is rough; the ship is rolling; dishes fly; ankles are sprained and arms broken. For all that, however, everybody knows that the ship is sound. It will arrive. Around the individual discomfort is the encompassing security of the voyage as a whole. So with life. Our personal problems are often exceedingly severe. But to a man who has faith in God the universe is sound. It will arrive. The captain is on the bridge. The bearings have not been lost. The agnostic must live without that confidence.

Second, a basic confidence that there is spiritual meaning and purpose in the universe -- not simply the meanings and purposes which we put into life, but also those which we discover in life because the Creator put them there. How can a man live in a world which he believes to be fundamentally meaningless? It was not a preacher but England’s man of letters, John Addington Symonds, who said, "Such skepticism is like a blighting wind; nothing thrives beneath it." Astronomy makes us think about the size of the universe, geology about its age, physics about its atomic structure, but religion makes us think about the moral meaning of the universe. How can a sane man avoid facing that issue? To be sure, plenty try to avoid it. Some try on a mediocre level. They say, Why worry about the universe? Here are baseball and television, liquor and love-making -- let the universe wag! And some try on a loftier level. They say, Here are art and music, scientific truths to discover and philanthropic causes to serve, much to read, think about, and do -- why concern oneself with the fundamental meaning of the universe? Nevertheless, only the intellectually blind can fail to see that towering interrogation: Is there an undergirding purpose in the universe? The believer in God, like Robert Browning, says,

The agnostic must live without this confidence.

Third, the experience of interior resources so that, as Paul put it, "in him who strengthens me I am able for anything." Have you ever steamed along a waterway until you came to a change of level, where they shut you in a lock, closed the great gates behind you, opened the sluiceways above, and the water from above poured down and lifted you? You never could have made it by your own motor power. Life is like that. To me that kind of experience -- inward, replenishing power to do and to endure what by myself would have been impossible -- is at the very center of religion’s meaning. When Dr. James Pratt was head of the department of philosophy at Williams College he sent out a questionnaire to friends of his, asking them what, if anything, God meant to them. Here are three typical answers: "He is as much a necessity to my spiritual existence as the elements of pure air are to my physical system"; "If I were convinced that there is no God, I fear a sense of loneliness would become intolerable"; "As for any repose, or ability to face life and death with composure, any incentive to be perfect in things hidden from outsiders, any exhilaration in living and trying to do my best -- I cannot conceive it without the idea of God." I cannot write off the countless millions of men and women across the centuries who would bear similar witness to this experience of God’s sustaining power. But, of course, the agnostic must live without it.

There are many other positive contributions which faith in God makes to a man’s life and which agnosticism misses -- all the way from confidence that this is really a universe of moral order where no lie can live forever, to confidence that death is an open door into life eternal. So I return to something I said before. Conceivably you may keep your mind in suspense as between speculative theism and atheism. But with regard to the involved meanings and experiences, which the question of God or no-God raises, how can you keep your life in suspense? At any rate I have not been able to. As Frederic Myers pictures Paul saying, so say I:

Sincerely yours,

Dear Mr. Brown:

Your letter raises a very important question and I salute you for the able way in which you present it. You agree with my contention that in living the good life it would be inspiring and sustaining to believe in God. To have faith that love is at the heart of the universe, that the whole scheme of things is conceived in wisdom and goodwill, that a divine purpose underlies creation and makes the ultimate victory of good over evil a foregone conclusion -- that, you say, is obviously a most comforting and enheartening philosophy. But, you say, is not that the very reason why people do believe in God, because they want a comfortable faith? "I fear," you write, "that this faith which you exalt is wishful thinking. It sugar-coats this terrific universe with a lush gospel. Isn’t it a psychological drug, a daydream, a tranquilizer, a soothing fantasy?" You confess that you wish you could honestly believe in God, but you say, "I don’t want to be credulous and believe a myth just because it is pleasant."

