A DOCTOR ON RELIGION

Northern Advocate, 4 May 1933, Page 4

A DOCTOR ON RELIGION

It becomes more and more difficult nowadays to comprehend the old belief in some fundamental antagonism between Religion and Science. Yet it was widely prevalent during the latter part of the nineteenth century and lingers still in many minds. That it has no substantial foundation was the whole burden of the address delivered recently in Liverpool Cathedral by Lord Dawson of Penn when, as the representative of the medical profession, he was admitted a member of the Order of Counsellors of the Cathedral. “Religion and Science,” he said, “represent two aspects of experience. Religion belongs to an inner world; it rests upon, first, experience, and later conviction; its concern is

life in its fullness. Science belongs to the outer world of the senses and the intellect; it rests upon external observation, land later objective, corroboratin'!!.” The tragedy of the nineteenth century, it may he suggested further, was failure to see that these two aspects of experience can only find their synthesis in man’s knowledge of Hod. Those who discovered in the writings of Darwin a new philosophy of “life in its fullness” failed too often to remember that Darwin was concerned with the bodies of animals. From the earliest time men have recognised a distinction between the physical lav/ of greed and fear and the spiritual conception of duty, which is the very denial of greed and fear. II follows that there are two processes of evolution, the one material and the other spiritual. To attempt to apply to the one the methods and deductions of the other can achieve nothing but confusion of mind. Science is meaningless without religion. To take, for instance, as “The Times” comments on the lecture, that sphere of science for which Lord Dawson is the acknowledged spokesman, it is only when a method of medicine or surgery has been applied to the prevention or relief of disease that it acquires real importance; and this importance ought to be measured —in terms of man’s relationship with his neighbours, and so with the spiritual world. The point at which the scientific method ends and the religious attitude begins can never be determined precisely, for the two are related and connected in such a way that neither can be separated from tin* other. Science does not pretend to show men the object of their lives. It is the claim of revealed religion that it does show that object, and that it offers the faith by which alone, in the last issue, that object can be achieved.