THE NEW DIVINITY .sx Sir Julian Huxley .sx 'WHY ARE these strange souls born everywhere today , with hearts that Christianity cannot satisfy ?sx ' , asked W. B. Yeats .sx It is certainly a fact that Christianity does not , and I would add cannot , satisfy an increasing number of people throughout the West ; and it does not and cannot do so because it is a particular brand of religion which is no longer related or relevant to the facts of existence as revealed by the march of events and the growth of knowledge .sx But first of all we must ask what we mean by a religion .sx A religion is an organ of man in society which helps him to cope with the problems of nature and his destiny- his place and role in the universe .sx It always involves the sense of sacredness or mystery and of participation in a continuing enterprise ; it is always concerned with the problem of good and evil and with what transcends the individual self and the immediate and present facts of every day .sx It always has some framework of beliefs , some code of ethics , and some system of expression- what are usually called a theology , a morality , and a ritual .sx When we look closely we find that the beliefs largely determine both the nature of the moral code and the form of the ritual .sx The theological framework on which Christianity is supported includes as its centre the basic belief of all theistic religions- belief in the supernatural and in the existence of a god or gods , supernatural beings endowed with properties of knowing , feeling and willing akin to those of a human personality .sx In Christian theology , God is a being who created the world and man at a definite date in the past ( until recently specified as 4004 B.C. ) and in essentially the same form they have today ; a ruler capable of producing miracles and of influencing natural events , including events in human minds , and conversely of being influenced by man's prayers and responding to them .sx Christianity believes in a last judgment by God at a definite but unspecified future date .sx It believes in an eternal life after death in a supernatural realm , and makes salvation through belief its central aim .sx It believes in the fall of man and original sin , that its code of morals has been commanded by God , and that all mankind is descended from a single couple .sx It asserts a partial polytheism in the doctrine of the Trinity , and gives full rein to what the students of comparative religion call polydaimonism by its belief in angels , saints and the Virgin , and their power to grant human prayers .sx Officially it still believes in hell and in the Devil and other evil supernatural beings , though these beliefs are rapidly fading .sx It is based on a belief in divine revelation and in the historical reality of supernatural events such as the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus as the son of the first person of the Trinity .sx It claims or assumes that all other religions are false and that only Christianity ( or only one brand of Christianity ) is true .sx It assumes that the earth occupies a central position in the divine scheme of things and that , though God is believed to be omnipotent , omniscient and omnibenevolent , he has a special concern with man's salvation .sx This system of beliefs is quite unacceptable in the world of today .sx It is contradicted , as a whole and in detail , by our extended knowledge of the cosmos , of the solar system , of our own planet , of our own species , and of our individual selves .sx Christianity is dogmatic , dualistic and essentially geocentric .sx It is based on a vision of reality which sees the universe as static , short-lived , small , and ruled by a supernatural personal being .sx The vision we now possess , thanks to the patient and imaginative labours of thousands of physicists , chemists , biologists , psychologists , anthropologists , archaeologists , historians and humanists , is incommensurable with it .sx In the light of this new vision , our picture of reality becomes unitary , temporally and spatially of almost inconceivable vastness , dynamic , and constantly transforming itself through the operation of its own inherent properties .sx It is also scientific , in the sense of being based on established knowledge , and accordingly non-dogmatic , basically self-correcting , and itself evolving .sx Its keynote , the central concept to which all its details are related , is evolution .sx Let me try to outline this new vision as briefly as possible .sx On the basis of our present understanding , all reality is in a perfectly valid sense one universal process of evolution .sx The single process occurs in three phases- first , the inorganic or cosmic , operating by physical and to a limited extent chemical interaction , and leading to the production of such organizations of matter as nebulae , stars , and solar systems ; in our galaxy this phase has been going on for at least six billion years .sx In the rare places where matter has become self-reproducing , the inorganic has been succeeded by the organic or biological phase ; this operates primarily by the ordering agency we call natural selection , and leads to the production of increasingly varied and increasingly higher organizations of matter , such as flowers , insects , cuttlefish , and vertebrates , and to the emergence of mind and increasingly higher organizations of awareness .sx On our planet this has been operating for rather under three billion years .sx Finally , in what must be the extremely rare places ( we only know for certain of one ) where , to put it epigrammatically , mind has become self-reproducing through man's capacity to transmit experience and its products cumulatively , we have the human or psychosocial phase .sx This operates by the self-perpetuating but self-varying and ( within limits ) self-correcting process of cumulative learning and cumulative transmission , and leads to the evolution of increasingly varied and increasingly higher psychosocial products , such as religions , scientific concepts , labour-saving machinery , legal systems , and works of art .sx Our pre-human ancestors arrived at the threshold of the critical step to this phase around a million years ago ; but they became fully human , and psychosocial evolution began to work really effectively , only within the last few tens of millennia .sx During that