Well, neither do I, and with one aspect of what you say I agree: faith in God is used by many as a psychological defense mechanism, a lovely make-believe world to which sentimentally they retreat when they do not want to face life’s stern realities. Nothing is free from the possibility of burlesque, not even belief in God. But you do not judge music by jazz; you know there is Mozart. You do not judge architecture by filling stations; you know there is Chartres. No more should you judge religious faith by the weaklings who use it as a cozy retreat.

The idea that irreligion is hardheaded and factual while religion is visionary and wishful, is a strange misconception. Upon the contrary, the central issue between religion and irreligion concerns what we are going to do with a towering range of marvelous and significant facts. The stars in their courses are not more factual than the profound spiritual experiences that have produced the great souls of our race. The irreligionist picks up a Bible and calls the visible book a fact, but when the book tells of a man who goes into his closet, shuts the door and, having prayed to the Father, comes out transfigured and empowered, he calls that a wishful fantasy. The irreligionist calls our bodies a fact, but when our spirits are led "in green pastures" and "beside the still waters" by an invisible Shepherd who restores our souls, he calls that a consoling illusion. The irreligionist grants that Gandhi is a fact, but when Gandhi, going to prison under a sense of divine vocation, which he cannot resist, calls God "the most exacting personage in the world and the world to come," the irreligionist says that is visionary fancy. Irreligion seems to me a negation of life’s most significant facts. Life is immeasurably more profound and meaningful than irreligion sees. Man’s best life, his deep and moving experiences of beauty, goodness, truth -- they are facts. What made Plato Plato, what made Raphael Raphael, what made Christ Christ are facts. An intellect like Einstein’s is a fact and, if you say that the stars are overwhelmingly tremendous, I answer that a mind which can understand the stars and describe the universe in a mathematical formula is far more amazing than the stars, which do not even know that they are being understood.

When then a man turns to molecules and atoms alone as the ultimate realities, he is not being more factual than the man of religious faith. He is simply neglecting one range of facts to concentrate upon another. Serious religious faith takes them both into account, but it gives primacy to the higher range of facts, man’s best life; and concerning that it maintains the strong conviction that man at his best has experiences, intellectual, ethical, and spiritual, which materialism never can account for, and which only religious faith is adequate to explain.

When I was a sophomore in college I cleared God out of my universe and started all over to see what I could find. I dreaded being credulous, and some of the stuff handed out to me as part and parcel of the Christian faith seemed to me -- and still seems to me -- incredible. But by disbelieving in God I did not escape belief; I ran headlong into belief in atheism, materialism, into faith that the ultimate, creative factors in the universe are physical particles operating blindly without mind behind them or purpose in them. Talk about credulity!

Recently I heard a magnificent rendering of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. How explain that -- its composer, its thrilling beauty, its masterly rendition? On the analogy of a materialistic explanation of the universe we must first reduce all the symphony’s spiritual aspects to its physical basis printed in the score. Then we must analyze the physical basis into its notes --whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, and eighths -- and then, having analyzed them into circles, dots, and dashes, we must reduce those to arithmetical points diffused in space. So, the explanation runs, by fortunate chance the arithmetical points fell together into whole notes, half notes, quarter notes, and eighths, and by fortuitous concourse on some happy occasion they arranged themselves into the symphony. That seems to me a true analogy of the process of thought by which men reach a materialistic explanation of the universe and of our lives in it. Talk about credulity! As another put it, that is like ascribing Shakespeare’s dramas to an accidental explosion in a printing shop.

Don’t misunderstand me! There are endless baffling problems associated with belief in God. Mystery beyond mystery confronts us in any endeavor to explain this world. But of all attempts to find the source and meaning of our existence, atheistic materialism seems to me to be the most incredible. So I came back to belief in God, not in order to be happily credulous but in order to escape credulity. It was not a preacher but Charles Darwin who said, "If we consider the whole universe, the mind refuses to look upon it as the outcome of chance."

