ATTITUDE OF SCIENCE.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 267, 10 November 1934, Page 2 (Supplement)

ATTITUDE OF SCIENCE.

<-'NO LONGER DENIES GOD." Several notable preachers occupied IProtestant and Catholic pulpits in Aberdeen on September 9, when the British Association were in the city. Sir George Adam Smith, principal of the University, preached before the association in the West Church of St. Nicholas (Presbyterian), the minister of the church conducting tho service, .and the Lord Provost of the city and Sir James Jeans reading the Scripture lessons. The principal took for his text the correct translation of the first two verses of the hundred and twenty-first Psalm: "I will lift up my eyes urito the hills. From ■whence shall my help come? My help comcth from the Lord Who made heaven and earth." We are indebted to the "Aberdeen Press and Journal" for the following notes of the sermon: — No truth had been more steadily pressed upon Israel, he said, than that all their life, national and individual, lay in the might and in the care of God— not a God far off, but by their side, "a shade on our right hand." Such for nearly 2000 years had been the- vision ■which Nature had presented to Christian faith and to other religions, the •vision of a personal God, the vision of a mind and character and purpose immanent in the material universe, the origin and basis of all substance and life, tho Creator Himself, The truth of that had been denied again and again; sometimes by a philosophic pantheism, which, while acknowledging a divine immanence in Nature, denied to this any form of personality, and sometimes by a sheer and often crude materialism which, claiming to epeak in the name of strict science, refused to see in matter and its constituent elements any proof or sign of divinity whatsoever. Of late there had been evinced by ■biologists and leading authorities in physical science and mathematics a very etriking return, and to put it broadly, a convergence upon uhristian position of faith in a Personal Creator of all living matter and its constituents. History of Approach. The history of this approach was well worth following. It was not so new 'as some of its recent exponents imagined.. "A littlo philosophy inclineth a man's mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion," he quoted from Bacon. Naturally, the nearest modern convergence of science towards belief in a Personal Creator had been that of biology. . Tho eminent German biologist, Professor Driesch, recognised that the mechanical laws of physics and chemistry were inadequate to explain biological . phenomena, and rendered it probable that new concepts peculiar to biology would lave to be created. From his own experiments, Driesch held that "an organism has a mind-like factor associated •with it."

The late Professor J. Arthur Thomson affirmed that there is in Nature a cumulative suggestion of purpose, but purpose cannot reside in the system of Nature, it must be referred to an author

. . . There- does not seem anything preposterous in the idea that man should receive something from Nature, analagous to that which he receives from art —fro; i music in particular —for Nature is a great artist. The history of religion shows clearly that as man's need grew his God also grew, and one of his needs was an appreciation and interpretation of the world which modern ecience describes. This must enter into our conception of God. With the development since Darwin of the theory of evolution the assertion arose of now and alleged conclusive reasons for denying the faith in a Pereonal Creator and, in consequence* for fresh opposition between science and religion. There was no just reason for supposing that evolution meant the denial of a Personal God or need lead to any new opposition between science and religion. On the contrary, religion was ihere, as elsewhere, deeply indebted- to science. As Professor J. S. Haldane said, continued the speaker, "Philosophy leads ne not to the conception of a perfect God existing apart from, what is very clearly an imperfect universe, but of a continuously living God manifested in progressive creation of what we recognise as higher. . . . It is to a universe ■which is a manifestation of God that the analyst of our experience finally leads. God is the personality of personalities." Physicists and mathematicians had also joined in the convergence to which he had referred. Nothing had been more striking than their growing dissatisfaction with merely material conceptions of world and man. Physicists Point of View. It was the physicists and mathematicians of to-day who might be regarded as tho most powerful authors of the convergence of science upon religious explanations of the universe, and a belief not only upon a divine immanence therein, but even on a probability of a Personal Creator.

As Professor A. S. Eddington, one of their leaders, put it: "We all know that there are regions of the human spirit untrammelled by the world of physics." Similar were the conclusions of their illustrious President, Sir James Jeans, •who stated in one of his recent publications:—Few will be found to doubt that some reorientation of scientific tl; uighr is called for. It is my own view that .the final direction of change bably be away.from the materialism and strict determinism which characterised nineteenth century physics, towards something which will accord better with our everyday experience. The new picture of Nature must inevitably involve mind as well as matter —the mind which perceives and the matter which is perceived —and must be more mental in character than the fallacious picture ■which preceded it. Those tendencies distinctly indicated that no longer was there any cause for the distressincr controversies which embittered the tempers and warped the minds of our fathers only a few years ago, but that science and religion might pursue their respective linos of duty in peace and harmony, ever vigilant, but each of them reverencing, rejoicing in, and snppli'inent.ins; the advance of the other, in equal obedience to truth and the Divine Will. Which of them did not stand in need of such a God and of the personal help He was waiting to give—such a God as religion proclaimed ■ and science no longer denied?

Who can set us on our feet again ■with a new song in onr'mouth save God Himself; our loving and forgiving Father and Jesus • Christ. His Son. who was tempted in all points us we are. Who ; hath said. ''Fight the good fight »f faith; to him that overconietli 1 will give a crown of life, oven us 7 also overcame?" And remember, to your faith add love, for without love all religion is hollow and vain.