short span of evolutionary time , man has not changed genetically in any significant way , and his evolution has been predominantly cultural , manifested in the evolution of his social systems , his ideas , and his technological and artistic creations .sx The new vision enlarges our future as much as our past .sx Advance in biological evolution took place through a succession of so-called dominant types- in the last four hundred million years from jawless , limbless vertebrates to fish , then through amphibians to reptiles , from reptiles to mammals , and finally to man .sx Each new dominant type is in some important way biologically more efficient than the last , so that when it breaks through to evolutionary success it multiplies and spreads at the expense of its predecessors .sx Man is the latest dominant type to arise in the evolution of this earth .sx There is no possibility of his dominant position in evolution being challenged by any existing type of creature , whether rat or ape or insect .sx All that could happen to man ( if he does not blow himself up with nuclear bombs or convert himself into a cancer of his planet by over-multiplication ) is that he could transform himself as a whole species into something new .sx He has nearly three billion years of evolution behind him , from his first pre-cellular beginnings :sx barring accidents , he has at least as much time before him to pursue his evolutionary course .sx Yeats implied , or indeed affirmed , that if the Christian God were rejected , a Savage God would take his place .sx This certainly could happen , but it need not happen , and we can be pretty sure that in the long run it will not happen .sx The new framework of ideas on which any new dominant religion will be based is at once evolutionary and humanist .sx For evolutionary humanism , gods are creations of man , not 6vice versa .sx Gods begin as hypotheses serving to account for certain phenomena of outer nature and inner experience :sx they develop into more unified theories , which purport to explain the phenomena and make them comprehensible ; and they end up by being hypostasized as supernatural personal beings capable of influencing the phenomena .sx As theology develops , the range of phenomena accounted for by the god-hypothesis is extended to cover the entire universe , and the gods become merged in God .sx However , with the development of human science and learning , this universal or absolute God becomes removed further and further back from phenomena and any control of them .sx As interpreted by the more desperately 'liberal' brands of Christianity today , he appears to the humanist as little more than the smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat , but one which is irreversibly disappearing .sx But though I believe that gods and God in any meaningful non-Pickwickian sense are destined to disappear , the stuff of divinity out of which they have grown and developed remains and will provide much of the raw material from which any new religions will be fashioned .sx This religious raw material consists in those aspects of nature and elements in experience which are usually described as divine .sx The term divine did not originally imply the existence of gods :sx on the contrary , gods were constructed to interpret man's experiences of this quality in phenomena .sx Some events and some phenomena of outer nature transcend ordinary explanation and ordinary experience .sx They inspire awe and seem mysterious , explicable only in terms of something beyond or above ordinary nature- 'super-natural' power , a 'super-human' element at work in the universe .sx Such magical , mysterious , awe-inspiring , divinity-suggesting facts have included wholly outer phenomena like volcanic eruptions , thunder , and hurricanes ; biological phenomena such as sex and reproduction , birth , disease and death ; and also phenomena of man's inner life such as intoxication , possession , speaking with tongues , inspiration , insanity , and mystic vision .sx With the growth of knowledge most of these phenomena have ceased to be mysterious so far as rational or scientific inexplicability is concerned .sx But there remains the fundamental mystery of existence , and in particular the existence of mind .sx Our knowledge of physics and chemistry , physiology and neurology does not account for the basic fact of subjective experience , though it helps us to understand its workings .sx The stark fact of mind sticks in the throat of pure rationalism and reductionist materialism .sx However , it remains true that many phenomena are charged with a magic quality of transcendent and even compulsive power , and introduce us to a realm beyond ordinary experience .sx Such events and such experiences merit a special designation .sx For want of a better , I use the term divine , though this quality of divinity is not truly supernatural but transnatural- it grows out of ordinary nature , but transcends it .sx The divine is what man finds worthy of adoration , that which compels his worship :sx and during history it evolves like everything else .sx Much of every religion is aimed at the discovery and safeguarding of divinity , and seeks contact and communion with what is regarded as divine .sx A humanist-based religion must re-define divinity , strip the divine of the theistic qualities which man has anthropomorphically projected into it , search for its habitations in every aspect of existence , elicit it , and establish fruitful contact with its manifestations .sx Divinity is the chief raw material out of which gods have been fashioned .sx Today we must melt down the gods and refashion the material into new and effective agencies , enabling man to exist freely and fully on the spiritual level as well as on the material level .sx The character of all religions depends primarily on the pattern of its supporting framework of ideas , its theology in an extended sense ; and this in its turn depends on the extent and organization of human knowledge at the time .sx I feel sure that the world will see the birth of a new religion based on what I have called evolutionary humanism .sx Just how it will develop and flower no one knows- but some of its underlying beliefs are beginning to emerge , and in any case it is clear that a humanism of this sort can provide powerful religious , moral and practical motivation for life .sx