SCIENCE AND RELIGION

Evening Star, Issue 19310, 24 July 1926, Page 21

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

PAST PHASES OF THE CONFLICT [Written by J.A., for the ‘'Evening . Star.’] Tlie conflict, so far as Christianity is concerned, goes back to the early days of the church; but it is open to question whether the severe strictures passed upon official Christianity in those days are really justified. Allowance must be made for the enormous difficulties which stood in the way ol the spread of knowledge. Books were scarce and hard to come by. "he market for scientific works was very restricted. For his knowledge of the scientific theories of the time and the grounds on which they rested the teacher of religion had often to be content with the garbled representations and inaccurate accounts of wandering lecturers who visited his town, or of travellers who brought him reports from abroad. As they reached him those theories must frequently have sounded grotesque in the extreme, and the arguments on which they were based flimsy or absurd. It has to bo remembered, too, that the condition of science under the Roman Empire was chaotic enough, and its theories wore very speculative. Modern scientific method was practically unknown. Very little real observation lay behind the guesses at truth with,'which the philosophers busied themselves. To take a single example, the shape of the earth was variously given as cylindrical, spherical, the shape of a round flat disc, or of a concave eclipse—of a winnowing basket, as they said. There was little or no agreement among the philosophers. Science spoke as yet with many voices. The church’s interest lay not in speculation, but in practical living. . What Lactantius called “ the edification and the making perfect” of men’s souls was her chief concern: and the place which science might play in the process was as obscure to her as it was to many of the philosophers themselves. Such science as the church made the acquaintance of did not seem to have any practical use, or to help men in solving the problems of life and conduct. On the other hand, the church had inherited from the Jews, along with the Old Testament Scriptures, a theory of inspiration which fettered her. . She accepted without question the belief in their verba] inerrancy which the Scribes had taught. The Scriptures were' universally accessible, so that all over the world the church could present the same front to the philosophers, and could meet, for example, their attempts to sketch a cosmogony or map out a geography with the first chapter of Genesis. “Nothing,” it was said, ‘is to be accepted save on the authority of Scripture, since that authority is greater than all the powers of the human understanding. ’ . The wild dream fancies of the Gnostics were mot with the literal interpretation of the Mosaic account of Creation. The more sober findings of the pioneers of science seemed, indeed, little less . fantastic when measured against the simple and beautiful Hebrew narrative. It is easy to see how in an age of ignorance the Biblical narrative, taken as literal history, seemed, oven to intelligent minds in the church, to afford a more reliable conception of the origin of things than anv other that was offered. Nevertheless, the bondage of the church to her theory of inspiration was by no means so rigorous, nor was her opposition to scientific speculation so absolute and unreasonable, as it is sometimes represented to have been, or as it afterwards became. The Scriptures, said the Fathers, were indeed the source of all necessary knowledge; but their interpretation of the Scriptures was often remarkably liberal, and they themselves indulged in some remarkably bold and ingenious speculation. It is with something like amazement that the modern student discovers a doctrine of evolution in Gregory . of Nyssa, in the fourth century. Commenting on the story in Genesis, Gregory says:— “In the beginning ” means that tli.3 occasions, causes, and powers of all things were created by God, and that the essence of each of existing things came into existence at the first impulse of that will. . . When they had been brought together by the divine power and wisdom with a view to the perfection of each of the parts of the world, a certain necessary series followed, according to a certain order, so that any one thing first arose from the whole totality of things, and appeared. Then after that necessarily a second followed. Then a third and a fourth and a fifth and tho rest after. In another passage he puts his idea more succinctly;— All things were potentially in the first divine impulse to creation, as if a certain seminal power were laid clown for the creation of everything, but in actual realisation individual

