The problems of Religion then all centre round conduct. Whether you are thinking of this world or the next, today’s answers centre round how you behave, how you should treat other people. Even if you go back to St. Paul’s “justification by faith” (as opposed to works), which was the cornerstone of Luther’s Reformation, faith must still manifest itself in “works” or action, otherwise faith becomes hypocrisy. So conduct is what matters; how then should one behave, both as regards God, if you believe in Him, and as regards the State, which you must obey unless you want to get involved with the criminal law? This involves considering men’s frames of mind, because these influence, and largely control, conduct.
To a dispassionate person, it might seem insane that men should hate each other, and kill each other, because they have different frames of mind, and hold different things sacred. But the trouble is that a man’s predominant frame of mind influences all his conduct, and dictates a good deal of it. At first sight it might not seem to matter that Science sees the Cosmos as a whole; but we all view our planet quite differently since Yuri Gargarin circled the earth in his sputnik. Similarly at first sight it might not seem to matter if I regard space as absolute, filled with a three-dimensional grid reference like an ordinance survey map, and the sun at the centre of it. But if modern science tells me that this does not conform to reality, because it is meaningless to think of anything being at rest in space, it undermines my certainty of life. It becomes tempting to say, “Everything is relative”. And indeed today in the C.of E. anything goes; but it was not always so. People used to think that religion provided certainty, but no longer. The uncertainty is compounded when I remember that in Jenkins and White, the standard student’s textbook on light, there was a footnote that somebody had performed the Michelson-Morley experiment more accurately, and discovered we were travelling through space with an absolute velocity of thousands of mile per second, much more than the experimental error. So Einstein may have to be revised; but for the moment he holds the field. On what, or on whom then, can we rely?
Some people will find the very small things of science more disturbing, than the very large. The little electron is indistinguishable from any other electron, and curiously has exactly the same charge as every other electron. Were it not so, the elementary bonding between atoms would not be possible; and complicated structures like human beings would literally fall apart, into a heap of atomic dust. Are not humans, in the modern world, rather like electrons; each one virtually a replica of every other one, and none having lasting significance, at least not in their own eyes? Do not many people nowadays get lost in the fashion of consumerism, because it is the only way they feel they can give momentary significance to their lives?