CORRESPONDENCE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXII, Issue 19365, 23 July 1925, Page 2

CORRESPONDENCE

EVOLUTION AND GENESIS (To the Editor) Sir, —The Rev. J. Paterson, in the report of his sermon appearing iu your issue of July 21, 1925, asserts that “Materialistic evolution in dead, except amongst Rationalistic societies, who, at least a century behind the times, are under the delusion that they are ladvanced thinkers.” It seems that Mr Paterson, like so many of his calling, uses words very loosely, and without due regard for their proper values. But this is a failing to which many clergymen are prone and is possibly due to the fact that discussions do not, as a rule, follow their pulpit utterances. The absurd statement that Rationalists are a century behind the times is amusing. I wonder how the • Rev. Paterson stlands in regard to being abreast of the times with men like Dr. Leonard Huxley, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell, Earl Russell, Sir Francis Darwin, Professor C. J. Patten, Sir Arthur Keith, Sir 11. Bryan Donkin, Hon. John Collier, Right Hon. J. M. Robertson, Mr Joseph McCabe and ti host of others, who are all members of a society of Rationalists, and of which many Wanganui Rationalists are members. If any are behind the times it is those whose thought is dominated by the teachings of those who lived thousands of years before man had grasped the elements of knowledge of Nature, and his relation thereto. Mr Paters m says: “To-day chemistry thinks of matter as a form of energy, of spirit.” 1 challenge him to name any reputable chemist or physicist—as even the Rev. gentleman does not mean that “chemistry thinks”—who imagines that matter is a. form of spirit, a word which has no meaning to the scientific mind. His so-called “materialistic evolution,” which he says is dead, never really existed in the past. If he is acquainted with the writings of Huxley and his Victorian contemporaries, he must know that they repudiated both materialism and spiritualism las “the opposite poles of the same absurdity,” as Huxley once said. If there is a “materialistic evolution,” it is becoming more and more with us to-day. As a recent writer has said, “If any man seriously suggests that modern science has abandoned the idea which Huxley and Tyndull put forward —the I ambition to reduce life to the rank of I a chemical mechanism—he must be singularly ignorant of the aim and progress of recent physiology. Science is, if anything, considerably more materialistic than it. was fifty years ago land a far higher proportion of scientific men <are heterodox in religion.’’ It

is many years ago since John Tyndall said, on behalf of science, “We claim, and we wrest from theology, the whole domain of cosmological theory.” And Mr Paterson knows well enough that the history which will be written of the period which has elapsed, since I those days, is one continual retirement from the more strictly orthodox position occupied by the churches of those days to the position they occupy to-day. * And. after all. this is no more than one might expect, for surely kill religions, in their more primitive forms, arc but efforts of the human mind to express the world, and the universe as they conceive it, and more particularly

to explain its origin and the origin of nan, as the dominant thing it is. No religion, no church, could afford to have its foundation beliefs put forward as conditions of membership to-day. And what is this change duo to but to the growth of national knowledge, which such people'as Mr Paterson are so fond

lof calling “-materialistic.” Professor j Toddy, one of the greatest of living physicists, would not subscribe to Mr Paterson’s assertions that matter is a (form of spirit, for he says, “The power | by which we live and more and have iour being, is none other than that j which drives on the stars in their courses.” Tn the trial of Scopes, at Dayton, U.S.A., we see. perhaps, the I last fanatic effort put forth by ortho- ■ doxy to stem the tide of knowledge which is overflowing the dykes built by hncient faiths in the past. Perhaps Professor Leu ma’s questionart*, and the results disclosed by it. have caused them to take this step. But they fail Ito read the writing on the wall. Lenka found that nearly two-thirds of the ’more influential professors in Amerida reject the belief in a personal God, and

■ no loss than five-sixths of the more I distinguished reject both a personal land impersonal divinity. It means, as ! one writer said, that something like

| ninety per cent., lat least, of our great | educators and mon of intellectual I leadership reject iho conceptions of I orthodoxy, and that of the existence of ia conscious, personal God. But Sir, if Iwo rejoice to find so much of the rational mind in Mr Paterson, we cannot help deploring the “spirit’’ which iprompted the jibe la gain st Rationalists: i for we see in it a little of that ancient intolerance by which the Christian Church “blazed” her way along the lagos. It is that spirit which has made Rationalists in all ages and will, to the I end, keep them active. Bui , Sir. I I might suggest to the Rev. Paterson ilhai, had it not been for the Ibitional[ists of the past, tand for their age-long ! fight against the forces of orthodoxy, he would have found himself arraigned las others were for their heresies and [failing tn recant; he would, have mtide I the acquaintance, of the stake and the • burning faggot as did Brand and others who represented the forces of reason in their times, as the Rationalist does in this. In conclusion, I fail to see that the argument, re the unfolding of a bud into la flower, proves nothing of value to us, because the mind at once receives a shock in the contemplation nf the innumerable insane, as well as the innumerable diseases such as cancer, etc.—l am. etc., J. T. WARD. President, Wanganui Rationalist Association.