The powers possessed
by the Gods of the faithful are awesome. They evoke feelings of
reverence in the minds of their devotees. To prevent these forces
being used against the believers themselves, the Gods must be
propitiated. So services of worship of the unknowable Gods are
developed and permeate the whole of life. By verbal expression of
man's insignificance in the mind of God, of his weakness in the
face of the Almighty, and of other comparisons, the faithful places
the unknowable in a position from which it no longer threatens his
life. He has manipulated it so that it is powerless to harm
him.
This process of
defusing the unknowable was evidently essential in the
pre-scientific age when man felt so much more at the mercy of the
natural elements. But it is surprising to find it still practised
so extensively when he has the weapons of the technological
revolution in his hands. These weapons evidently have failed to
neutralize the threat of the unknown.
However hard we try
the inexplicable will not disappear. It will always loom large in
our lives, and can only be propitiated by belief in the
supernatural unless we are prepared to look it full in the face and
square up to what precisely is strange, what cannot be explained.
In doing this we have to reject our preconceived notions and throw
away the security of a particular position of faith. We must bring
to our attack on the unknown all the knowledge of the past and of
the present, and all of the hopes of the future. Only then can we
begin to gain any understanding at all of the impossible
surrounding us. Not that we may get very far, but even a step or
two into the gloom of the unknown could be worth a million miles
travelled with the blinkers of faith over our eyes.
