Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thoughtWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thought
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Civilization; Communication and traffic; Social prediction; Twentieth century -- Forecasts
But choice, the antagonism
of good and evil, just as much as the formulation of things in space and
time, is merely a limiting condition of human being, and in the thought
of God as we conceive of Him in the light of faith, this antagonism
vanishes. God is no moralist, God is no partisan; He comprehends and
cannot be comprehended, and our business is only with so much of His
purpose as centres on our individual wills.
So, or in some such phrases, I believe, these men of the New Republic
will formulate their relationship to God. They will live to serve this
purpose that presents Him, without presumption and without fear. For the
same spacious faith that will render the idea of airing their egotisms
in God's presence through prayer, or of any such quite personal
intimacy, absurd, will render the idea of an irascible and punitive
Deity ridiculous and incredible....
The men of the New Republic will hold and understand quite clearly the
doctrine that in the real world of man's experience, there is Free Will.
They will understand that constantly, as a very condition of his
existence, man is exercising choice between alternatives, and that a
conflict between motives that have different moral values constantly
arises. That conflict between Predestination and Free Will, which is so
puzzling to untrained minds, will not exist for them. They will know
that in the real world of sensory experience, will is free, just as new
sprung grass is green, wood hard, ice cold, and toothache painful. In
the abstract world of reasoning science there is no green, no colour at
all, but certain lengths of vibration; no hardness, but a certain
reaction of molecules; no cold and no pain, but certain molecular
consequences in the nerves that reach the misinterpreting mind. In the
abstract world of reasoning science, moreover, there is a rigid and
inevitable sequence of cause and effect; every act of man could be
foretold to its uttermost detail, if only we knew him and all his
circumstances fully; in the abstract world of reasoned science all
things exist now potentially down to the last moment of infinite time.
But the human will does not exist in the abstract world of reasoned
science, in the world of atoms and vibrations, that rigidly predestinate
scheme of things in space and time. The human will exists in this world
of men and women, in this world where the grass is green and desire
beckons and the choice is often so wide and clear between the sense of
what is desirable and what is more widely and remotely right. In this
world of sense and the daily life, these men will believe with an
absolute conviction, that there is free will and a personal moral
responsibility in relation to that indistinctly seen purpose which is
the sufficient revelation of God to them so far as this sphere of being
goes....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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