THE CONFLICT BETWEEN RELIGION

AND SCIENCE

THE British Association has just concluded at Dundee its annual session. Of the papers that were read before that distinguished gathering none have excited a more lively interest than those which dealt with the supposed origin of life and the supposed simian ancestry of man. And it requires no effort of the imagination to conceive how from the ranks of the Christian ministryin reply to a series of assertions without proofs and of conjectures ex hypothesia Chalmers or a Guthrie, a Whewell or an Archbishop Thompson, would have risen to the occasion and responded to the call. But that generation of giants is gone; and the modern generation, since the credit of Christianity itself is at stake, might well stand convicted of indifference or cowardice if it allowed zeal for science to eat up its zeal for the house of God.

No one who reads the signs of the times can doubt that Christianity is once more on her trial in her conflict with the forces of this world. As Tennyson anticipated, a secret and involuntary unbelief-whether it take a pantheist, a Unitarian, or a 'Catholic' form-has become the prevailing disposition of educated men. And scepticism-however much, as in the case of Newman, Ruskin, or Carlyle, it clothe itself in the language of philosophy or in the garb of mysticism-is scepticism still! Men believe; but they do not believe the faith of the Gospel. The world was never so religious, Nietzsche tells us, but its religion is sincerely anti-Christian. And what Canon Henson has observed of Gibbon is far more true of Gibbon's great forerunner Voltaire-namely, that he dictates by an indisputable right the common opinions of educated Englishmen. Even Newman went so far as to admit that Voltaire had won. He pooh-poohed the notion that Paley had vanquished the Deists. He asserted that Hume's ridiculous gibes were unanswerable arguments against the truth of miracles, that Gibbon was our one ecclesiastical historian,' and that there was no cogent proof for the existence of God.' Latterly he gave up even Vincent of Lerins' famous canon as to what might be said to constitute the Church's rule of faith. And if in this our own day it is true that Catholic' principles are once more in the ascendant, we have it on Newman's authority that these

principles are held, not because they are true, but because, as in all violent times of transition, there lies an appeal to men of timid, scrupulous, ascetic, emotional temperament in the traditional symbols and effete devotions of an uninquiring age;

Believing where they cannot prove.

We are not of this school. The past may have had its glories. But we believe the present has them too. We have lived to witness the triumphs of Physical Science. With her help man has harnessed to his service the forces of the universe. He has plumbed the earth and scaled the heavens, and bound the lightning to do him service in the forms of radium and electricity. The telephone, the railway engine, and the marconigraph have enabled him at once to increase distance and annihilate space. The gramaphone allows him to catch and to transmit to posterity the perfect echoes of the human voice; while with the aeroplane he has outstripped the speed of the swallow. And who shall reckon the triumphs over disease of a Pasteur and a Lister, or guess the future possibilities of the Röntgen ray?

It is asserted that the progress of Science has tapped the foundations of Religion. We do not believe it. The truths of revelation have no fear of the fullest and freest investigation. On the contrary, they court it. The greatest scientists of the pastBacon and Newton, Pascal and Galileo, Faraday and Kelvin— revolutionised the systems of their day, and they were Christian. And if the modern sciences sometimes overstep their respective boundaries in the race for precedence, what then? It is no more than what we should expect that in the mystery of our present environment, moral beings, placed on their trial in the moral order of the universe, should have to face problems that call for the healthy exercise of those moral faculties of choice and determination which mark all the difference between a monkey and a man. If ethnology has shattered the early chronology of the Hebrews, geology has given us back the first chapter of Genesis. If the higher criticism has dissolved the seeming unity of the Old Testament documents, Assyriology has restored to us the historical portraits of Moses and of Daniel. And if philosophy has been too busy about the origins of religion, philology has tended to reassure us of the fundamental unity of the human race.

