MANNER OF CREATION.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19905, 27 September 1926, Page 2

MANNER OF CREATION.

THE ULTIMATE TRUTH. DEAN INGE’S PHILOSOPHY. Dean Inge, giving the second annual Fison lecture at Guy’s Hospital Medical School, took Science and Ultimate Truth as his subject. In his conclusions Dean Inge said:— . •’Of the motives of the Creation and the manner of the Creation we know nothing whatever. VVe cannot penetrate the mind of the Absolute, and 1 think wo must frankly confess that while tlje return journey to God, the path of salvation, is known to us, the downward journey, the path of Creation, is unknown to us. “This has even been made a reproach against the eohool of philosophy to which 1 belong. We feel we are told to account for tlie world. Well, the world is a solid fact which wo have to accept, not to account for. “i do not know the reason why we should be admitted behind the scones while our business is on the stage. If I have to picture to myself how the wo?ld may be related to its Creator, I should say that, though the enormous nature of the Supreme Being is unknown to us, He has revealed Himself under the three attributes of goodness, truth, and beauty. “There eternal and intimate values are not in active thoughts. They necessarily produce an eternal world—a sphere of spaceless and timeless existence in which we live. This is the heaven of the Christian. “There are some, 1 know, who picture to themselves religion as retreating from one position to another before the victorious advance of science, and as now preparing to die in its last ditch. That is not at all my opinion. Organised religion is certainly not retreating. But why '! I do not think that scientific discoveries have so much to do with it as is often supposed. “I should rather say that religion has in the past tried to coerce the irreligious by garish promises and terrifying tnreats — both promises and threats offered in grossly materialistic language. When these promises and threats lost their cogency, religion secularised itself still further, and announced that its object was to promote a comfortable organisation of society. These irreligious appeals have failed, so the irreligious no longer care tor the menaces or promises of the Church, and they have no respect for the priest in politics. “But the religious appeal is in no way weakened Now. as always, the soul of man lives by admiration, hope, and love; and that these are fused in homage to the Unseen but Ever-present Being, the 'Value of Values,' as a medical thinker called Him, who exists unchanged behind the flux of phenomena, and appropriate reaction, worship, is set up, and the inhuman spirit sots forth again ‘on its adventure, brave and new,’ loss hampered than formerly by the fragments of obsolete science and philosophy which a now knowledge has helped ns to discover.’’