BY
PROFESSOR JAMES ORR, D. D.,
United Free Church College, Glasgow, Scotland
In many quarters the belief is
industriously circulated that the advance of “science,” meaning by this chiefly
the physical sciences — astronomy, geology, biology, and the like has proved
damaging, if not destructive, to the claims of the Bible, and the truth of
Christianity. Science and Christianity are pitted against each other. Their
interests are held to be antagonistic. Books are written, like Draper’s
“Conflict Between Religion and Science,” White’s “Warfare of Science with
Theology in
Christendom,” and Foster’s “Finality
of the Christian Religion,” to show that this warfare between science and
religion has ever been going on, and can never in the nature of things cease
till theology is destroyed, and science holds sole sway in men’s minds.
This was not the attitude of the
older investigators of science. Most of these were devout Christian men.
Naville, in his book, “Modern Physics,” has shown that the great discoverers in
science in past times were nearly always devout men. This was true of Galileo,
Kepler, Bacon, and Newton; it was true of men like Faraday, Brewster, Kelvin,
and a host of others in more recent times. The late Professor Tait, of
Edinburgh, writing in “The International Review,” said: “The assumed
incompatibility of religion and science has been so often and confidently
asserted in recent times that it has come * * * to be taken for granted by the
writers of leading articles, etc., and it is, of course, perpetually thrust
before their too trusting readers. But the whole thing is a mistake, and a
mistake so grave that no truly scientific man * * * runs, in Britain, at least,
the smallest risk of making it. * * * With a few, and these very singular
exceptions, the truly scientific men and true theologians of the present day
have not found themselves under the necessity of quarrelling.”
The late Professor G. J. Romanes
has, in his “Thoughts on Religion,” left the testimony that one thing which
largely influenced him in his return to faith was the fact that in his own
university of Cambridge nearly all the men of most eminent scientific
attainments were avowed Christians. “The curious thing,” he says, “is that all
the most illustrious names were ranged on the side of orthodoxy. Sir W. Manson,
Sir George Stokes, Professors Tait, Adams, Clerk Maxwell, and Bayley — not
to mention a number of lesser
lights, such as Routte, Todhunter, Ferrers, etc., — were all avowed Christians”
(page 137).
It may be held that things are now
changed. To some extent this is perhaps true, but anyone who knows the opinions
of our leading scientific men is aware that to accuse the majority of being men
of unchristian or unbelieving sentiment is to utter a gross libel. If by a
conflict of science and religion is meant that grievous mistakes have often
been made, and unhappy misunderstandings have arisen, on one side and the
other, in the Course of the progress of science, — that new theories and
discoveries, as in astronomy and geology, have been looked on with distrust by
those who thought that the truth of the Bible was being affected by them, —
that in some cases the dominant church sought to stifle the advance of truth by
persecution, — this is not to be denied. It is an unhappy illustration of how
the best of men can at times err in matters which they imperfectly understand,
or where their prejudices and traditional ideas are affected. But it proves nothing
against the value of the discoveries themselves, or the deeper insight into the
ways of God of the men who made them, or of real contradiction between the new
truth and the essential teaching of the Scriptures. On the contrary, as a
minority generally perceived from the first, the supposed disharmony with the
truths of the Bible was an unreal one, early giving way to better understanding
on both sides, and finally opening up new vistas in the contemplation of the
Creator’s power, wisdom, and majesty. It is never to be forgotten, also, that
the error was seldom all on one side; that science, too, has in numberless
cases put forth its hasty and unwarrantable theories and has often had to
retract even its truer speculations within limits which brought them into more
perfect harmony with revealed truth. If theology has resisted novelties of
science, it has often had good reason for so doing.
It is well in any case that this
alleged conflict of Christianity with science should be carefully probed, and
that it should be seen where exactly the truth lies in regard to it.
