What sort of a God is it that Man dreams about? Is it the god of Cumulative Selection, or survival of the fittest, a god who praises virility and scorns effeminate sentimentality? No! The God of Amos was a God of Righteousness. The God of Hosea was a God of loving kindness, and of reconciliation with a wife who had gone badly astray. The God of Zephaniah was a God who gave widows and orphans equity, but the fat sheep of the House of Israel who elbowed others out of the way would receive Justice (which in those days meant execution). Not what you would expect at all in a mechanical Universe, to have its heroes threatened with the gallows.
“Who told thee that thou wast naked?” The writer of that lovely story had the imagination to grasp that you do not pluck the emotion of shame out of the air. You need to have sinned, or to have thought that you had sinned, before you first can appreciate shame. So in a purely mechanical world of cumulative selection, in which the apparent altruism of animals in nourishing and defending their young is actually nothing of the kind, it is an efficient and effective manifestation of survival of the fittest, where does this idea of a just and merciful God come from? Does it occur first to the under-dogs, the losers in the race for life, who would like to think they are not so pathetic after all, as compared with the Herrnvolk of the survival of the fittest? Well it reached its apotheosis in Jesus, who was anything but pathetic; he chose to die the most horrible death, to teach others that his life was the way to live. How does this idea make its appearance in a wholly mechanical world, dedicated to natural selection and survival of the fittest? It was the utter defiance of a world of creeping and disloyal servitude to an occupying power; perhaps faintly mirrored in the female animal’s willingness to fight and die to protect her young. Yet all this is mechanical; and any feelings of heroism are delusion in those who sacrifice themselves, and fantasy in those who look on. Well, maybe these thoughts did first occur in the minds of the under-dogs; but it still does not answer the question how these thoughts ever arose in a purely mechanical and meaningless world? Was Gethsemane a mere ritual, with the actions and the agony merely dictated by the genes of those present? If the mechanism of the body is mechanical, the mechanism of the mind must be too; for if the experience that mind influences matter, which we all have, is genuine, and not illusion, then the moment animals and men learn to think, their bodies break free of their servitude to mechanics. But if the mechanism of the body is truly mechanical, that of the mind must be too. And if the mind is not free to think, then it is all Marshall Saxe’s dream anyway; and there is no reality in thought, in matter, in experience, or in anything else. You do not normally pluck figs from thistles, nor sublime structures of thought from will-o-the-wisps; but perhaps we all have to learn afresh what the world is like, although if it is all mechanical, there is no point in our doing so.