The famous author of “Narnia” was once a “shallow rationalist” but abandoned it because it had “existential deficiencies”. Access to what was logically true did not resolve the “greater questions of life”, which “focused on identity, meaning, and value”.

From his book Mere Christianity (1952)

The Franch Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin believed the world was evolving towards a mystical “Omega Point”. As an evolutionist he spent his life trying to reconcile science and religion. He believed in a personal God but God as directing the universe with loving, watchful care; and God the revealer, communicating himself to humans on the level and through the ways of intelligence.

God shall be all in all, as prophesied by St. Paul:

“The Universe fulfilling itself in a synthesis of centres in perfect conformity with the laws of union. God, the Centre of centres. In that final vision the Christian dogma culminates…perfectly coinciding with the Omega Point”:

The Phenomenon of Man (1955)

What does religion say? “It says that there’s something in human beings beyond the body and brain and that we have ways of knowing that go beyond the organism and its senses”.

Humboldt’s Gift (1975)

John Butler Yeats (father of the famous Irish poet) was living in Boston in the US in the closing years of the 19th century, and he was unimpressed:

“The Bostonians hate England intensely. That is the only interesting thing about them. I am told by everyone that it is terrible to live in Boston, it is so infernally dull. I suppose they have a good side, but I have not as yet discovered it”.

The eminent crystallographer J. D. Bernal wrote in his The Origin of Life (1967):

“Life is beginning to cease to be a mystery and becoming a cryptogram, a puzzle, a code that can be broken, a working model that…while removing most of the mysteries of life, it has not reduced in the minds of scientific biologists any of the appreciations of its complexity and beauty”. Ideas about life might need to be rethought:

The individual might die but the particles making up the individual had almost planetary immortality – in a thought similar to Zen Buddhism – would just be reconfigured.

The important thing was “the effective immortality of life itself, that is the effective immortality of genetic carrying nucleic acid molecules”.

Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) wrote best-selling detective stories (Lord Peter Wimsey, Harriet Vane, The Nine Taylors) but was just as well-known at the time for her writings and plays on religion (The Man Born to be King, for example). As I wrote in my book Debating Faith (2021):

“She was a doughty warrior who sallied forth against the heathen and the indifferent, and especially against Christianity’s supposed followers. She accused them of surrendering to the unbelieving temper and pressures of the age. Don’t be ashamed, she chided them. Speak out loudly and widely about the wonders of the Christian faith”.

“Someone once said that nobody went to live in Ballarat; you had to be committed by a magistrate.”

Jack Irish story 1996

Chesterton was a noted opponent of eugenics which was the doctrine to go to in the late 19th century, and reached its gory depths with Nazi race theory and the Holocaust.

Eugenics was the controlled breeding of humans. Positive eugenics advocated interbreeding of the “fittest” (usually white, well educated, members of the Establishment), while negative eugenics discouraged the breeding of the “unfit” (usually the poor, the “feebleminded”, habitual criminals, those lower down the evolutionary ladder). Measures proposed included sterilisation, segregation, even “elimination”.

Chesterton, a devout Catholic, attacked the eugenists for having contempt for the masses of humanity. God’s love was directed towards the poor and afflicted (“blessed are the poor”). He asked for more Christian charity and reminded people that the Bible was harsher towards the rich and powerful.

He denounced the “pseudo-science” behind categories such as “imbeciles” or “morons” , such as used in the flawed IQ tests of the day or in treatment of the mentally ill.

As GK said, we no longer burnt witches, but were increasingly punitive towards the poor, attacking the right to strike, or people’s pleasures such as drinking beer ( a favourite activity of his) or smoking. He saw capitalism as in league with eugenics, aiming to produce a plentiful supply of docile workers, getting rid of “wastage” in the system.

Eugenics also used what Orwell later called Newspeak. For example eugenists did not speak of it being necessary to kill off the old, but spoke of “euthanasia” or remedying “the burden of longevity”. They wanted to eliminate the disabled, even when they were highly intelligent (Stephen Hawkins in our day, consumptive Keats and many other geniuses).

Ever the optimist, GK hoped that humans would embrace ideals of caritas, democracy and Christianity, ideals that had not really been tried. Christianity, for example, “has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried”.

Much history written about the famous Habsburg dynasty has been written from a nationalistic perspective and that has been consistently negative. Sure the dynasty had its weaknesses and failures, and fell mainly because of “overreach” and strategic mistakes, such as a misguided push into the Balkans, which sparked World War 1.

But the Habsburgs achieved much, showing the advantages of an overarching and cosmopolitan system. Hasn’t out of control nationalism been responsible for mind-blowing world disasters, wars and civil strife? An historian of the dynasty, Benjamin Curtis, speaks of “the small minds and restrictive confines of nationalism”. A loose and largely tolerant, ethnically diverse system gives us something to think about in today’s catastrophic world.

Alec Vidler thought so. This distinguished English church historian had respect for science, even though he accepted that it was seen by some as a dissolving agent upon religious belief. Vidler had respect for science. He argued that theology had itself to blame for not keeping up with the achievements of science (including evolutionary biology). Theologians (or many of them) had simply not done the same hard work and research as scientists had done.

Nevertheless science did not have all the answers: “…there still remain mysterious depths in the whole universe and in human existence which mortal man has not fathomed”. It was the function of religion to cast light on those mysterious depths.

Christian Belief(1950).