SCIENTIST AND GOD

Greymouth Evening Star, 2 July 1936, Page 14

SCIENTIST AND GOD

WORLD NOT 'HAPPY ACCIDENT. LONDON, May 20. Sir Ambrose Fleming, the famous octogenarian scientist, and champion of religious opinion against belief in determinism and evolution, returned to the attack in his annual presidenitla address yesterday to the Victoria Institute. The title of his address was Some Philosophical Conceptions of Modern Physical Science and their Relation to Religious Thought.” After an exposition in simple language of the main discoveries in recent years in radiation, the structure of matter, radio-activity and astronomy, Sir Ambrose continued: “The great modern accumulation of facts regarding the presence of number, weight and measure in the physical world have, in the opinion of many persons, .destroyed the old materialism, and presented the universe to us rather as a thought than a thing, and thought implies a thinker.”

The evidence of physical science supported “the conception that the physical universe had a beginning in acts of creation, and’ was not selfproduced or infinite in past duration. Also that, left to itself, it will have an end. - Moreover, this ‘running down’ which is thus disclosed is the very opposite of any evolution, in the sense of a spontaneous advance. “It gives denial to any assertion that the universe is the result of a set of ‘happy accidents’ or freaks or casual combinations, or any mode of operations which dispenses with the necessity for belief in a creation, and therefoie in a creator."

The presence in Nature of so many phenomena requiring intelligence for their appreciation implied a kindred intelligence to produce them.

“The fundamental underlying idea of evolution is that of perfectly continuous change by infinitely small steps. But now the discoveries of physics everywhere contradict this assumption of perfect continuity in Nature.” Sir Ambrose described the theory that, at some time, living matter was evolved from non-living matter as “pure assumption and contradicted by experimental evidence not easily refuted.”

“But if it has not been so produced,” he concluded, “it shows an unbridged gap which is inconsistent with evolution.