things were not yet. Gregory was indeed a scientific man himself, and his interest in and sympathy with scientific thought are apparent. Ho arrived at a doctrine of the conservation of matter which is wonderfully modern, and his sense of the value of experiment and observation is well nigh unique in that age. When he says ‘‘ We are unable to present the works of. Nature by reason,” what he moans is that a priori speculation is futile, and he offers his own theories frankly to the test of experiment. Though for obvious reasons she plung to Scripture and was inclined to ridicule the divergent theories and imaginative conjectures of the philosophers, the church had not yet taken up the rigid obscurantist attitude which characterised her throughout the Middle Ages. At a later stage the claim of the church to ho the sole exponent and guardian of all truth was expressed in two renowned institutions, the Index Expurgatorius and the Inquisition. She arrogated to herself the right to dictate what books her faithful children might read and what books they must not rend. Lists of forbidden works appeared as early as 494 A.n., and at intervals throughout the succeeding centuries, until in 1557, Pope Pins IV. issued what is commonly regarded as the first Roman Index. It was called forth by the rising tide of knowledge, which marked the Revival of Learning, and stirred the fears of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The Inquisition was of older date. It was established by Innocent IV. in the thirteenth century, a permanent court for the detection and punishment of heresy. Both of those institutions took cognisance of departures from the norm of church doctrine, not only in theology, but in science as well. And their tremendous influence is easily traceable throughout tho sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the foundations of modern science were being laid. Copernicus finished his famous work on the ‘ Revolutions of the Celestial Bodies ’ in 1507, but it was not till 1643 that be found courage to publish it. Tycho Brake was driven from one place to another over half Europe while he was advancing the knowledge of the solar system and of the stars. Giordano Bruno was persecuted, though there is some doubt whether lie was actually burned at tho stake. The experiences of Galileo are well known. It might have been hoped that with the Reformation there would come a more enlightened toleration, if not welcome, for scientific discoveries and theories. But, also, the exigencies of its polemic against Rome led the Reformed Church to adopt the same doctrine of inspiration which had made the Scriptures the supreme authority on all subjects. Luther regarded Copernicus as a “ fool and knave,” “ an upstart astrologer.”

It is easy, of course, to say scathing things about the attitude of official Christianity towards science at that time, hut consideration must be shown in our judgment of the church. What are to us commonplaces, the rotundity of tho carth ; the revolution of the heavenly bodies,, the infinite depths of space, and tho like, were* then new ideas. They were but slowly making their way even among thinkers and teachers outside the church, in the universities, and elsewhere. It was not only from ecclesiastical authority that they encountered opposition. The great hotly of scientific and philosophic opinion was itself hostile to tho new knowledge. It was pledged to Aristotle as the church was pledged to the Scriptures. Aristotle’s doctrine was the highest truth, “since,” it was said, “his intellect represented the final achievement of human faculty.” It is, indeed, well thattruth has to fight for recognition, for in the struggle she rids herself of accompanying error, and in the end shines with a more faultless radiance.

By and by theology managed to accommodate itself to a heliocentric solar system and a stellar system of infinite range and complexity, and found that, far from banishing to the limbo of superstition the conception of a Creator, the more the universe was understood tho greater did His glory appear. There was perhaps less excuse for the attitude with which the theory of evolution was confronted in the nineteenth century. The church might by that time have learned one or two lessons which would have saved her the pain and humiliation of tho famous Oxford debate of 1871, in which Soapy Sam received so well-merited and stinging a rebuke at the hands of Thomas Huxley. She might have learned that the methods of modern science had justified themselves abundantly in the discovery of truth, that students of science deserved confidence for their sincerity and disinterestedness, and that error would certainly be freely acknowledged when shown to be error by further investigation. And shemight have learned, from her own past experiences, that scientific truth . had never yet done any harm to religion, but rather had,served to purify and exalt the religions .spirit. Whatever excuses may bo offered for her in the early centuries, tho Middle Ages, or even in tho time of tho Renaissance, Christian men must always look back with something like shame on the panic which swept over the church when the theories of Lyell and Murchison and Darwin were given to the world. But if the church has often shown an alarmed impatience with the theories of science, scientific men have likewise displayed a resentful impatience with the church. Not infrequently they' have forgotten the limitations of their own sphere of inquiry, and presumed too arrogantly that because they could not see God with their telescopes or discover the soul with their scalpels, belief in God and in the spiritual nature of man was but blind superstition. And their language has often been as fierce and bitter as any of the denunciations under which they themselves winced. It was Huxley who said of the opponents of Evolution, “ I should like to get my heel into their months and scrunch it. round.” Tho truth is that not only patience, but charity and faith, have been wanting on both sides; and if Christian men must learn a faith in God which has courage enough to face every revelation of His ways of working which science may make known, men of science must also learn to bear with those whose weak eyes cannot endure all at once the dazzling light of their discoveries.