SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume XXI, Issue 6779, 11 February 1884, Page 3

SCIENCE AND RELIGION.

Sib, — Nothing is easier than to take vague and general passages from the Mosaic account of the Creation, and to make them harmonise with the teachings of modern science ; but it is quite another .thing to take the whole account and make it tally with the truths of geology, biology, and astronomy. For instance, take the passage "And the Lord God formed man out of the dust of the ground and breathed into' his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul." The ordinary reader would, of course, take this in its literal sense, that God first made an image of clay and then endowed it with life. Not so the modern theologian of the Dr Kinn school. Finding this hypothesis repugnant to common sense and the teachings of science he turns round and says, ." What a striking and beautiful confirmation of the Scriptures ia Mr Darwin's theory of evolution — that roan has developed from the lowest forms of life, from the very slime of the sea and dust of the earth, to the highest position in the scale of animal life." And takon in this sense it certainly does seem a most remarkable coincidence, but when we read on a few verses further that the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam and took from him a rib which he manipulated into a woman, further attempt at scientific harmony becomes ridiculous. But Dr Kinn very conveniently ignores Buch passages as these ; he is sublimely oblivious of the statement that " grass, herbs, and fruit trees yielding fruit after their kind" were created on the third day, whilst the sun, moon, and stars were not "made" and " set in the firmament of Heaven to give light upon the earth " until the fourth day, and if each of these days is to be considered as " scons of ages," it follows that according to the Book of Genesis "fruit trees yielding fruit alter their kind " existed in abundance millions of years before the light of the sun ever reached the earth. But, most ridiculous of all does the attempt to reconcile the Bible with science become when we reach Genesis 11., 19, " And out of the ground the Lord

God formed every beast of the field and every fowl of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them, and whatsoever Adam called every living creature that was the name thereof." This, of course, tallies well enough with the old-fashioned literal reading that delighted our grandmothers, but how does it agree with geology ? If Adam was not made until the last, how could he have the honor of baptising those myriads of creatures, great and small, which had lived their day and been stored up in the rocks ages before he was created? But, Bi'r, I take it that so long as there are vast religious organisations, with enormous revenues and endowments, there will not be wanting able and ingenious advocates to keep up the delusion that their various systems are of more than human origin ; and that the vital essence of religion ; the love of truth and the practice of virtue ; the " larger heart, the kindlier hand," cannot exist apart from priestly dogma and alavish creed. — I am, &c, Reformer. <