It would have been far better if it had been possible to achieve this without the two wars. And I have read that if Hitler had really served his five-year sentence after the beer-hall putsch of 1923, not even he could have maintained control of the Nazi Party. And what we would have been “saved” if he had served it. In fact he only served six months in a comfortable flat in some schloss; and he did keep control. But times have moved on since then; and criminal barons can now maintain their criminal empires from prison. The crime of destroying civilization, as it existed in Europe before 1914, will have consequences for us all for hundreds of years. And one of those consequences is that religion has to be re-interpreted to accept the truth of science, and the truth of war.
But the official Church may not have much of a role to play in rebuilding society. To build a society that is of any use, you need morale; and the Church at the moment hasn’t got any. If you want to improve society, you cannot afford to reject help from any person of integrity who offers help, and maybe help from people without much integrity. The important thing is to establish a camaraderie, an esprit de corps, so as to work together.
This is particularly so in our modern society, which has become so unbelievably complicated that few people are able to do their jobs competently. The complexity is partly due to science, and partly due to the breakdown of traditional patterns of behaviour, which has necessitated the introduction of so many Rules and Regulations to replace its discipline. This incompetence ranges from an inability to protect the prerogatives of the House of Commons, the Highest Court in the Land, from an overbearing executive, through an ignorance of history; to bank clerks who are incapable of lending to legitimate businesses because they are incapable of assessing risk; to school teachers who cannot teach because they are not given the means of enforcing discipline. The list is endless. New public Acts of Parliament and their associated Statutory Regulations would keep a lawyer reading for a whole year, without him bothering about his practice. It is a madhouse! And ironically just as religion needs to incorporate the vocabulary of science, so society needs to incorporate the discipline of religion. And what better way to do this than by a vision of a world created by God, which would make clear what behaviour was acceptable in society, and what was not.
The real conflict between science and religion is the conflict between the attitude of mind of the scientist and the attitude of mind of the clergy. The scientist investigates inorganic and organic matter, deliberately leaving out of account any spiritual content which it may have; and then as often as not claims it has not got any spiritual content anyway. And may indeed end up preposterously claiming that there is no spiritual world at all, and that we are all mechanical.