Science and Belief1

Throughout the whole period of civilization which, one is almost constrained to say, has just ended, matters of belief have been the central focus around which human life has orientated itself. We regard ourselves as the heirs of a Christian civilization, and for centuries it was accepted without question that the fundamental cultural boundary was between the Believers and the Heathen. Within each realm, the differences which divided men into more or less exclusive and often hostile groups were usually expressed in terms of belief in certain formulated doctrines. Some of the most ferocious of all wars have raged between people who considered that their most important characteristic was a belief in Catholicism or Protestantism, in the Divine Right of Kings, in Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, or some other such ideal. Many modern historians would wish to look behind the dividing lines drawn in terms of belief, and claim that one can discover other factors, usually economic in the broad sense, which separated the various groups, and of which, they argue, the consciously held beliefs were mere rationalizations couched in the fashionable religious terminology of the age. That may well be largely true; but it must still be recognized that, as far as an individual man attempted to control his own behaviour, and act as a conscious agent, it was by such beliefs that he was influenced. The religious martyrs did not, consciously, die on behalf of a rising class of entrepreneurs or bourgeois middlemen, but for points of doctrine. And even those who did not in fact believe anything deeply enough to die for it, seem for the most part to have considered beliefs as things to which it was quite proper to give such attachment, were not everyday human nature all too weak for such devotion.

In speaking of beliefs in this way, I am not, of course, referring to comparatively trivial theories concerned with the details of behaviour. A man may believe in the wisdom of the editors