Armed with this invaluable intellectual tool, a theory of consciousness, it may be possible to start from scratch, and consider what religion is all about, and whether one can be confident that some or all of it is true. Narrow minded lawyers say that one should not speculate; but one has to start somewhere, and as Lord Justice Ormrod said one day in the Court of Appeal, “All inferences are speculation, but some speculations are more likely than others”. So when one is sitting in one’s room, gazing at the pattern on the wallpaper, wondering about the incredible complexity of its molecular and atomic structure, or gazing out of the window at the sun or the stars in their billions of galaxies and innumerable numbers, most of which one cannot see, to think that all this was brought into being by a benign Creator is speculation. But some people would say that it was a more likely speculation than some of the other suggestions that have been proposed in recent years.
So too, when one reflects on the size and complexity of the universe, and on the fact that mortal man can neither create a tree, nor a plant, nor a flower, still less any permanent relationship with another human being, to think that this Divine Creator must be infinitely greater than mere man is speculation. But some people would say that, if He exists at all, then it is a speculation so likely to be true as to verge on certainty. And conversely, what He thinks of mortal man is speculation; but the idea that He regards those who deny his existence with amused contempt is also a speculation that verges on certainty. The Infinite, which is so great that nothing you can add to Him, or even imagine adding to Him, will increase Him at all; and nothing which you can imagine subtracting from Him will diminish Him at all, is unlikely to be bothered by the opinions of a man who is nought, or zero, in comparison.
If God exists, then the only significance that a man can find, is in a life lived in cooperation with Him, which presupposes a relationship with Him. And if God does not exist, then man’s life is like the flight of a sparrow through a lighted hall, which once out into the dark again is lost in death. It has no significance at all, save in the ever fleeing moment; and once those moments have gone, none at all, save for the evil legacy that it leaves behind. One view of evil is that men resort to it, to gain a significance which they cannot see themselves obtaining in any other way. The good that men do lives on only in the memories of those who are grateful for it; but the evil that men do lives after them for a long, long time, and that gives some men a gratifying sense of power. As Shakespeare said:-
“The evil that men do lives after them;
“The good is oft interred with their bones”.
Logically evil should not remove their sense of insignificance, when compared with creation; but it does, because it blinds men to their insignificance, so that they are able to regard themselves as at the centre of their own little world. And they like that!
“Take no thought for the morrow”, insofar as it encourages us all to lose ourselves in the ever-fleeing moment, is about the worst advice anyone could give. It encourages short-sighted decisions that blight our own future, and the future of society. It does so because a man, who is not in control of himself and his own fate to some extent, is unlikely to do society much good either. As far as I know it was again the Greeks who first sought to limit contingency or the influence of luck in human life, so as to repel the dread thought that man was just a pawn in the hands of Fate; and for the Greeks, fate was more powerful than the gods. So Plato was able to arrive at the conclusion that the philosopher led the perfect life, because he was the man who was least exposed to the vicissitudes of fortune. But alas these delightful speculations by the most intelligent of men were swept away, firstly by Alexander the Great who brilliantly put into practice everything that Clausewitz preached 2000 years later; and secondly by Jesus who provided a life so glorious that the speculative philosopher’s life seems a feeble obscurity in comparison.