Another factor in your letter gives me serious concern: your concept of Christian faith as a roseate, even saccharine, view of life and your picture of Christian living as cozy and comfortable. Granted that too many Christians make such a description possible! There is today a popular "peace of mind" movement in some of our churches, which seems to me to reduce the harp of the gospel to one string -- don’t get nervous -- and to play endlessly on that. Granting, however, that such a caricature of Christianity exists, it certainly is a caricature. Was the religion of Christ primarily comforting? I should call it primarily challenging, disturbing, demanding. "If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me" -- is that kind of living a snug and soothing retreat?

Perhaps you will say that the last time you went to church they sang Whittier’s hymn:

Drop thy still dews of quietness,

Till all our strivings cease.

Isn’t that a soft retreat? To which I answer, read Whittier’s biography. He was a courageous, militant social reformer. In his elder years, famous as a poet, he wrote, "I set a higher value on my name as appended to the Anti-Slavery Declaration of 1833 than on the title page of any book." I think of him in Concord, New Hampshire, going to speak at an anti-slavery meeting, facing a crowd on the way that pelted him with rotten eggs until his black Quaker coat ran yellow with the stains. He was hated as a radical and lampooned in the press as a traitor, but he stood his ground. Now, with all that and more in mind, go back to Whittier’s hymn again, and see where he got the stability and stamina to "fight the good fight."

Genuine Christian faith and life are not anything that a soft and cowardly spirit would care to retreat to. Your reference to the New Testament -- that its "idealistic faiths and beautiful ideals" seem to you far removed from life’s "dirty and often cruel realities" -- especially interested me. Take another look at the New Testament! In what other book will you find such an ungodly company of vicious scoundrels as you find in the New Testament?

Where does Herod, wanting to kill one child, massacre all the newborn boys in the countryside so as not to miss him? In the New Testament. Where do we meet Judas Iscariot, the traitor, who for thirty pieces of silver sold to his death the fairest soul that ever visited the earth? In the New Testament. Where do we watch Caiaphas, the crafty priest, twisting judicial process to an evil end, and Pilate, who knew that Jesus was innocent, sending him out to be scourged and crucified? In the New Testament. Where does a whole city’s population, swept by mass propaganda, cry hours on end, "Great is Diana of the Ephesians," because incited by a group of greedy tradesmen who do not want their profits cut? In the New Testament. Where does religious persecution rage, killing uncounted Christian martyrs, until the survivors think they hear the souls of the slain crying from under the altar, "O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long?" In the New Testament. In what other book in all literature does the story start from, center around, and evermore return to a cross, where a man, "fairest among ten thousand and the one altogether beautiful," dies after six hours of agony, while his foes jeer him and his friends desert him. There isn’t any such book. Are you taking Latin in college? Cicero called crucifixion "crudelissimum deterrimumque supplicium -- the most cruel and terrifying punishment." On Calvary you see it at its worst. Show me a single damnable and scrofulous evil in human nature that does not appear in the New Testament! Dishonest taxgatherers, adultery, racial prejudice, religious bigotry -- all the evils that make men cynical are in that book.

This is one reason why I am proud to be a Christian. Christian faith did not start as a retreat from life’s ugly realities. It faced all of them and rose triumphant over them. When it is genuinely Christian it is not cozy comfort; it is "the victory that overcomes the world."

I was especially interested in your reference to Schopenhauer. I judge that in some course in philosophy you have heard of him with his atheism and pessimism. You say in your letter that when a man like that talks he sounds objective, realistic, unemotional. He is not believing anything because it is agreeable. I knew a young man once who reveled in Schopenhauer, welcoming his assertions that there is no God, that nothing is worth our striving, that life is a business which does not cover expenses, and that "the only honest wish man can have is that of absolute annihilation." There, the young man said, is clear, cold reason unaffected by emotion.

