In my Chapter on the Beliefs of Jesus, at the end of my Reconciliation with Science and War, I do suggest that if Jesus was the complete manifestation of the Almighty, the Creator, then he should have manifested not only the mystery of Man, but the mystery of Nature and of Titanic World Events too. If Evolution has any truth in it, the Creator must have wanted Man, a hunter-gatherer for hundreds of thousands of years, to develop civilisation, and eventually an ordered, decent, just society. And whilst the Church makes a somewhat pathetic attempt to explain the mystery of Nature, by saying that Jesus was the Word through whom all things were created; it is quite obvious from the Gospels that Jesus knew no science, and had not the faintest conception of the modern idea of Evolution. And if he did imagine Jewish society evolving into the Kingdom of God, his idea of Evolution was as remote from ours, as Democritus’s atoms are from Dalton’s Law of Multiple Proportions, or Bohr’s idea of the complementarity of waves and particles in atomic physics. I do not believe Jesus had the faintest conception of world politics, other than the stories of the Old Testament, which was his Bible. Incomparably great man that he was, if he was a man at all, he was a man of his time limited to the social and cultural world in which he grew up, as we all are. Jesus was not an original thinker; the Sermon on the Mount was taken from the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, which was written by a Pharisee one hundred years before Jesus was born. I understand that the Spirit of the writing and even some of the phrasing are identical. The forty days Jesus spent in the wilderness were wholly inadequate for him to work out a new philosophy. You need a period of three, four or even five years to think anything new. Without that apprenticeship, human thought is little better that shuffling round other people’s thoughts: rather like re-arranging the pieces of a Chinese puzzle. The forty days in the wilderness were only enough for Jesus to decide which of the existing philosophies he should embrace and proclaim. And in his proclamation, he was pre-eminent. Indeed an original thinker is often not much good at proclamation. Newton was reluctant to publish his Principia, and only did so with the encouragement of Halley. Jesus was wrong when he said a disciple is not greater than his master; often in the world of affairs a disciple overtakes his master, and in time leaves him far behind. So I have no hesitation in admitting that Heisenberg, whatever his record in the War, has in his God-World-I Triangle produced a symbolism incomparably better than my concept of the need for Jesus to reveal the mystery of Man, of Nature, and of Titanic World Events. And that being so, I felt I had to see how my thought measured up to his.
Heisenberg says that a man or woman must come to terms with the God-World-I Triangle, both as an individual and as a member of a community or country. The God-I side of the triangle is the world of religious belief, and of intimate personal friendship. Or if you do not believe in God, it is Man’s relationship to Einstein’s central order of things: the relationship of the one to the many, which the Greek philosophers argued about long ago. The World-I side is the relationship of the individual to the community in which he or she lives. The God-World side, the world of the Geo-evolution of politics, and the threat of war.
If individuals do not come to terms with the three sides of the triangle, he says, at first they develop idiosyncrasies; then if they still do not come to terms with the Triangle, they go mad, and in the end stark raving mad. Of course this is only an hypothesis; he does not produce detailed evidence to prove it, and I doubt if one ever could. But I would have thought it a fair comment that our country has gone mad, largely through the collapse of religious belief; maybe only mad North-West by North, maybe only on one point of the compass; but some of the decisions of our Law Courts in recent years, I would have thought, could only be explained on this basis. And if you think about it, if this Universe was created by the Almighty, the Creator, it is understandable that He should have decreed that anyone who ignored Him, and persisted in ignoring Him, should end up mad and in hell. Irenaeus wrote (about 180 AD) that, ‘God sustains the universe in being....He cannot be described by any of his creatures. But he is known to all of them....There is one God the Father who holds all things in being and gives being to all creation’. If that is correct, it is readily understandable that even God should eventually get tired of sustaining someone who resolutely ignores Him. And when you look up at the starry heavens at night, and at a space so vast as to be utterly beyond our comprehension, it is difficult to think it wasn’t created by somebody!