Religion in Science*

BY WILLIAM LOUIS POTEAT,

President and Professor of Biology in Wake Forest College

The invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity.-Paul, Letter to the Romans.

How is it possible that a state or a house cannot endure, no, not for the shortest time without a governor and overseer, but this so great and fair fabric should be guided thus orderly by chance and accident? There is, then, one who governs.-Epictetus, Dissertations.

It is true that a little Philosophy inclineth Mans Mindes to Atheisme; But depth in Philosophy bringeth Mens Mindes about to Religion: For while the Minde of Man looketh upon Second Causes scattered, it may sometimes rest in them, and goe no further: But when it beholdeth the chaine of them, Confederate and Linked together, it must needs flie to Providence and Deitie.-Bacon, Essays, "Of Atheisme."

Professor Huxley, on the occasion of receiving a public distinction, told a story of a member of the Society of Friends in the old pirate days. The lover of peace was a passenger on a ship which was threatened by a pirate ship. When the captain handed him a pike that he might take part in the common defence, he declined, though he was not unwilling to stand at the gangway and wait with the pike in his hand. When the pirates actually began to come on board, he pushed the sharp end of his pike into them, with the benevolent advice to each one, "Stay on thine own ship, friend."

In view of our last discussion and of that which is now proposed, the question may be asked, Are we not inviting trouble by mixing up the crews of two distinct and hostile ships? Does not reason say to faith, with the pike at her breast, "Stay on thine own ship, friend?" And is not faith equally concerned that reason stay on board its own ship? This question of distinct spheres has been heretofore touched upon incidentally. We must now consider it more directly.

As was remarked before, the view is widely held. Dr. Osler, for

*The concluding lecture of a series given on the Brooks Foundation in Hamilton Theological Seminary, May, 1905, and repeated the following autumn in Crozer, Newton, and Rochester Theological Seminaries and the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. The general subject of the series was "The Relations of Science and Religion." The lecture is presented here unchanged.

example, told the medical students of Toronto University some eighteen months ago that they would all sooner or later come to the point where they would try "to mix the waters of science with the oil of faith." He said they could have a great deal of both, if they could only keep them separate; that the worry came from the attempt at mixture.* Dr. Brinton declares that religion and science arise in totally different tracts of the human mind, science from the conscious, religion from the sub- or unconscious intelligence, and that, therefore, there is no common measure between them. We have noted, in the personal experience of a biologist and of a critic of our time, how these two powers of the mind presented themselves concretely in irreconcilable opposition, with different practical results. In the one case, a modus vivendi was established; in the other, faith with some protest, surrendered itself to the mastery of the rational faculty. The same antithesis appears in Tennyson:

If e'er when faith had fall'n asleep,

I heard a voice 'believe no more,'
And heard an ever breaking shore
That tumbled in the Godless deep;
A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason's colder part,
And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answered, 'I have felt!'
No, like a child in doubt and fear:

But that blind clamor made me wise;
Then was I as a child that cries,
But, crying, knows his father near.

This blind clamor of heart and head has served the useful pur. pose of bringing into clear relief the distinction between faith and belief, a distinction of great practical importance. Faith is seen to be of the essence of religion, belief concerns the form of it. Faith is the spirit's attitude of response to the unseen world, belief is the mind's assent to propositions about it. Faith, whose stages and processes escape logical manipulation, is said to be the gift of God; belief is a state of mind reached automatically in the presence of a body of evidence, and cannot, therefore,

*Johns Hopkins Univ. Circulars, Jan., 1904.

Relig. of Prim. People, p. 331.

be enjoined as a duty. Consequently, faith does not have to wait for the settlement of the mind's perplexities, and the odium and the distress of religious doubt are not permitted to shadow the clearness of the heart's response to the divine appeal, which is the real test of the religious experience.