1. SCIENCE AND LAW — MIRACLE
It is perhaps more in its general
outlook on the world than in its specific results that science is alleged to be
in conflict with the Bible and Christianity. The Bible is a record of
revelation. Christianity is a supernatural system. Miracle, in the sense of a
direct entrance of God in word and deed into human history for gracious ends,
is of the essence of it. On the other hand, the advance of science has done much
to deepen the impression of the universal reign of natural law. The effect has
been to lead multitudes whose faith is not grounded in direct spiritual
experience to look askance on the whole idea of the supernatural. God, it is
assumed, has His own mode of working, and that is by means of secondary
agencies operating in absolutely uniform ways; miracles, therefore, cannot be
admitted. And, since miracles are found in Scripture, — since the entire Book
rests on the idea of a supernatural economy of grace, — the whole must be
dismissed as in conflict with the modern mind. Professor G. B. Foster goes so
far as to declare that a man can hardly be intellectually honest who in these
days professes to believe in the miracles of the Bible.
It is overstating the case to speak
of this repugnance to miracle, and rejection of it in the Bible, as if it were
really new. It is as old as rationalism itself. You find it in Spinoza, in
Reimarus, in Strauss, in numberless others. DeWette and Vatke, among earlier
Old Testament critics, manifested it as strongly as their followers do now, and
made it a pivot of their criticism. It governed the attacks on Christianity
made in the age of the deists. David Hume wrote an essay against miracles which
he thought had settled the question forever. But, seriously considered, can
this attack on the idea of miracle, derived from our experience of the
uniformity of nature’s laws, be defended? Does it not in itself involve a huge
assumption, and run counter to experience and common sense? The question is one
well worth asking.
First, what is a miracle? Various
definitions might be given, but it will be enough to speak of it here as any
effect in nature, or deviation pore its ordinary course, due to the
interposition of a supernatural cause. It is no necessary part, it should be
observed, of the Biblical idea of miracle, that natural agencies should not be
employed as far as they will go. If the drying of the Red Sea to let the
Israelites pass over was due in part to a great wind that blew, this was none
the less of God’s ordering, and did not detract from the Supernatural character
of the event as a whole. It was still at God’s command that the waters were
parted, and that a way was made at that particular time and place for the
people to go through. These are what theologians call “providential” miracles,
in which, so far as one can see, natural agencies, under divine direction,
suffice to produce the result.
There is, however, another and more
conspicuous class, the instantaneous cleansing of the leper, e.g., or the
raising of the dead, in which natural agencies are obviously altogether
transcended. It is this class about which the chief discussion goes on. They
are miracles in the stricter sense of a complete transcendence of nature’s
laws. What, in the next place, is meant by the uniformity of nature? There are,
of course, laws of nature — no one disputes that. It is quite a mistake to
suppose that the Bible, though not
written in the twentieth century, knows nothing of a regular order and system
of nature. The world is God’s world; it is established by His decree; He has
given to every creature its nature, its bounds, its limits; all things continue
according to His ordinances (Psalm 119:91). Only, law in the Bible is never
viewed as having an independent existence. It is always regarded as an
expression of the power or wisdom of God. And this gives the right point of
view for considering the relation of law to miracle. What, to begin with, do we
mean by a “law” of nature? It is, as science will concede, only our registered
observation of the order in which we find causes and events linked together in
our experience. That they are so linked no one questions. If they were not, we
should have no world in which we could live at all. But then, next, what do we
mean by “uniformity” in this connection? We mean no more than this — that,
given like causes, operating under like conditions, like effects will follow.
Quite true; no one denies this either. But then, as J. S. Mill, in his Logic,
pointed out long ago, a miracle in the strict sense is not a denial of either
of these truths. A miracle is not the assertion that, the same causes
operating, a different result is produced. It is, on the contrary, the
assertion that a new cause has intervened, and this a cause which the theists
cannot deny to be a vera causa — the will and power of God. Just as, when I
lift my arm, or throw a stone high in the air, I do not abolish the law of
gravitation but counteract or overrule its purely natural action by the introduction
of a new spiritual force; so, but in an infinitely higher way, is a miracle due
to the interposition of the First Cause of all, God Himself. What the
scientific man needs to prove to establish his objection to miracle is, not
simply that natural causes operate uniformly, but that no other than natural
causes exist; that natural causes exhaust all the causation in the universe.