Schopenhauer’s atheism unaffected by emotion? His grandmother was insane; his father, married to an unfaithful wife, committed suicide. Then his mother turned openly to free love and, like Hamlet, Schopenhauer despised her with a hatred which she vehemently returned, throwing him out of the house at last and physically pitching him downstairs. During the last twenty-four years of his mother’s life, Schopenhauer never saw her. He had no wife, one illegitimate son whom he refused to acknowledge, no home life, few friends. He distrusted all mankind so deeply that he never allowed a barber to shave him, and he habitually slept with a loaded pistol beside his bed. Schopenhauer’s atheism an objective, intellectual conclusion, unaffected by emotion? No! Give him a good father and mother, a devoted wife, some fine children and real friends, and see how long he will go on thinking as he did about life’s meaninglessness.

Do you see what I am driving at? You are saying that folk often believe in God for emotional reasons, because such faith is consoling and comfortable. I am saying now that many people disbelieve in God for emotional reasons, because in their misery life feels godless and meaningless. I am sure that atheism is commonly not at all the conclusion of a clear, cool mind, unclouded by emotion.

Take, for example, one of our popular American novelists, the late Theodore Dreiser. He was a thoroughgoing atheist, calling life "a complete illusion . . . purely temporary . . . always changing . . . ever ridiculous." How did he come to accept that philosophy? His father, a cripple, never was able to lift his family of fifteen out of poverty. The home periodically broke up, and mother and children were battered about from one town to another. Even the local prostitute once sent them food and clothes. So this gifted, sensitive youth grew up, humiliated, frustrated, embittered. Then in his maturity he came upon the philosophy of atheistic materialism, which said about life just what he felt about it, that it came from nowhere, means nothing, and is going nowhither. Thus not by the intellectual but by the emotional route he came to his atheism.

Don’t misunderstand me. There are happy and fortunate people who are atheists, and there are desperately handicapped people who are theists. What I am trying to do is to make clear that while some people do believe in God because such faith is emotionally satisfying, plenty of others disbelieve in God for the same reason, because atheism expresses the way they feel about life’s emptiness. In the end I hope you will do neither, but will find a faith in God and an experience of his presence which will command the respect of the whole of you -- mind, heart, and will.

To be sure, in every realm the believers are commonly accused by the skeptics of being crazy. A friend of mine, operating in Arabia during the First World War, ran upon an Arab sheik who, hearing talk about telegraphy, was dogmatic that no message could possibly travel from Basra to Baghdad faster than his swiftest horse could run. He refused to be credulous. He was one of those shrewd, hardheaded men, not to be fooled. No one was going to pull the wool over his eyes. What he failed to see was that skepticism can be just as mistaken as credulity.

When steam-driven locomotives were first proposed for the Liverpool-Manchester Railway, learned men testified that they never could go more than twelve miles an hour, and the Edinburgh Review pleaded that Thomas Gray be put in a strait jacket because he maintained that railroads could be made practical. All the way up from such matters to philosophies about life’s meaning, the skeptics have always derided the believers. But how often the skeptics have been mistaken!

In a generation like this, with its desperate needs and indispensable ventures of faith and endeavor, I should hate to make a fool of myself by being credulous. But I should hate even more to be found among those who have made fools of themselves through skepticism and disbelief. As for me, I bet my life that God is.

Cordially yours,

Dear Mr. Brown:

In reply to your letter let me say first that I am especially interested in what you write because, in spite of the so-called "religious boom" now widely advertised, your statements represent a not uncommon attitude. You are going to give up religion. You find the idea of a good God, revealed in Jesus Christ, intellectually indigestible in the face of the staggering mystery of this vast universe. The new space age is making the cosmos more mysterious than ever, so that you would agree, I take it, with Charles Darwin’s remark that all our knowledge "is something like an old hen’s knowledge of a forty-acre field, in one corner of which she happens to be scratching." You have tried to retain your Christian faith but the insoluble mystery of life in this huge and often dreadful universe has swamped it.

