Theological Counter-attack Tux early chapters of this book are devoted_to
a survey of the various "—isms" and philosophies, cults, scepticisms and agnosticisms, which have sprung up in , the void left where organized religion seems to have broken down. Professor Radhakrishnan don not either minimize the breakdown or belittle the substitutes. The present religious or, rather, anti- religious unrest is world-wide, and is caused " as much by tai moral ineffectiveness of religion, its failure to promote the best life, as by the insistent pressure of new knowledge oa traditional beliefs."
After a brilliant preliminary survey of the forces of criticism, Professor Radhakrishnan launches his counter-attack, the defence and rehabilitation of religion. Contemporary criticisms of religion, however they differ in other respects, concur for the most part in one fundamental charge. Religion, they allege (both the experience itself and its object) is merely a product or expression of the human mind. Man's self-respect demanding that the universe should be fundamentally friendly and akin to compensate him for his felt insignificance in face of the vastness of Nature, employs his reason, a ready tool of his instincts, to supply him with grounds for thinking that it is in fact friendly and akin. Accordingly, he creates God in the recesses of his own unconsciousness and then projects Him into the world outside. The spiritual values of truth, goodness and beauty and the personal deity in which according to the religions they culminate are pictures projected by the mind of man upon the empty canvas of an indifferent universe. The study of religion tells us much of the nature of those who believe in it ; of the nature of things it can tell us nothing. Religion, in fact, is merely a brand of psychology. So the modern critics. •
Professor Radhakrishnan's answer takes two forms. First, let us suppose that it is true that the world purpose and the world order which religion asserts are created and projected by ourselves. Are not we ourselves part of the world ? Let it be granted that our minds have developed by natural pro- cesses from cruder forms of life, that they are grounded in Nature. Is it, then, likely that their most deep-seated inti- mations should belie Nature ? Hence, if it is a universal human instinct to believe that truth and goodness and beauty are real values and to postulate a God to unify them, there must be something in the universe to guarantee the fulfilment of that instinct. You cannot say both " our minds have developed as part of the world process," and " our minds tell us nothing about the world process." " The interaction of self and the universe," as Professor Radhakrishnan puts it, " has given rise to these aspirations which are their joint products." It is not reasonable then to hold that the aspirations reflect only the self.
Secondly, there is no ground for saying that the world which our spiritual self affirms is unreal in some sense in which the world which our perceiving self affirms is real. Psychologically religious experience is no less convincing a testimony to the otherness which we experience than sense perception. " To
say that our sense perceptions answer to reality, while spiritual intuitions do not, is for psychology a gratuitous assumption."
Moreover, hifiv much do- we really 'know of the physical world ? The physicist attempts to account for the appearance of matter by hypotheses such as those of the electron and the proton. But these, it is becoming increasingly apparent, are only symbols of the nature of a reality of which it is impossible to form any picture. The formulae of physical science are simply hypotheses to account for the fact that we have the experiences that we do have. The basis of religious experience is not essentially different. The idea of God, like the concepts of physics, is an interpretation of experience which may be— which probably is—no more like the reality than is the current idea of the electron. But it is not, therefore, to be dismissed as a figment of the human mind, merely because it is the closest picture which the human mind can frame of a reality which transcends it. Thus, " the creeds of religion correspond to the theories of science."
So much by way of rebuttal of the modern critics. What of Professor Radhakrishnan's own position ? Religion is obviously an ambiguous word ; it covers a variety of meanings. It has, he points out, " been identified with feeling, emotion and sentiment, instinct, cult and ritual, perception, belief and faith." All these views, he holds, " are right in what they affirm, though wrong in what they deny," for religion is all these things and more than them all. It is consciousness of the value in the universe, but, more than mere consciousness, it is enjoyment of value as well ; it is knowledge of the reality of the universe, but, more than mere knowledge, it is worship of and reverence for the reality known. What, then, is its essence ?
First it is a quest, the quest for the reality of the universe. Secondly, it is a unique experience of the human mind, which is its consciousness of that reality. Thirdly, it is a freeing, in the light of this experience, of the soul of man from the thousand and one petty needs and desires which form its normal preoccupation. Fourthly, it is an integrating ; it integrates all the faculties and energies of the personality in response to reality conceived and viewed as a whole ; " it is the reaction of the whole man to the whole reality." It is only when a human being is integrated in this way that he can be said to function spiritually, spiritual life being just that inte- grated life of the whole man which religion effects.
This is the position which, in the later chapters, is developed in a passionate affirmation of the universe as at once the expression and the creation of a personal God who is Himself an aspect of an Absolute which transcends Him.
I have touched upon only a few of the points raised in these lectures ; but I have said enough to show the compelling interest of the book. Professor Radhakrishnan possesses the rare gift of being able to make righteousness readable, and I know of no work which, while so fairly and crisply presenting the modern criticisms of religion, presents also with such an eloquence of passionate conviction the modern reply. The result is one of the most profoundly moving religious books
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