And that, we hold, he can never do.
It is obvious from what has now been
said that the real question at issue in miracle is not natural law, but Theism.
It is to be recognized at once that miracle can only profitably be discussed on
the basis of a theistic view of the universe. It is not disputed that there are
views of the universe which exclude miracle. The atheist cannot admit miracle,
for he has no God to work miracles. The pantheist cannot admit miracle, for to
him God and nature are one. The deist cannot admit miracle, for he has
separated God and the universe so far that he can never bring them together
again. The question is not, Is miracle possible on an atheistic, a
materialistic, a
pantheistic, view of the world, but,
Is it possible on a theistic view — on the view of God as at once immanent in
His world, and in infinite ways
transcending it? I say nothing of
intellectual “honesty,” but I do marvel, as I have often said, at the assurance
of any one who presumes to say that, for the highest and holiest ends in His
personal relations with His creatures, God can work only within the limits
which nature imposes; that He cannot act without and above nature’s order if it
pleases Him to do so. Miracles stand or fall by their evidence, but the attempt
to rule them out by any a priori dictum as to the uniformity of natural law
must inevitably fail. The same applies to the denial of providence or of
answers to prayer on the ground of the uniformity of natural law. Here no
breach of nature’s order is affirmed, but only a governance or direction of
nature of which man’s own use of natural laws, without breach of them, for
special ends, affords daily examples.
2. SCRIPTURE AND THE SPECIAL
SCIENCES
Approaching more nearly the alleged
conflict of the Bible or Christianity with the special sciences, a first
question of importance is, What is the general relation of the Bible to
science? How does it claim to relate itself to the advances of natural
knowledge? Here, it is to be feared, mistakes are often made on both sides — on
the side of science in affirming contrariety of the Bible with scientific
results where none really exists; on the side of believers in demanding that
the Bible be taken as a text-book of the newest scientific discoveries, and
trying by forced methods to read these into them.
The truth on this point lies really
on the surface. The Bible clearly does not profess to anticipate the scientific
discoveries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Its design is very
different; namely, to reveal God’ and His will and His purposes of grace to
men, and, as involved in this, His general relation to the creative world, its
dependence in all its parts on Him, and His orderly government of it in
Providence for His wise and good ends. Natural things are taken as they are
given, and spoken of in simple, popular language, as we ourselves every day
speak of them. The world it describes is the world men know and live in, and it
is described as it
appears, not as, in its recondite
researches, science reveals its inner constitution to us. Wise expositors of
the Scriptures, older and younger, have always recognized this, and have not
attempted to force its language further. To take only one example, John Calvin,
who wrote before the Copernican system of astronomy had obtained common
acceptance, in his commentary on the first chapter of Genesis penned these wise
words: “He who would learn astronomy and other recondite arts,” he said, “let
him go elsewhere. Moses wrote in a popular style things which, without
instruction, all ordinary persons endued with common sense are able to
understand. * * * He does not call
us up to heaven, he only proposes things that lie open before our eyes.” To
this hour, with all the light of modern science around us, we speak of sun,
moon and stars “rising” and “setting,” and nobody misunderstands or affirms
contradiction with science. There is no doubt another side to this, for it is
just as true that in depicting natural things, the Bible, through the Spirit of
revelation that animates it, seizes things in so just a light — still with
reference to its own purposes — that the mind is prevented from being led astray
from the great truths intended to be conveyed. It will serve to illustrate
these positions as to the relation of the Bible to science if we look at them
briefly in their application to the two sciences of astronomy and geology, in
regard to which conflict has often been alleged.
1. The change from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican
system of astronomy — from the view which regarded the earth as the center of
the universe to the modern and undoubtedly true view of the earth as moving
round the sun, itself, with its planets, but one of innumerable orbs in the
starry heavens — of necessity created great searching’s of heart among those
who thought that the language of the Bible committed them to the older system.
