THE CHRISTIAN'S APPEAL TO SCIENCE.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXIV, Issue 38, 15 January 1897, Page 28

THE CHRISTIAN'S APPEAL TO SCIENCE.

(By Rev. William Bakiiy, D.D.)

A desire has been expressed that I shonld set down in black and white the argument of which I made use during the discussion upon science and religion at our conference in Hanley. Ido so now ; for it is an argument, I am persuaded, which will bear repetition, and goes direct to the centre. I was led to it. naturally enough, in consequence of a remarkable admission made by Professor Huxley, not long before his death. As Mr. Wilfred Ward tells us in the Nineteenth Criitunj for August, Professor Huxley had called his attention to a somewhat elaborate criticism on his own opinions, or "creed," which came out in January, 18i»."), adding that it was the first in which the main outlines of his position as a philosopher had been accurately described. This, I said to the conference, was matter of rejoicing, since I well knew that the essay in question had come from a Catholic pen. But moi - e. The Professor's acknowledgement threw a flood of light upon the whole situation. It showed us that we could, by taking a little trouble, rightly apprehend and state the views of scientific believers ; and it opened a way to deal with them on scientific grounds. MATERIALISM — NOT THE CREED OF SCIENCE. The average man, I went on to remark, who flouts religion in the name of science, is a materialist. He believes that nothing exists save only matter and motion, or matter and force ; to these terms he reduces all experience. But in doing so he is not simply reproducing experience ; he is putting his own sense upon it and giving it a peculiar interpretation : he ceases to be a witness telling us what he can prove by his scales and microscopes, and he lias gone up to the judge's bench and from that position has announced a theory over and above experience. And what a theory / One so futile, so inadequate and incredible, that, far from its being recognised as the " creed of science," Professor Huxley found it unspeakably shallow, roundly declaring that, rather than be a materialist. he would be an out-and-out idealist — in short, a Christian. But he wished to be neither this nor that, and so he in\ en ted a new name and called himself an agnostic ; for, said he. the universe contains a third thing, consciousness, which is not force and is not matter. but we do not know whence it comes ; we cannot affirm that it will survive the body : we are ignorant of its cause and its purpose. Let us not. then, he concluded, say that we know when \\ c do not know ; let us honestly confess our intellectual impotence and refrain from affirmations for which we have no proof. This it is to be an agnostic. But hereupon the Catholic Church steps in and craves a hearing. What does she declare ! THE CHUHCH DKI'EN'DN KEAhOX. She declares that our minds are not impotent, not hopelessly blind and dumb in the presence of these high problems. She defends reason — the actual. average, ordinary human intelligence — against this deadly blight of a seeming humility which would be its suicide. How sensitive she is on this point we saw not long ngo in the severe judgment which Catholic teachers passed on Mr. Balfour's well-meaning but dangerous volume. "The Foundations ot Belief." All we that dealt with it were of one accord in reminding the author of those rights of reason which he appeared to be disregarding. While the Church allows, with all deep philosophy, the gross darkness in which man moves, she bids us look to the li<zht that shines in darkness ; and it is her teaching that, if we use our own intellect as we ought, we shall arrive at a knowledge ot the soul's immortality, ot the moral law. of the existence of God and ot the judgment to come. As I said above, the agnostic puts to silence the materialist. But now reason compels the agnostic to perceive that he can know those spiritual realities and divine laws of which he has been hitherto in doubt. Reason has first principles and is founded on certitudes. THE (UIKAT ARGUMENT. This in general. But. from the dawn of a rational day. Igo forward to my great argument. If. as the Church commands me. I do exercise my reason, I shall turn to the materialist and ask him, Bible in hand, what does he make of the life and death of Jesus Christ .' Will he dare, will he dream, of reducing it to matter and force, to chemistry, to so much oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen. mixed with so much carbon .' Professor Huxley would laugh that doctrine to scorn. Now. the life of our Lord is a certain fact : then, if all certain facts belong to science, Christ Himselt belongs to science. He is the supreme fact which cannot be denied and must not be explained away. To leave Him out ot biology would be to rob that science of its most astounding phenomena, and of an experience which resolves the world s riddle, giving it an answer sublime and practical of highest Avorth. Matter and force cannot account for Christ ; then materialism is false. But in the same moment that Jesus of Nazareth — this central figure in all history — refutes the materialist. He makes an end of the amiostio. For His example, taken .is matter of fact, lays opon another, a spiritual world, of which He is the pledge and the instance. He is a reality beyond the mere visible : and in knowing Him we learn what is the nature of the invisible. Thus it is He re\euls a universe in which wo are at home, governed and shaped by the, law of righteousness. Observe that I am not appealing to faith : 1 am stating evidence. We can, indeed, take His Word as decisive of this controversy. But He is, likewise, the concrete proof of that which He asserts and which we believe ; and there is no agnostic darkness but will flee away at His coming.

Such is a faint outline of what I consider to be at once real and philosophical, which bears equally upon life, thought and science ; an argument which I leave now in the hope of expanding it more fully elsewhere. It states the question which every scientific unbeliever must at length undertake to solve ; and it brings him to the touchstone of experience by saying with the utmost simplicity : " There is the Lord Jesus Christ ; what do you make of Him ? Either explain Him or bow down before Him. But if you pass Him by unexplained, how shall I name your pretentious and inefficient theory, your baseless hypothesis and mere assertion, except with St. Paul, I speak of it as " science falsely so-called .'" If matter cannot explain consciousness, the agnostic who has studied the Gospel should recognise therein the meaning and purpose of existence.