Religion: Convert Joad

A goat-bearded, argumentative agnostic was London University’s Philosopher Cyril Edwin Mitchison Joad, who once asserted (on the dust-jacket of his Testament of Joad): “I can explain anything to anybody.” For the last 18 months he has carried out this threat on a popular BBC radio program, “The Brains Trust.” But of late radio fans have noticed a decreasing cockiness in Brain Truster Joad’s answers. One shrewd lady listener wrote him that he seemed to be walking a tightrope between the mountain of faith and the abyss of doubt, and that she prayed every night he would fall off on the mountain side. Last week Joad fell, confessed that he was once more a Christian.

Philosopher Joad lapsed into agnosticism 30 years ago when, like many another sensitive intellectual, he “could not reconcile the existence of pain and evil with the Christian hypothesis.” Like many another intellectual Dr. Joad felt that the greatest evils were social evils; rid the world of these and you get rid of most others. Social evils, he decided, were “the by-products of economic circumstances. . . . The inference was obvious: remove the circumstance . . . and you would abolish the byproduct evil.” Now, like many another contrite intellectual, Dr. Joad can no longer believe this because “the evil in the world today is too widespread and obtrusive … to enable us to take any longer so easy a view of its nature and origin. . . .” The end of Joad’s confession is an earnest statement of his personal dilemma and that of others like him: “It is in no feeling of gladness that I thus set about revising my picture of the universe. On the contrary, I have the sense of resuming with the greatest alarm and dismay a burden which in the first flush of my agnostical freedom I so gladly laid aside.”