For a time there was strong Opposition on the part of many theologians, as well
as of students of science, to the new discoveries of the telescope. Galileo was
imprisoned by the church. But truth prevailed, and it was soon perceived that
the Bible, using the language of appearances, was no more committed to the
literal moving of the sun round the earth than are our
modern almanacs, which employ the
same forms of speech. One would have to travel far in these days to find a
Christian who feels his faith in the least affected by the discovery of the
true doctrine of the solar system. He rejoices that he understands nature
better, and reads his Bible without the slightest sense of contradiction. Yet
Strauss was confident that the Copernican system had given its death-blow to
Christianity; as Voltaire before him had affirmed that Christianity would be
overthrown by the discovery of the law of gravitation and would not survive a
century. Newton, the humble-minded Christian discoverer of the law of
gravitation,
had no such fear, and time has shown
that it was he, not Voltaire, who was right. These are specimens of the
“conflicts” of Christianity with science.
The so-called “astronomical
objection” to Christianity more specially takes the form of enlarging on the
illimitableness of the universe disclosed by science in contrast with the
peculiar interest of God in man displayed in the Christian Gospel. “What is man
that thou art mindful of him?” (Psalm 8:4). Is it credible that this small
speck in an infinity of worlds should be singled out as the scene of so
tremendous an exhibition of God’s love and grace as is implied in the
Incarnation of the Son of God, the Sacrifice of the Cross, the Redemption of
Man? The day is well-nigh past when even this objection is felt to carry much
weight. Apart from the strange fact that up to this hour no evidence seems to
exist of other worlds inhabited by rational intelligences like man — no
planets, no known systems (on this
point A. R. Wallace’s “Man and the
Universe” may be consulted) — thoughtful people have come to realize that quantitative
bigness is no measure of God’s love and care; that the value of a soul is not
to be estimated in terms of stars and planets; that sin is not less awful a
fact even if it were proved that this is the only spot in the universe in which
it has emerged. It is of the essence of God’s infinity that He cares for the
little as well as for the great; not a blade of grass could wave, or the insect
of a day live its brief life upon the Wing, if God were not actually present,
and minutely careful of it. Man’s position in the universe remains, by consent,
or rather by proof, of science, an
altogether peculiar one. Link between the material and the spiritual, he is the
one being that seems fitted, as Scripture affirms he is, to be the bond of
unity in the creation (Hebrews 2:6-9).
This is the hope held out to us in
Christ (Ephesians 1:10). One should reflect also that, while the expanse of the
physical universe is a modern thought, there has never been a time in the
Christian Church when God — Himself infinite — was not conceived of as adored
and served by countless hosts of ministering spirits. Man was never thought of
as the only intelligence in creation. The mystery of the divine love to our
world was in reality as great before as after the stellar expanses were
discovered. The sense of “conflict,” therefore, though not the sense of wonder,
awakened by the “exceeding riches” of God’s grace to man in Christ Jesus,
vanishes
with increasing realization of the
depths and heights of God’s love “which passeth knowledge” (Ephesians 3:19).
Astronomy’s splendid demonstration of the majesty of God’s wisdom and power is
undiminished by any feeling of disharmony with the Gospel.
2. As it is with astronomy, so it has been with
the revelations of geology of the age and gradual formation of the earth. Here
also doubt and suspicion were —naturally enough in the circumstances — at first
awakened. The gentle Cowper could write in his “Task” of those who drill and
bore. The solid earth and from the strata there. Extract a register, by Which
we learn That He who made it, and revealed its date. To Moses, was mistaken in
its age.” If the intention of the first chapter of Genesis was really to give
us the “date” of the creation of the earth and heavens, the objection would be
unanswerable. But things, as in the case of astronomy, are now better
understood, and few are disquieted in reading their Bibles because it is made
Certain that the world is immensely older than the 6,000 years which the older
chronology gave it. Geology is felt only to have expanded our ideas of the
vastness and marvel of the Creator’s operations through the aeons of time during which the world,
with its teeming populations of fishes, birds, reptiles, mammals, was preparing
for man’s abode — when the mountains were being upheaved, the valleys being scooped out, and
veins of precious metals being inlaid into the crust of the earth.