You propose to live a good life, to be a decent character and a useful citizen. That is to say, you are planning to be what is technically called a "nontheistic humanist." No more religion for me, you say; I will live by the golden rule, and that is enough. Since you are in college I suspect that some of your professors have encouraged this attitude, and I appreciate the honor you do me in asking for my advice.

I, too, am fairly stunned by the mystery of this universe. Some people seem to think that science is clearing up the mystery, but a cosmos in which we are told that it would take 250,000 years to count the atoms in a pinhead has not been noticeably simplified. And when one turns from pinheads to stars, what meaningful explanation can one hope to find for those unimaginable distances? You are right about the unfathomable mystery of the universe. And then man appears -- this "forked Radish with a head fantastically carved" -- and makes the puzzling enigma all the more difficult to explain. No wonder a Negro preacher bewailed his failure to "unscrew the unscrutable!"

So you propose to give up religion -- faith in mind behind the universe, purpose running through it, worth-while destiny ahead of it, with man not an accident of the dust but a child of the Eternal Spirit -- and to content yourself simply with goodness. Friend, haven’t you forgotten something: that goodness is the most mysterious thing in this mysterious universe? How on earth did that ever get here? Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote a long paragraph about the strange riddle of human life. He began by exclaiming, "What a monstrous spectre is this man," and then went on to describe the weird, uncanny aspects of our existence, but when he came to his climax, to the most incredible thing in man’s experience, he wrote this:

Well, isn’t Stevenson right? When one turns away from religion to goodness, far from escaping mystery, one confronts the most mysterious factor in human experience.

I can imagine some ministers saying, in answer to your letter, that you are wrong because no one can be good unless he is first of all religious. I am not saying that. I am saying that when you face genuine goodness, whether in a believer or an unbeliever, you run headlong into life’s deepest mystery and into all the basic questions of religion. Beauty and integrity of character, Dr. Schweitzer’s self-sacrificial dedication, Helen Keller’s indomitable courage, supremely the life and quality and influence of Jesus -- that is not simple. Or, even in us ordinary mortals, the sense of duty which made Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn say that conscience "takes up more room than all the rest of a person’s insides" -- that is not simple. That demands an explanation, and in the long run, if you really think it through, you have to choose between two explanations.

One is that goodness is an accident in a material universe with no mind behind it, no purpose running through it, and with nothing to account for it except protons and neutrons going it blind -- the cosmos itself a "gigantic accident consequent upon an infinite succession of happy flukes." The other explanation is that goodness is not an accident, but a revelation, a disclosure of something everlastingly so, light from a central sun, living water from an eternal fountain. As the New Testament puts it: "He who does good is of God."

That first explanation seems to me incredible. A magician may get rabbits out of a hat, but no magician can ever get a character like Christ from the mere fortuitous play of atoms, any more than he can toss type into the air and have it fall by physical gravitation into the score of Handel’s Messiah. It takes more than physical accident to produce integrity of character, fidelity in friendship, sacrifice in service, courage and sportsmanship in difficulty, genuine goodness rising at times to great heights of moral heroism.

When, therefore, you write me that you are giving up God and are going to content yourself with goodness, I am sure that you are oversimplifying the matter. You still have the universe on your hands. You still face the question that will not down: Is a good life the chance product of a merely physical cosmos or is it a revelation of the Eternal?

I wish I knew more than your letter tells me about why you are getting rid of your religion. There is plenty of intellectually and morally bad religion that you may well get rid of. I am told that Gandhi was once asked to name the greatest enemy Christ faces in the modern world, and after a moment’s pause he answered, "Christianity." That is rather rough, but we Christians would do well to face up to the truth in it. It may be that religious faith has been presented to you in terms that have insulted your intelligence and disgusted your conscience. All right! Get rid of that! But if you are going out for a good character, remember that goodness -- Christ’s, for example -- raises the basic question in one’s philosophy of life: Is goodness an accident or a revelation? On one side you have Tolstoi saying, "Where love is, there God is also"; and on the other side is Joseph Wood Krutch, one of the finest nontheistic humanists of our time, who, seeing in goodness no revelation of the Eternal, says about man, "There is no reason to suppose that his own life has any more meaning than the life of the humblest insect that crawls from one annihilation to another." I hope that in the end you will find yourself on Tolstoi’s side.

