To summarize, no intellectual discipline is worth much, until you have considered the unspoken and usually unconscious assumptions that underlie the attitude of mind responsible for that discipline. This is equally true for religion, science and War.
The principal idea in this book is that there is no impediment to a Christian View of Nature and the Universe, because no theory of life ever measures up to the reality of life, as we all live it in practice. Science is limited, political and military theory are limited, theology is limited; there is nothing to prevent a man or woman regarding this world as God’s creation. No need for them to do so; but nothing to stop them if they want to, neither in logic, nor in experience, nor in authority. Besides traditional authority largely vanished with the slaughter on the Somme in 1916. The authority that most people respect is that of their colleagues; professional bodies, trades unions, neighbours, churches, even criminal gangs. Few respect the State, when they regard those who run the State with contempt. And many people find the rate of change in modern society bewildering. So there is much to recommend the view that God created the Universe. Probably it is true, and that recommends it. God’s mind seeking out Man’s mind makes sense of Evolution, and provides an indirect approach to creating a better world, when the direct approach ended with the murder of Jesus. And above all, everyone has a part to play, who wants one. What more could one ask, to make sense of life?
Can I reduce what I have to say to simplicity? Whilst the inspiration for my first book was undoubtedly the forlorn love, by which I hoped to reconcile symbolically England and Germany after the War; it would be absurd for me to persuade myself that this was the inspiration throughout. No single person, however attractive their character, is going to provide the inspiration for creating a view of the entire known cosmos in the imagination. Not even Jesus could provide this inspiration. You cannot pluck him out of his Jewish society of 2000 years ago, and deposit him into our contemporary society, with its astonishing wealth of knowledge and experience; and expect a happy result. And this is the essential thing: to try to understand the situation in which we find ourselves. Clausewitz never laid down Rules for planning a campaign or conducting a battle. He sought to teach soldiers to understand the nature of War; and if they did, and if they were caught up in war, they were then in a position to decide how to act wisely. And that is what I seek to do with my Theory of Consciousness; to try to help others to appreciate the power and the limitations of the processes of the mind. What the mind can do, and what it can not do; and not be taken in by those who peddle lies.
And as far as inspiration was concerned, I accepted it from any source that offered it. So what sense was I able to make of things, once I had left the initial inspiration behind? The best sense I could make of it, was that a religion that does not help to resolve the most difficult decisions one is ever likely to have to make, namely the form of one’s relationships with other people, is largely a waste of time. “Man’s Relationship with God” has been described as “basically a study of relationships”. And I came to see that religion should help form, not just the most important relationships, but all of them.