The Relations Between Religion and Science eBook

Frederick Temple
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 163 pages of information about The Relations Between Religion and Science.

The Relations Between Religion and Science eBook

Frederick Temple
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 163 pages of information about The Relations Between Religion and Science.
favour and absolutely no evidence against it.  And although scientific belief would then still rank below mathematical belief, it would nevertheless have a cogency quite irresistible.  Science would not thereby gain in power of progress, in practical acceptance, or in utility to man.  But men are so constituted that completeness gives a special kind of satisfaction not to be got in any other way.  If Science could but be complete it would seem to gain in dignity, if it gained in nothing else.  And it is easy to foster a kind of passion for this completeness until every attempt to question it is resented.  I have seen a boy first learning mechanics show a dislike to consider the effect of friction as marring the symmetry and beauty of mechanical problems; too vague, too uncertain, too irregular to be allowed any entrance into a system which is so rounded and so precise without it.  And something of the same temper can sometimes be seen in students of Science at the very thought of there being anything in the world not under the dominion of the great scientific postulate.  The world which thus contains something which Science cannot deal with is pronounced forthwith to be not the world that we know, not the world with which we are concerned; a conceivable world if we choose to indulge our imagination in such dreams, but not a real world either now or at any time before or after.  And yet the freedom of the human will and the sense which cannot be eradicated of the responsibility attaching to all human conduct, perpetually retorts that this world in which we live contains an element which cannot be subdued to obedience to the scientific law, but will have a course of its own.  The sense of responsibility is a rock which no demand for completeness in Science can crush.  All attempts at reconciling the mechanical firmness of an unbroken law of uniformity with the voice within that cannot be silenced telling us that we must answer for our action, have failed, and we know that they will for ever fail.

If indeed it could be said that the progress of Science was really barred by this inability to make the induction complete, and to assert the unbroken uniformity of all nature; if it could be said that any uncertainty was thus cast over scientific conclusions, or any false or misleading lights thus held up to draw inquirers from the true path, it would undoubtedly become a duty to examine, and to examine anxiously, whether indeed it could be true that our faculties were thus hopelessly at variance with each other, the scientific faculty, imposing on us one belief, and the spiritual faculty another, and the two practically irreconcileable.  But there is no reason whatever for thinking this.  Newton’s investigations were unquestionably pursued, as all true scientific investigations must ever be pursued, in reliance on the truth of the uniformity of nature, and yet he never felt it the slightest hindrance to his progress that he always tacitly and

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The Relations Between Religion and Science from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.