You are a young man and I am now in my eighties. You write about living the good life as though you could blow on your hands and do it. That is not my experience. Let me tell you some aspects of the good life that do not seem to me at all simple.

A good life involves a constant and sometimes devastating struggle against temptation. In France during the First World War a young American officer came to me with this account of his problem. "At home," he said, "I had never visited a brothel, but here in France with my fellow officers I have gone twice to look on. The first time I hated it; the second time I tolerated it; and I know that were I to go again I would participate in it, and so, before I went, I thought I would have a talk with you." The good life simple and easy? Read the newspapers and see! Or indulge in a little introspection and watch this strange spectacle of evil, inviting you, alluring you, while over against it a haunting, protesting good stands athwart your desire to let yourself go.

Right living in this kind of world is a challenging affair. It costs self-discipline, self-sacrifice, self-control, courage to refuse conformity and to stand up against popular wrongs. During the Civil War a Yankee commodore was put in charge of a blockade on the Mississippi, with strict orders to allow no cotton to pass down the river. Some speculators tried to release their cotton by bribing the commodore. They visited him at his headquarters and promised him a price to let two barges through. Without looking up from his desk he refused. They raised the price and he answered with a sharp "No!" Then they raised it again, making the bribe a large one, and the commodore leaped from his chair, seized his tempter by the collar and threw him out the door. "Out with you!" he shouted. "You are getting too near my price!"

I do not know what your moral problems are, but I am sure that you have a lot of them, like all the rest of us, and that sometimes your tempters get too near your price. For myself I am thankful that, in trying to live a good life, I do not have to picture myself in a universe with no intelligence behind it, no purpose running through it, no ultimate meaning in it, no available resources of eternal goodness to back me up.

To go further, goodness is not only a matter of right action but of bravely enduring and surmounting trouble. Abraham Lincoln’s greatness of character came out when catastrophe faced him, when he was steady in a shaken time, magnanimous in a vindictive time, when the worse the situation became the more of a man he proved himself to be. One way or another it is true with all of us that the ultimate test of character comes when trouble comes, when some battering shock befalls us and the question presented to our goodness is not so much whether we will do a right deed as whether we can stand up with integrity of soul under what life does to us.

You seem to think of Christ’s goodness in terms of his golden rule. I cannot avoid thinking of his goodness in terms of his cross. When you are as old as I am you will have seen many admirable characters, but none so moving as those who in the face of life’s tragedy and injustice, its cruelty and pain, have revealed such greatness of soul that they have become the world’s saints and saviors. Goodness is not merely a matter of morals -- it is a matter of morale. Take Booker T. Washington, for example --"Born a slave, lived a servant, died a king." Is that simple?

That kind of goodness does not naturally lead one to say, I will drop religion and be good. At any rate, it rather drives me to seek a religion such as Professor Royce of Harvard once described: "Faith is the soul’s insight or discovery of some reality that enables a man to stand anything that can happen to him in the universe."

Furthermore, goodness always involves recovery from moral failure. Sin isn’t just a word; it is a stupendous fact in every life, and all of us face crises in our experience when we need to repent, to be forgiven, to be "transformed by the renewing of our minds." Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son applies, one way or another, to every one of us. That boy started by saying, "Give me" -- "Give me the share of property that falls to me" -- but when he came back from the far country, humiliated and penitent, he had changed his tune. "Make me," he said to his father, "Make me as one of your hired servants," only make me different from what I have been. Staging a comeback like that is about the toughest assignment that a man can face. It involves repentance, confession, forgiveness, restitution, reconciliation.

