the new divinity . Sir Julian Huxley . why are these strange souls born everywhere today , with hearts that Christianity can not satisfy ? , asked W B Yeats . it is certainly a fact that Christianity does not , and I would add can not , satisfy an increasing number of people throughout the west ; and it does not and can not do so because it is a particular brand of religion which is no longer related or relevant to the facts of existence as revealed by the march of events and the growth of knowledge . but first of all we must ask what we mean by a religion . a religion is an organ of man in society which helps him to cope with the problems of nature and his destiny - his place and role in the universe . it always involves the sense of sacredness or mystery and of participation in a continuing enterprise ; it is always concerned with the problem of good and evil and with what transcends the individual self and the immediate and present facts of every day . it always has some framework of beliefs , some code of ethics , and some system of expression - what are usually called a theology , a morality , and a ritual . when we look closely we find that the beliefs largely determine both the nature of the moral code and the form of the ritual . the theological framework on which Christianity is supported includes as its centre the basic belief of all theistic religions - belief in the supernatural and in the existence of a god or gods , supernatural beings endowed with properties of knowing , feeling and willing akin to those of a human personality . in Christian theology , God is a being who created the world and man at a definite date in the past ( until recently specified as 4004 B.C ) and in essentially the same form they have today ; a ruler capable of producing miracles and of influencing natural events , including events in human minds , and conversely of being influenced by man &apos;s prayers and responding to them . Christianity believes in a last judgment by God at a definite but unspecified future date . it believes in an eternal life after death in a supernatural realm , and makes salvation through belief its central aim . it believes in the fall of man and original sin , that its code of morals has been commanded by God , and that all mankind is descended from a single couple . it asserts a partial polytheism in the doctrine of the trinity , and gives full rein to what the students of comparative religion call polydaimonism by its belief in angels , saints and the virgin , and their power to grant human prayers . officially it still believes in hell and in the devil and other evil supernatural beings , though these beliefs are rapidly fading . it is based on a belief in divine revelation and in the historical reality of supernatural events such as the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus as the son of the first person of the trinity . it claims or assumes that all other religions are false and that only Christianity ( or only one brand of Christianity ) is true . it assumes that the earth occupies a central position in the divine scheme of things and that , though God is believed to be omnipotent , omniscient and omnibenevolent , he has a special concern with man &apos;s salvation . this system of beliefs is quite unacceptable in the world of today . it is contradicted , as a whole and in detail , by our extended knowledge of the cosmos , of the solar system , of our own planet , of our own species , and of our individual selves . Christianity is dogmatic , dualistic and essentially geocentric . it is based on a vision of reality which sees the universe as static , short-lived , small , and ruled by a supernatural personal being . the vision we now possess , thanks to the patient and imaginative labours of thousands of physicists , chemists , biologists , psychologists , anthropologists , archaeologists , historians and humanists , is incommensurable with it . in the light of this new vision , our picture of reality becomes unitary , temporally and spatially of almost inconceivable vastness , dynamic , and constantly transforming itself through the operation of its own inherent properties . it is also scientific , in the sense of being based on established knowledge , and accordingly non-dogmatic , basically self-correcting , and itself evolving . its keynote , the central concept to which all its details are related , is evolution . let me try to outline this new vision as briefly as possible . on the basis of our present understanding , all reality is in a perfectly valid sense one universal process of evolution . the single process occurs in three phases - first , the inorganic or cosmic , operating by physical and to a limited extent chemical interaction , and leading to the production of such organizations of matter as nebulae , stars , and solar systems ; in our galaxy this phase has been going on for at least six billion years . in the rare places where matter has become self-reproducing , the inorganic has been succeeded by the organic or biological phase ; this operates primarily by the ordering agency we call natural selection , and leads to the production of increasingly varied and increasingly higher organizations of matter , such as flowers , insects , cuttlefish , and vertebrates , and to the emergence of mind and increasingly higher organizations of awareness . on our planet this has been operating for rather under three billion years . finally , in what must be the extremely rare places ( we only know for certain of one ) where , to put it epigrammatically , mind has become self-reproducing through man &apos;s capacity to transmit experience and its products cumulatively , we have the human or psychosocial phase . this operates by the self-perpetuating but self-varying and ( within limits ) self-correcting process of cumulative learning and cumulative transmission , and leads to the evolution of increasingly varied and increasingly higher psychosocial products , such as religions , scientific concepts , labour-saving machinery , legal systems , and works of art . our pre-human ancestors arrived at the threshold of the critical step to this phase around a million years ago ; but they became fully human , and psychosocial evolution began to work really effectively , only within the last few tens of millennia . during that short span of evolutionary time , man has not changed genetically in any significant way , and his evolution has been predominantly cultural , manifested in the evolution of his social systems , his ideas , and his technological and artistic creations . the new vision enlarges our future as much as our past . advance in biological evolution took place through a succession of so-called dominant types - in the last four hundred million years from jawless , limbless vertebrates to fish , then through amphibians to reptiles , from reptiles to mammals , and finally to man . each new dominant type is in some important way biologically more efficient than the last , so that when it breaks through to evolutionary success it multiplies and spreads at the expense of its predecessors . man is the latest dominant type to arise in the evolution of this earth . there is no possibility of his dominant position in evolution being challenged by any existing type of creature , whether rat or ape or insect . all that could happen to man ( if he does not blow himself up with nuclear bombs or convert himself into a cancer of his planet by over-multiplication ) is that he could transform himself as a whole species into something new . he has nearly three billion years of evolution behind him , from his first pre-cellular beginnings : barring accidents , he has at least as much time before him to pursue his evolutionary course . Yeats implied , or indeed affirmed , that if the Christian God were rejected , a savage God would take his place . this certainly could happen , but it need not happen , and we can be pretty sure that in the long run it will not happen . the new framework of ideas on which any new dominant religion will be based is at once evolutionary and humanist . for evolutionary humanism , gods are creations of man , not vice versa . gods begin as hypotheses serving to account for certain phenomena of outer nature and inner experience : they develop into more unified theories , which purport to explain the phenomena and make them comprehensible ; and they end up by being hypostasized as supernatural personal beings capable of influencing the phenomena . as theology develops , the range of phenomena accounted for by the god-hypothesis is extended to cover the entire universe , and the gods become merged in God . however , with the development of human science and learning , this universal or absolute God becomes removed further and further back from phenomena and any control of them . as interpreted by the more desperately liberal brands of Christianity today , he appears to the humanist as little more than the smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat , but one which is irreversibly disappearing . but though I believe that gods and God in any meaningful non-Pickwickian sense are destined to disappear , the stuff of divinity out of which they have grown and developed remains and will provide much of the raw material from which any new religions will be fashioned . this religious raw material consists in those aspects of nature and elements in experience which are usually described as divine . the term divine did not originally imply the existence of gods : on the contrary , gods were constructed to interpret man &apos;s experiences of this quality in phenomena . some events and some phenomena of outer nature transcend ordinary explanation and ordinary experience . they inspire awe and seem mysterious , explicable only in terms of something beyond or above ordinary nature - super-natural power , a super-human element at work in the universe . such magical , mysterious , awe-inspiring , divinity-suggesting facts have included wholly outer phenomena like volcanic eruptions , thunder , and hurricanes ; biological phenomena such as sex and reproduction , birth , disease and death ; and also phenomena of man &apos;s inner life such as intoxication , possession , speaking with tongues , inspiration , insanity , and mystic vision . with the growth of knowledge most of these phenomena have ceased to be mysterious so far as rational or scientific inexplicability is concerned . but there remains the fundamental mystery of existence , and in particular the existence of mind . our knowledge of physics and chemistry , physiology and neurology does not account for the basic fact of subjective experience , though it helps us to understand its workings . the stark fact of mind sticks in the throat of pure rationalism and reductionist materialism . however , it remains true that many phenomena are charged with a magic quality of transcendent and even compulsive power , and introduce us to a realm beyond ordinary experience . such events and such experiences merit a special designation . for want of a better , I use the term divine , though this quality of divinity is not truly supernatural but transnatural - it grows out of ordinary nature , but transcends it . the divine is what man finds worthy of adoration , that which compels his worship : and during history it evolves like everything else . much of every religion is aimed at the discovery and safeguarding of divinity , and seeks contact and communion with what is regarded as divine . a humanist-based religion must re-define divinity , strip the divine of the theistic qualities which man has anthropomorphically projected into it , search for its habitations in every aspect of existence , elicit it , and establish fruitful contact with its manifestations . divinity is the chief raw material out of which gods have been fashioned . today we must melt down the gods and refashion the material into new and effective agencies , enabling man to exist freely and fully on the spiritual level as well as on the material level . the character of all religions depends primarily on the pattern of its supporting framework of ideas , its theology in an extended sense ; and this in its turn depends on the extent and organization of human knowledge at the time . I feel sure that the world will see the birth of a new religion based on what I have called evolutionary humanism . just how it will develop and flower no one knows - but some of its underlying beliefs are beginning to emerge , and in any case it is clear that a humanism of this sort can provide powerful religious , moral and practical motivation for life . 