28o Science Religion and Reality 



5. The Factors of Experience 



Our discussion so far has tended to show that, whether this 

 environment be real or not, rehgion is an affirmation of what we 

 may call broadly the supernatural, and that its quality is determined 

 by this outward reference and not by any particular kind of 

 subjective feeling or attitude, while its validity wholly depends on 

 whether such an invisible world exist or not. Now this would 

 seem to bring us so near to the Rationalist view of religion, as a 

 matter of evidences for the existence of God, providence, and 

 immortality, that the difference might not seem worth discussing. 

 Even where difference does exist, the advantage may appear to be 

 on the side of a theory which states what its supernatural is and 

 establishes the existence of it by inference from the natural. And 

 undoubtedly we have in its insistence that the essential question 

 about religion concerns its truth, the reason why the rationalist 

 view of religion has been so widely held and why it endures to this 

 day, for unless its object is real, nay, the ultimate reality, religion 

 is a vain and most unnecessarily distressing illusion. Moreover, 

 Rationalism was right in insisting that this question may not be 

 evaded, and also that we may not escape the demand to answer it 

 for ourselves. 



But, while men are religious according as the world which 

 religion affirms is, by their own knowledge, the ultimate reality for 

 them, it is equally certain that religion is not a matter of evidence 

 from nature, or life, or moral principles, and that men are not 

 religious as they reason or even reason cogently. Most religions 

 have held some belief in God, but the religious element in the 

 belief has not been an inference from the order of the world ; 

 usually they have believed in a providential order, but the religious 

 element of it has not been a deduction from the happy ordering of 

 our existence ; with few exceptions they have held the hope of 

 personal immortality, but never, religiously at least, on an argument 

 about a j uster reward than this world provides. 



Rationalism proceeded on the assumption that the world with 

 which religion was concerned needed to be proved, and this by 

 evidence not depending on itself. Religion came so badly through 

 the test that the supernatural seemed reduced to the shadow of 

 a shade, leaving naturalism triumphant through pure lack of a 

 rival. Then naturalism was taken to be unchallenged as the 