You see what I am trying to say. A good life is not simple -- especially when one has done something that makes a long uphill climb necessary, if one is to recover rectitude and integrity. I have seen many magnificent comebacks from moral abysses --alcoholism, vice, criminality, or what-you-will -- but I never saw one that did not involve a recovery of faith in God.

Finally a genuinely good life involves going all out for worthwhile social causes, and trying to leave this world a little better because you were born into it. Look at this world that you are about to improve with your goodness! A child in school was asked by the teacher to tell the shape of the earth, and he answered, "My father says it’s in the worst shape it ever was." Certainly its racial prejudice, its insane trust in violence, its appalling criminality, its possible misuse of nuclear power to commit racial suicide, make being effectively good enough to save the world no simple matter.

Gilbert Chesterton once said that we can tell the quality of any idea by its useableness as an oath to swear by, and that the real trouble with ethics minus religion is revealed in a crisis when all that a man can say is "Oh, my goodness!" Picture this desperately needy world, with all its mountainous problems, and then picture a man going out to save it, with nothing to swear by except "Oh, my goodness!" No! That man needs more than ethics; he needs a philosophy of life that will put sense, meaning, hope, into his existence.

What makes one sure of this is the way the atheists themselves describe their outlook on man’s life. Theodore Dreiser called man "a parasite infesting the epidermis of a midge among the planets." H. L. Mencken described man as "a local disease of the cosmos, a kind of pestiferous eczema." And even Bertrand Russell, one of the noblest of our nontheistic humanists, says that man’s life is "a curious accident in a backwater." Are you going out to help save the world with that kind of philosophy and with nothing you can swear by except "Oh, my goodness"? Someone once said that the "simple gospel" is not so simple as some simple people think it is. I would say the same about goodness.

From the tone of your letter I am sure that you will not stop where you are. You are not the first college student to give up religion. Here is a youth who called himself an atheist. He rebelled against his inherited religion so vehemently that once when his family took him to church he made a disturbance and was publicly rebuked. Who was that youth? You never would guess, unless by chance you knew. That was Robert Browning. Not Robert Browning who afterward wrote,

Yes, that Robert Browning.

So, I am hoping that you too will come through to a faith that will alike create and sustain the goodness you dream of.

Cordially yours,

Ted Brown, to whom the letters in this book are addressed, is, of course, a fictional character. As the familiar disclaimer puts it, any resemblance between him and any living person is coincidental. In a deeper sense, however, he is far from being fictional; I have corresponded with men and women like him for many years, and have spent countless hours in personal conference with them.

Like anyone with a radio ministry over an international network I received hundreds of thousands of letters from all over the world and, whenever they presented important questions about religious faith and practice, I answered them. When, therefore, Ted Brown began to take shape in my imagination and I started writing letters, designed to help him in his religious perplexities, I found myself very much at home, and this book is the consequence.

The book will be misunderstood if it is pictured as an endeavor to answer the religious questions of every sort of young person. On the contrary, Ted Brown is a distinct personality. He comes from the background of a religious home; he is seriously trying to work out an intelligent philosophy of life; he is sensitive to spiritual values; and he seeks a vocation where he can make the most of his best for the sake of others. Many young people are obviously of another type; some of Ted’s beatnik contemporaries, for example, would doubtless call him a "square"; but it is to this particular and worthwhile kind of person that these letters are addressed. There are more like him than some people suspect, and they are asking questions which, far from being youthfully immature, are being asked also by some octogenarians whom I know.

I owe my family a large debt of gratitude for their encouragement, reassuring me that the questions I perceived troubling Ted Brown are present-day problems. My two grandchildren, now in college, have been especially helpful in that regard. And once again I must express my cordial thanks to my very able secretary, Mrs. Dorothy Noyes, for her patient and efficient co-operation.

H. E. F.