I REALLY REALLY wanted to like this book. Throughout the entire first half I was planning to give it 4 stars because it greatly inspired me. In the second half Wells' weak arguments dropped it to 3 stars. By the end the book was such a confusing mess that I dropped it to 2 stars. Finally I bumped it up to 3 again just because it is a good historical resource into Wells' thinking. Honestly I say it's 2 1/2, but I'm having a really hard time giving an H.G. Wells book fewer than 3 stars.
Everybody knows that H.G. Wells was an atheist. At least that is a common conception, but in this book Wells' vehemently denies it and spends the entire book laying out his form of neo-theism. I was confused by this and did a little online research. According to the H.G. Wells Society of America, Wells was an atheist but went through a religious phase due to the emotional trama of World War I. Supposedly he rejected those religious ideas later in life; I will have to read my copy of Wells' "Experiment in Autobiography" to get a better understanding of his religious views. In any event, "God the Invisible King" was written in that religious phase contemporary to the First World War.
The purpose of this book is to lay out H.G. Wells' religous beliefs and those of "modern religion". He explicity claims on the first page that he is not a Christian. Although to us it seems like he is trying to promote a new future movement, to Wells himself this modern religion was already happening in his day and was the direction that religion would continue to go. (He might have been right except that the reactionary fundamentalist Christian movement changed modern religion into something quite different.) First Wells lays out the difference between the Creator God and the Christ God. The Creator God is that power behind the universe which is distant from man and can be seen in God the Father of the Christian Trinity. The Christ God is the personal aspect of God which is in people's hearts and whom people relate to. Wells claims to be decidedly agnostic towards the Creator God, whom he calls the "Veiled Being" and says is both unknowable and irrelevent. He does however literally believe in the Christ God. In making this distinction Wells actively denounces Trinitarian theology, and after this distinction is made all references to God mean specifically the Christ God as opposed to the Creator God.
What is Wells' God like? He did not create the universe. He is not omnicient, omnipotent, or omniprecent. He doesn't know everything or have all power. He doesn't work miracles or answer prayers (although Wells contradicts himself on this point later in the book). He doesn't judge or condemn us. But according to Wells this God is definitely a person. He is a personal God whom we can know, but we don't really pray to him or worship him in any direct way. Mostly he is there giving us courage, feeling our pain with us, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with us, and we are supposed to serve him with everything we do. Wells says that it is impossible to prove God, but we can experience him directly.
I must admit that in the first half of the book Wells says it much more compellingly than I do. In fact for the first half I was inspired by this God and thought that I as an atheist could almost believe in a God like this. It seems like kind of an amorphous feel-good God that doesn't really exist out there but is a very real and important part of our psyche. But Wells doesn't want us thinking like that because he constantly reminds us that God is a real external person.
Unfortunately the inspiration and though-provoking aspect of this book wears off halfway through when Wells makes half-hearted attempts to prove the existence of his God. Wells makes the same old agruments that would later be made by C.S. Lewis in "Mere Christianity", but Lewis did it much better. For example Wells tried to prove the existence of God through the existance of human morality. Lewis at least tried to prove the existence of objective morality (and failed), but Wells did not even try. He simply "proved" that objective morality exists because it is obvious to common sense. Therefore God exists. A thin argument indeed.
This book started as really good and went to mediocre, but after 2/3 in it just gets bad. I had to skip a lot of pages to find major points in the argument and to find anything that made sense. Here Wells transforms his God from a feel-good entity that lives inside of us to a militant ruler. He says that people need to change their perspective so they do everything (especially work) for the glory of God. If we all do our jobs to God's glory, then we will enter a socialist paradise ruled by God himself - the Invisible King. But God never comes down from heaven to rule earth in physical form. No, God is our dear amorphous leader who rules through humanity's combined actions (or something like that). It is a call for an end of governments and the rise of a theocracy ruled by God with no priests and no church. (But of course God never comes down physically, and as wells said earlier in the book, God never sits on a throne.) God forbids the wealthy from giving their belongings to the poor, but he also forbids them from enjoying their wealth and being greedy. All wealth and all labor somehow work together through the glory of God to create a human paradise. The problem is the Wells seems like a communist in one sentence and like an Ayn Rand objectivist in the next sentence. It would probably take a lengthy book for a modern scholar to sort out Wells' economic and political ideas.
I really wanted to like this book. I found it inspiring at first, but ultimately it fell flat on its face. I was struggling with the rating, but after writing this review I have decided that this book sucks and gets 2 stars. When Ayn Rand and Karl Marx join forces to create a churchless theocracy run by nobody, then I think it's time for H.G. Wells to go back to writing science fiction.
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