And yet, widespread and useful as the separation of the faith function and the rational function has been, I beg to remind you that faith and reason are powers of the same mind. Their strife is a civil strife. I am told that the old "faculty psychology," which treated mind as a sort of parliament of powers under the presidency of the will, is completely superseded. The mind is a unit and acts as a unit, when it acts at all. Moreover, reason is no more characteristic of mind than is will, which includes impulse, desire, and instinct, and is close akin to the operation which we name faith. Indeed, will is held by some psychologists to be the more characteristic action, intellect being the expression of will. If, now, we have learned thoroughly the lesson which Horace Bushnell taught nearly fifty years ago, and have ceased to set over against each other the natural and the supernatural as mutually exclusive; if we extend the natural to embrace the supernatural and enthrone God over all, so that as Dante has it, "that Emperor who reigns above rules in all parts," then the realm of nature becomes one to its farthest confines, and the same mental powers bring us into relation with all its provinces. The apprehending faculty we call reason when it works under the relations of time and space or elaborates the sense-given ideas of the material world. We call it faith when it deals with the timeless and spaceless world, where the thought symbols that epitomize time and space experience are inapplicable, and where a certain vagueness of outline marks objects and events, probably because we have as yet no thought symbols for them except those derived from the still misty realm of our own consciousness. In mind functioning as faith, there occur, along with emotion, impulse, and desire, also cognitive elements, such as recognized traces of the divine movement in physical nature, or history or personal experience, traces as real as the footprints of longvanished reptiles in the Connecticut Valley sandstone; and in the one case as in the other, with these materials of observation, the imagination sets about its proper work of reconstruction.

Besides, there are the observations and reconstructions which countless generations back of us have made and which are now deeply organized in our constitution and rise up, we hardly know whence, to face us as imperious religious instincts. On the other hand, there is an intuitive, or instinctive, element in reason. While, as Pascal says, we infer the truth of propositions, we feel the truth of first principles. And who would deny the instinct of causality, of the existence of the external world, of the uniformity of natural law, which are presuppositions of the rational process everywhere?

It appears, therefore, that the opposition between religious intuition, or faith, and reflective analysis, or reason, is, as Edward Caird says, not a real opposition; each complements the other in the development of the religious life. This conclusion will, perhaps, prepare us to enter more hopefully upon the consideration of the positive religious affinities and implications of science.

THE SPIRIT OF SCIENCE.

I ask you to think first of the mental attitude of the masters of science, the spirit in which they have undertaken and prosecuted their work.

The publication in 1637 of Descartes' "Discourse on Method" is sometimes fixed upon as the beginning of the modern scientific development. In that famous treatise one of the central principles is the consecration of doubt as a duty; and the tradition of doubt, or skepticism, has clung tenaciously to the scientific calling down to our own day. But it is grossly misinterpreted. The apotheosis of doubt is supposed to be the chief feature of the cult of science, which offers sacrifice on no other altar. The case is far otherwise. The high-priest who, perhaps more than any other, is responsible for this apotheosis, declares that he always had an intense desire to learn how to distinguish truth from falsehood, in order to be clear about his actions and to walk sure-footedly in this life. There is, he said, a path which leads to truth so surely that even the lowest capacity can find it; and this is his guiding rule by which a man may find and keep that path:

"Give unqualified assent to no propositions but those the truth of which is so clear that they cannot be doubted."*

*Quoted by Huxley, Essays, Descartes' "Discourse on Method."

Moreover among the laws which he established for his own self-government occurs this fourth one:

"Make the search for truth the business of life."

It is not doubt, but truth to which Descartes pays homage, and the same high allegiance has bound all the priestly line downwards. Copernicus doubts the Ptolemaic astronomy until he can verify or displace it. Vesalius cannot bow at once before the authority of Galen and the authority of Nature. Lamarck, poor, old, blind, doubts the world which contemns him, that he may hold fast the new truth of transformationism, which is his sufficient consolation. Johannes Müller is led by doubt of the current teaching to a fresh examination of the foundations of physiology and morphology, and he gathers so large a harvest of truth that these sciences in his hands enter upon a new phase of development. Lyell doubts, and builds the new geology. And so it has been with all those who have given a new pace or a new direction to our growing knowledge of nature. Doubt is the pathway, but truth is the goal.

Indeed, the leading characteristic of the scientific spirit is its whole-hearted consecration to truth, its openness of mind before every problem, its eagerness to press the solution to the last possible point of completeness, and the abiding peace with which it accepts the truth with all the consequences. And you observe that this distinctive attitude of the scientific mind clearly involves a moral quality and a capacity which is not unlike faith. I mean the capacity to see and bring near a lofty ideal and a nobleness of purpose in pursuit of it.

We are told that when Pasteur died a writer in one of the Paris newspapers "described the intimate routine of the life at the Pasteur Institute, and compared it with that of a mediæval religious community. A little body of men, forsaking the world and the things of the world, had gathered under the compulsion of a great idea. They had given up the rivalries and personal interests of ordinary men, and, sharing their goods and their work, they lived in austere devotion to science, finding no sacrifice of health or money, or of what men call pleasure, too great for the common object. Rumors of war and peace, echoes of the turmoil of politics and religion, passed unheeded over their monastic seclusion; but if there came news of a strange disease in