Appetizers

Of a Scientific Religion

We were talking about the immortality of the soul. It's a topic of conversation that comes up at the end of dinner, after weather forecasts, Morocco, the financial problem, and the Decorative Arts:
I'm certain, said one guest, that there is nothing after death... And that's what reassures me perfectly.
This guest was a member of the Institute, whose profession is to monitor the stars. I'm certain, said another guest, that there is nothing after death. And that's what bothers me enormously.
He was a distinguished lawyer who makes a profession of questioning, the better to confound them, the mischievous spirits housed in a pedestal table. A third guest spoke up to say:
I agree with you... But don't you find that pagan materialism, elegant enough as long as one enjoys life, is disappointing in the brutal way of a roadblock at the end of a journey? The train has arrived at its destination; it hasn't arrived anywhere... Now, even in the materialist hypothesis, one cannot deny a universal and congenital human tendency to arrive somewhere. Nature creates nothing useless; every tendency corresponds to a goal; every germ corresponds to a fruit. Our spiritualist aspiration cannot find satisfaction in Christian idealism, childish and brutal, demanding an excessive effort of submission, an unreasonable abnegation of our reason... What is God? The guests nodded their heads, some as if to say, "I don't know," others as if to say, "Come on... you know that well." God is a spirit, a breath, a pigeon... God is a good old man with a white beard. God is a cruel, bloodthirsty, vindictive super-being, endowed with unlimited powers of espionage and a prodigious capacity for punishment. God is a Galilean conjurer suspended from a cross. God is a complete food that descends into the sinner's stomach, following a theophagic process that would seem sacrilegious to the last cannibals of Central Africa. We would have to start by adapting God to the scientific form of our knowledge; then we would have the key word of the soul and the key to immortality... There would be a formula that would fit quite well: God is a ray. There were grimaces of disappointment around the table. The divine ray? We've already been served that. You'll understand. God is an invisible radiation like the invisible radiations that carry light, sound, force, and thought. God is a wireless transmitter of divinity. In every being condenses an element of divine radiation; after the material destruction of this being, the immaterial element passes into a higher being. This is how I doubtless have within me the divine particles that were once found in a tree and in a dog; the tree and the dog have divine moments. I do not remember exactly having been a little tree and a little dog, because I was not enough tree nor enough dog to remember it. When I die, as nothing is lost and nothing is created in nature, the divine radiation that makes me valuable will pass into a being of higher value, perhaps on another planet... Until the moment when the purified ray returns to the central focus, from where it will be scattered again over the universe. It is a phenomenon analogous to the distribution of rain on earth, to the resurrection of matter that falls into dust to live again in new organisms, and to the monotonous transformation of worlds in the universe. You must agree that this religion, based on a material ideal, has the advantage of adapting to the scientific data imposed by recent revelations... Someone murmured:
"It's quite new."
But the lawyer replied ironically: "...Indeed, it is pantheism... combined with metempsychosis," added the member of the Institute.
For idealist philosophers are like doctors. Unable to invent remedies to cure the physical suffering and moral anguish of humanity, they are content to invent new words to define old diseases and old religions.

G. de La Fouchardière