YOUTH AND THE CHURCHES
SIR,—As an undergraduate of s81, may I endorse all that " Student " says about the inadequacy of the religious teaching of the Church today to satisfy the demands—and particularly the intellectual demands—of those of us who have been educated to believe that it is right to examine and question every important thing we are told, and not to accept it until our reason has endorsed the authority of tradition?
The chief intellectual difficulties (in addition to what seems to me the more trivial ones mentioned by " Student ") which seem to bar the way to acceptance of the. whole Christian faith are: the problem of evil, the problem of justice, the problem of free-will, and the problem of " what on earth (literally) does God do? " (when does He intervene ; what is His purpose, &c.?). I cannot discuss these problems here: I can only say that—for my part—all the truly astonishing ingenuity of Mr. C. S. Lewis and many other popular writers on religion has done nothing to dispel my belief that this is a series of problems which not only appear to be insoluble by any but the most elaborate and unconvincing arguments, based on hypotheses which appear to me as wholly unnatural and arti- ficial, but which also are problems solely by virtue of the set of apparently arbitrary postulates which forms the dogmatic theology of the Christian Church. And it is only natural that my reaction, like that of many others, is to escape the problems by denying the postulates.
And so, like " Student," I am left with an admiration for the Christian Ethic but no belief in the theology to which it is married. But, unlike him, I do not believe that it is necessary to think that you are fulfilling the will of a Divine Being or laying up treasure in Heaven before you can follow an ethic which you admire ; nor do I believe—what to me seems the most harmful of all the fallacies to which the Church clings— that the value of religious experience is in any way dependent on the metaphysical beliefs of those who have the experiences. But I do believe that the insistence by the Church on the permanence of this marriage between, on the one hand, a system of morals and a belief in the value of religious experience and, on the other, a two thousand years old theology and an outmoded ritual, has already had a disastrous effect, and will, unless a divorce is soon granted, eventually be fatal to the Church and all organised religion.' For it is this that keeps us away from the Church, and it is this that causes so many young people, brought up to admire the scientific attitude and encouraged by the Church to equate theology
with religion, to come to the disastrous conclusion that religion is all
" a lot of superstitious nonsense."—Yours faithfully, C. SCOTT. 8 Warwick Mansions, Cromwell Crescent, S.W.5.
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