Of late, there have been attempted compromises with the idea of evolution. May not God guide the course of natural change? But this outlook meets with certain difficulties. In the first place, was the physical {42} world created? If so, it must have been the best of all possible physical worlds, or else God is either not omnipotent or not omniscient or not ideally good. And when these questions are raised, we pass immediately into a field of mere speculation. The centuries have been witnesses of disputes between advocates of different dogmas. At present, there seems to be a revival of interest in the idea of a limited and youthful deity struggling against odds to make the world livable. But God becomes a part of the universe in every sense, and so we are led to the idea that the physical world was not created but is, rather, co-existent with deity. Of course, there are many possible variations on the theme, and human ingenuity will exhaust itself in combining these possibilities in various ways. The truth is, that these theological speculations carry us nowhere. Myth and dialectical acuteness, however skillfully blended, cannot add to our genuine knowledge of the world. Instead, they create new problems of their own which cannot be settled, because there is no way of testing and verifying the various solutions. In short, the premises are at fault and must be outgrown and left behind. Our experience no longer suggests to us the idea of a supernatural agency at work, nor are we so prone to think of an act of creation some few thousands of years in the past. We have largely outgrown the mythological setting out of which theology arose, and it is tradition and the lack of a more positive view which enable it to retain for us any semblance of plausibility. There is nothing inherently irrational in the idea of creation; it simply bears witness to a looser, more personal world in which annihilation and {43} origination were familiar events, because man saw only the surface of things and was not able to follow the continuities which bind things together underneath. The principle of conservation, which is one of the grand achievements of science, is like a two-edged sword: it destroys not only the belief in an absolute annihilation but, likewise, the belief in an absolute beginning. Slowly, but surely, this new view of nature will have its effect and undermine the more naive hypothesis of a creation. The emotional reverberation of the accustomed forms of speech, reenforced by the mental habits encouraged by religion, will die out only gradually. Man is instinctively romantic and tends to dramatize the world. His favorite categories are personal, and he has a profound distaste for the impersonalism of science. Only the slow pressure of actual knowledge will lift him to a truer view of the world in which he finds himself. {44} CHAPTER IV MAGIC AND RITUAL