18 MARCH 1938, Page 13

Under Thirty Page

WHY I AM NOT A CHRISTIAN-I

[The writer is an Oxford graduate, aged 24. Tke quotation with which she opens is from an article by Dr. Edwyn Bevan, who will reply next week] " According to Christian belief, the living Christ Himself is continually through His Spirit in contact with the minds of those who yield themselves to Him."

WHAT in the world, I wondered, as I put down The Spectator, a few weeks ago, do words like these mean ? Had I no imagination ? Was I frantically stupid ? Or were they really, as I felt, meaningless ? The article was a serious one, and its author an eminent authority on the Christian religion in whose words it was certainly not absurd to look for meaning. But the more I tried, the more I was sure that for me at any rate they had none. For I could not think of any observations which would lead me to accept them as being true or to reject them as being false. How could I verify that there is such a person as Christ, that he is living, that he has a " spirit," or that he is continually (or, indeed, ever) in contact with the minds of those who yield themselves to Him ? The writer might adduce various proofs. He might say that there was good in the world and that this is evidence of the existence of Christ. This, I would reply, would only be so if we agreed on arbitrary grounds to regard the manifestations of certain qualities, as, for instance, love, as manifestations of the personality of the Divinity. But I can see no reason for doing so, and anyway he would argue that the grounds were not arbitrary. Or he might simply say that he knew there was a Christ, that to him it was as certain as that there was a table in the room. And I would not deny that the statement may be emotionally significant to the writer. But what I do contend is that it i; not literally significant to any one else. For no one else can know how to verify the proposition that it purports to express.

It would be absurd, of course, to suggest that there are not such things as religious or mystical experiences. But the expounders of the Christian faith claim more for their religion than this, more, that is, than that it tells one certain facts about the minds Of religious or mystical people. They claim, as I understand them, that the intuitive knowledge of these people reveals truths which have objective validity. They do not merely believe that God exists subjectively for them, as the beauty of a landscape for instance exists for an artist who can perceive it ; they believe that he exists objectively for everyone, and that though He is admittedly not discovered or perceived by many people, he is yet always there capable of being discovered or perceived if they open their eyes (or souls) and look.

• But in fact it seems to me that theists and mystics do not give one any information about the external world. All they do is to give one indirect information about the condition of their own minds. I cannot, for instance, think of any defini- tion of the word " soul " which Christians would accept which would enable one to verify in principle the proposition that there is a soul. I say verify " in principle," for it is not necessary for a proposition to be significant for it to be verifiable in practice. The proposition that there are bears in the Caucasus is verifiable in principle by a crippled woman in England who cannot leave her bed, for she knows, or could know, what observations would lead her to acecpt the proposition as being true or reject it as being false, and she merely cannot decide whether it is true or false because she cannot move from her bed. But when a man tells me he believes in God, and I ask him why, the kind of evidence he adduces seems to me no more to prove there is a God than that there is not one. Somewhere in the argument one is asked to take something on faith, to accept something which cannot be verified. And no logical man who looks for meaning in words can do this. Statements about the soul, a transcendent God, assertions of the nature of " there is an after life " appear to me therefore to be meaningless. They are not false as the Atheist would say, but meaningless. They simply cannot be valid or invalid. To demand a criterion of verifiability for any proposition does not mean one believes there is such a thing as conclusive verifiability. No proposition other than a tautology can possibly be anything more than a probable hypothesis. But it is not possible for experience to render even possible most of the propositions of a theist. And our theists themselves corroborate this. Again and again one hears them say that the nature of God is a mystery, which transcends human understanding. To be asked to believe a mystery, to take something on faith, to accept the unverifiable seems to me nothing less than an insult.

What has been said above of religious concepts applies also, I think, to ethical and aesthetic ones. They arc ur.- analysable, for there is no criterion by which one can test the validity of the judgements in which they occur. When a man says : " You are noble to love your enemy," or " X has painted a beautiful picture," he is not saying any more than that you love your enemy and that he approves, and that X has painted a picture and that he likes it. The expression of the feelings of the speaker add nothing to the factual content of the sentences. If therefore he generalises and says that to love one's enemies is noble, he is not producing a sentence that has any literal meaning. He, and any man who disagrees with him, will only be expressing their moral sentiments. So that there is no sense in asking which of 'hem is right. For neither of them is asserting a genuine proposition.

Faced with the fact that they have religious experiences, that they have come somehow to believe that there is a Gcd and that their prayers are at times answered, but incapable of proving to the incredulous man that this God has any universal validity, theists have had to take refuge in claiming for their religions an " absolute " validity which is mys- teriously independent of ordinary sense-experience. The " person " who is said to control the material world is not himself located in it ; he is held to be Superior to the empirical world and so outside it ; and he is endowed with super-empirical attribet:s. But the notion of a person whose essential attributes are non-empirical is not an intelligible notion at all.

In saying this I do not of course wish to attack Christianity or the Church in particular, but merely to draw attention to what appears to me to be the nature of many of the religious, ethical and aesthetic statements that are made. This is not to deny that there may not be much to recommend the ethical code of Christianity as applied to practical life. On the whole, for instance, more happiness is probably created by the dissemination of love than of hate. But everyone can conceive of circumstances when they would be glad of a little less erosive, undiscriminating affection and there are of course persons who actually love being persecuted. One might say that one means by " loving " " giving pleasure," whatever form that may take, but this is certainly not the usual meaning given to the word by Christians. However much, therefore, one accepts Christianity's system of ethics on prac- tical grounds, or admires the lives of individual believers, I cannot see how one can be led to think that there is meaning in statements which have no factual or literal significance. It is for these reasons that I am not a Christian.