Does science, then, really,
contradict Genesis 1? Not surely if what has been above said of the essentially
popular Character of the allusions to natural things in the Bible be
remembered. Here certainly is no detailed description of the process of the
formation of the earth in terms anticipative of modern science — terms which
would have been unintelligible to the original readers — but a sublime picture,
true to the order of nature, as it is to the broad facts even of geological
succession. If
it tells how God called heaven and
earth into being, separated light from darkness, sea from land, clothed the world with vegetation, gave sun and
moon their appointed rule of day and night, made fowl to fly, and sea monsters
to plow the deep, created the cattle and beasts of the field, and finally made
man, male and female, in His own image, and established him as ruler over all
God’s creation, this orderly rise of created forms, man crowning the whole,
these deep ideas of the narrative, setting the world at the very beginning in
its right relation to God, and laying the foundations of an enduring philosophy
of religion, are truths which science does nothing to subvert, but in myriad
ways confirms. The “six days” may remain as a difficulty to some, but, if this
is not part of the symbolic setting of the picture — a great divine “week” of
work — one may well ask, as was done by Augustine long before geology was
thought of, what kind of “days” these were which rolled their course before the
sun, with its twenty four hours of diurnal measurement, was appointed to that
end? There is no violence done to the narrative in substituting in thought
“aeonic” days — vast cosmic periods — for “days” on our narrower, sun-measured
scale. Then the last trace of apparent “conflict” disappears.
3. EVOLUTION AND MAN
In recent years the point in which
“conflict” between Scripture and science is most frequently urged is the
apparent contrariety of the theory of evolution to the Bible story of the
direct creation of the animals and man. This might be met, and often is, as
happened in the previous cases, by denying the reality of any evolutionary
process in nature. Here also, however, while it must be conceded that evolution
is not yet proved, there seems a growing appreciation of the strength of the
evidence for the fact of some form of evolutionary origin of species — that is,
of some genetic connection of higher with lower forms. Together with this, at
the same
time, there is manifest an
increasing disposition to limit the scope of evolution, and to modify the
theory in very essential points — those very points in which an apparent
conflict with Scripture arose.
Much of the difficulty on this
subject has arisen from the unwarrantable confusion or identification of
evolution with Darwinism. Darwinism is a theory of the process of evolution,
and both on account of the skill with which it was presented, and of the
singular eminence of its propounder, obtained for a time a very remarkable prestige. In these later days,
as may be seen by consulting a book like R. Otto’s “Naturalism and Religion,”
published in “The Crown Library,” that prestige has greatly declined. A newer evolution has arisen which breaks with
Darwin on the three points most essential to his theory:
“Evolution,” in short, is coming to
be recognized as but a new name for “creation,” only that the creative power
now works from within, instead of, as in the old conception, in an external,
plastic fashion. It is, however, creation none the less. In truth, no
conception of evolution can be formed, compatible with all the facts of
science, which does not take account, at least at certain great critical
points, of the entrance of new factors into the process we call creation.
Man is the last
of God’s created works — the crown, and explanation of the whole — and he is
made in God’s image. To account for him, a special act of the Creator,
constituting him what he is, must be presupposed. This creative act does not
relate to the soul only, for higher spiritual powers could not be put into a
merely animal brain. There must be a rise on the physical side as well,
corresponding with the mental advance. In body, as in spirit, man comes
from his Creator’s hand.
If this new evolutionary conception
is accepted, most of the difficulties which beset the Darwinian theory fall
away.
The writer’s book, “God’s Image in
Man and its Defacement,” may be consulted on these points.
The conclusion from the whole is,
that, up to the present hour, science and the Biblical views of God, man, and the
world, do not stand in any real relation of conflict. Each book of God’s
writing reflects light upon the pages of the other, but neither contradicts the
other’s essential testimony. Science itself seems now disposed to take a less
materialistic view of the origin and nature of things than it did a decade or
two ago, and to interpret the creation more in the light of the spiritual. The
experience of the Christian believer, with the work of missions in heathen
lands, furnishes a testimony that cannot be disregarded to the reality of this
spiritual world, and of the regenerating, transforming forces proceeding from
it. To God be all the glory!
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