Anatomy of Religion
Design and Purpose. Frederic Wood Jones, D.Sc., F.R.S., F.R.C.S. (Kegan Paul. 5s.)
IN Life and Living Professor Wood Jones has given us one of the most notable books of our time. In his present volume, written out of a wider and more catholic experience of travel, research and teaching than probably that of any other contemporary anatomist, he has summarised the evidence, as he sees it, for the existence of design and purpose in Nature, both non-living and living. He has done so, he tells us, in response to signs that he has observed in his students of a growing dissatisfaction with the orthodox teaching of the Christian Churches. At the same time he has noticed, as have many other teachers, a desire—indeed, what might be called a religious desire—for something to take its place ; and it is interesting to note in this connexion that, at a recent meeting of the Oxford Union, a resolution that " Religion offers the only way out of our present discontents " was carried by an overwhelming majority.
In Professor Wood Jones' opinion, the chief cause for this intel- lectual dissatisfaction and frustrated religious impulse is the current conception, in Western Christian theology, of an anthropomorphic or personal Deity ; and it is here, perhaps, that he has been inclined to over-estimate the extent to which this view is now held even by orthodox theologians. It is, of course, true that, amongst the reported sayings of Christianity's Founder, the human and personal word father frequently occurs. But He was commending His vision and message to a largely unlearned and patriarchal community, and, in one of the most important of His reported utterances, He also lays stress on the point that God is a Spirit, to be worshipped in spirit and truth.
Where in fact religion chiefly differs from science and philosophy, in its approach to the Cause of the universe, is in its concern as to whether human beings, as individual persons, can enter into direct communion with it by such activities open to everybody as worship, prayer and contemplation ; learn thereby anything about it ; and receive anything from it. To this all the great religions have given a positive answer. All can point to persons, learned and simple, who have had such an experience and who claim, with what has
completely satisfied them to be " knowledge," that they have ent into such an immediate relationship and been able to draw upon unseen, if unexplainable, reservoir of peace and strength. Nor the validity of these experiences be denied, without a quite scientific presumption, by such as have not themselves received or perhaps made any attempt to obtain them.
Many of these experiences have been gained in the past by whose intellectual concept of what they had approached—and some degree found—was of course quite frankly anthropomo in a now outmoded sense. And yet, even so, need something could be expressed as fatherhood necessarily be absent from Infinite Mind, of which Professor Wood Jones, on purely Kim grounds, is inclined to see evidences? And could it not be tended that " purpose " itself is an anthropomorphic concep arising out of our three dimensional view of time?
But it is the actual individual experience that is the vital to of religion ; and there would seem to be no reason why it s be denied to the younger generation of thinkers if they are pr to employ the order of activities by which it has been found in past. That they can still do this without damaging their lectual integrity Professor Wood Jones, at any rate by implica has brilliantly argued. But, if the theologians of the Chris Churches wish to recruit them into their particular fold, they, should ponder what Professor Wood Jones has to say. Mot them than perhaps he has supposed have shed the cruder con tions that he attacks. But, that being so, surely they should co revising the phraseology of their official creeds and elimina statements in which they no longer literally believe or which
do not now regard as essential. H. H. BASHFO
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