It is not from science that religion has to fear, but from theories put forward in the name of science. True science is but the registering and classifying of phenomena. It deals with effects, not causes; with the outward show, not the inner reality; with things as they appear, not as they are. It leaves to theology, to philosophy, or to metaphysics the task of ascertaining final causes. And the reason is obvious. Science is at best applied

mathematics. That is to say, its means of arriving at results are mechanical. The microscope and the telescope can gauge with precision the crust of the earth, the leg of a flea, or the relative distances and courses of the stars they cannot penetrate to the origin of life, to the nature of thought, motion, life, reason, soul -to those inner springs that impel the world of animated being. 'At bottom,' rightly remarked Hume long ago, ' matter and spirit are equally unknown.' God, Creation, Design, Consciousness, Will, are things outside the category of the inductive sciences. They can register the effects of sensation, but they cannot explain or reproduce the feelings of pleasure or of pain. They can dissect the anatomy of the brain, but they can never penetrate the mystery of mind. It is easy to watch the beaver build his house, but who can analyse the psychic instinct by which he builds? It is possible to refer all animal embryo to a cell, but what power shall yield us the principles of divergent varieties which those cells contain? Thus Individuality eludes the last analysis that something of which all those other things, cell, embryo, spirit, soul and body, are made up, but which is in itself something more.

It is the mind that sees: the outward eyes

Present the object, but the mind descries.

The worlds of spiritual intuition and sense-perception, Huxley candidly admitted, can never be at strife. They are on different planes, like parallel lines which are continuous but never meet, eccentric circles whose circumferences never intersect.

Confusion of thought on this head has, we fear, brought into the controversy between religion and science a conjectural theory which is likely to damage the best interests of both. We refer to the theory of EVOLUTION.

All science [Huxley tells in his Life of Hume] starts with hypothesis; in other words, with assumptions that are unproved, while they may be, and often are, erroneous; but which are better than nothing to the seeker after order in the maze of phenomena.

Evolution is such a scientific hypothesis.' It is still an 'unproved assumption.' We hope to show it 'erroneous' also. But it has in the past supplied-like x to the mathematician or the invisible spot in the ocean which an admiral selects for a turningpoint in naval manoeuvres-a point-d'appui for the seeker after order in the maze of phenomena.' Alas, that it should have become something more; that a phrase should have been transmuted into fact; that a subjective conception in the mind of man should have come to be regarded as an objective reality-still more that it should have become the battle-cry of modern infidelity.

The supernaturalist [says Mr. Blatchford in his God and my Neighbour] stands by creation. The rationalist stands by evolution. It is impossible to reduce these opposite ideas to a common denominator,

The specific doctrines of Christianity, adds Mr. Philip Vivian in his new edition of The Churches and Modern Thought, are 'irreconcilable with science.' The late Mr. Mill in his Three Essays on Religion had avowed the same.

And this, though it be the irresponsible utterance of popular writers, expresses the original design of the Evolutionist leaders. Darwin tells us in his Life and Letters that he had given up 'the common religious belief.' He entirely dismissed even Voltaire's argument from 'design.' He told Haeckel in 1872 that he wished his ridiculous theory of spontaneous generation' could be proved true. 'This,' he adds, 'would be most important to us '-' us transmutationists,' as he called himself in a letter to Hooker twenty-five years before. This is a great blow to me,' he told Lyell, that you cannot admit the potency of natural selection.'

I grieve to see you hint [he elsewhere adds] at the creation of distinct successive types. . Remember, if you admit this you cut my throat!

Thus it may be seen that in espousing the theory of evolution science is unconsciously espousing the cause of infidelity. And since infidelity can never be original, science in so doing is merely reviving the forgotten superstitions of early paganism.

Evolution is as old as the hills. It was the capital argument against creation in the superficial cosmogony of the ancient Egyptians. From the dark waters (nû) of the Nile, wherein lay dormant all the germs of life, the mighty power of Râ, the rising sun, 'evolved the present myriad forms of being.' The Nile rat was, in the opinion of Maspero, the visible symbol of their notion of spontaneous generation.'

From Egypt Greece borrowed. Anaximander in the seventh century B.C. found in water the animating principle of life, and, tracing the descent of man from various animal forms ( årλoudŵv (wwv), is said by Plutarch, Censorinus and Eusebius to have referred his ultimate ancestry to fish.

Greece became the literary preceptor of imperial Rome and every schoolboy is familiar with the strains in which Virgil, Ovid, and Lucretius gave mind to matter and endowed molecular motion with the inherent principles of self-causation.

The literary tradition of Rome passed with the language to Rome's eldest daughter, France.

Voltaire has been credited with inaugurating the era of modern thought. That glory in reality belongs (as Huxley reminds us) to Descartes. And since France in her literary tradition has always reverted to the Roman type, in the seventeenth century French unbelief took the direction of stoicism. The leading spirits of that age, Descartes himself, Montaigne, Du Vair, Balzac, even Corneille, had become stoics reared on the writings