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By Rev. A. Powell Davies D.D.
March 16, 1947
To those who are accustomed to
the liberal viewpoint in religion, it may seem surprising that
anyone should wish to discuss the rather elementary question as to
whether science and religion can get together. In liberal churches,
it has been taken for granted for almost a generation that nothing
substantial has ever kept them apart. Even in more traditional
churches, thousands of sermons have been preached, all of them
undertaking to demonstrate that scientific knowledge and religious
faith can be harmonious: that there is no necessary opposition
between them. Why, therefore, should people be asked to listen to a
further discourse on a subject upon which everything pertinent must
already have been said?
Moreover, is it not the case that the harmony of science and
religion is being proclaimed on all sides these days--that even the
popular magazines have taken up the question and, by quoting
religious leaders side by side with scientific celebrities, have
shown that the controversy is practically over: that all that
remains is to emphasize that scientists can be religious and that
preachers can reconcile their creeds with science?
Yes, it is indeed true that popular magazines have been misleading
the public in this way. It is also true that most of the thousands
of sermons have been thoroughly disingenuous; they have achieved
their purpose by neatly avoiding the really penetrating issues and
have deceived the listening congregations by not distinguishing
between religion as a system of traditional beliefs and religion as
a basic faith. Statements made by individual scientists, very
cautious general statements, have been made to look like full
endorsements of the doctrines of particular churches, and in such a
way that the whole of science appeared to be committed to what an
individual scientist was made to seem to say. Sometimes scientists
have deserved this treatment, as the penalty of preferring a
cautious ambiguity in the phrasing of their statements to the
strenuous but honest controversy which more detailed and more
forthright words would bring. They have not wanted to say what kind
of religion they accepted, or to tell anyone the content of their
personal beliefs. They have been inclined to think of religion as
not quite important enough for really careful definition. Or they
have found it convenient to speak of it as not demanding the sort of
intellectual honesty required by science. I do not mean that any of
them have said this in plain words, but it is a fair inference from
their attitude.
It is also probable that many of the more prominent scientists,
after being quarreled with by churchmen until they were tired, found
themselves grateful for almost any ground of reconciliation that
gave them a chance of being let alone. From this, it was only a step
to letting themselves seem to endorse--vaguely, of course--the
prevailing religions that were so eager to applaud them. At any
rate, they have taken very little trouble lately to point out the
incredibility of most that passes for religion--and its demoralizing
effect upon people who must meet the problems that confront us at
the present time.
Let me be clear: I am not accusing either churchmen or scientists
of calculated dishonesty. What I am saying is that both are treating
a highly important matter in the way they find easiest instead of
with a scrupulous regard for truth and its consequences. That is why
I want to speak on the subject. My fear is not that religion and
science are failing to get together, but that they are getting
together--on a very dubious, shaky, and unsound basis.
It has become popular today to claim to be scientific. Even the
traditional churches are unwilling, for the most part, to be
altogether excluded from this claim. They see that science has
brought improvements to the world they live in: the telephone, the
radio, electricity, swift transportation, methods of increasing
crops and conserving soil--these and scores of other innovations are
conspicuous, at any rate in North America, as widely distributed
benefits made possible by modern science. If we add the more
spectacular achievements, many of which became universally known
during the war, it is easy to see why very few people can continue
to resist the blandishments of science.
If they do attempt it, then the minute they become seriously ill,
they must capitulate completely. For scientific medicine gives them
their best chance, and often their only chance, of getting well.
Nothing is more natural than the extension of popular allegiance
from the practical effects of science to science itself. Knowing
nothing of it as a method or an intellectual discipline, it is
nonetheless easy to accept it, to believe in it, since obviously
only a good tree could bring forth so much good fruit. So that, as I
say, it has become popular now to claim to be scientific--or at
least to esteem the scientific. Traditional churches want to be on
the same side as science, but --and here is the fatal
restriction--they want to do it while remaining traditional
churches. They want the pretense to endure that their creeds are
true and their ecclesiastical authority genuine. As the old proverb
puts it, they want to have their cake and eat it.
If we wish to know what happens, in one degree or another, when
unscientific institutions try to adopt science, the world has
recently afforded us some instructive examples. Hitler's Germany was
an unscientific institution, based upon tribal prejudice, and the
myth of blood and soil. It adopted science, as we know, very
energetically, but being itself unscientific, was forced to dominate
and deflect it--to decree a hybrid thing called "German science."
And whenever a scientist discovered something that conflicted with
the Germanism of Hitler's policies, he was told to renounce it and
discover the opposite. If, for instance, he discovered that the
racial elements in Nazi doctrine were unscientific--which, of
course, they most emphatically were--he had to make room for a
scientist (or should we say a pseudo-scientist?) who found reasons
to confirm prevailing prejudices. We know how many scientists were
forced to leave Germany--during the period when it was possible to
leave. It was partly because some of the outstanding ones among them
were refugees in this country that we and not the Nazis were first
with the atomic bomb. All that I want to show by this example, for
the moment, however, is what happens when an unscientific
institution "gets together" with science.
To a lesser degree--I suppose it is lesser--we see the same thing in
Soviet Russia. From time to time, scientists disappear from public
view. This happens, apparently, whenever their research leads them
towards conclusions to which the political rulers are opposed.
If science in the United States ever became dominated by a
reactionary government, or by a reactionary church, or by both
together, the result could be just as unfortunate. Indeed, it could
be disastrous. That is one of my reasons for advocating--as I have
several times lately--that a scientific and civilian-minded
regulation of science be set up while there is still time. Recent
scientific discoveries have become so dangerous, and further
discoveries are so certain to be more so, that it is inconceivable
that public regulation can be long delayed. If it is not
accomplished by scientists themselves, on a civilian basis of
unconcealed and open regulation, it will surely be imposed
tyrannically as soon as an emergency provides the opportunity.
But it will be imposed in any case if science and the wrong kind of
religion "get together." Any scientist who believes that science is
secure enough in modern civilization to protect itself against
traditional institutions if they get the chance to dominate it, is
blind to the situation in which he is living. He should consider
carefully the examples I have just cited. Then, he should appraise
present factors in the light of past history. He will find that
science has no chance at all except when it is protected by
liberalism. In religion, this means that science imperils its future
the minute it begins to lend aid and comfort to traditional beliefs.
The institutions founded upon those beliefs will insist, wherever
they have the power, upon suppressing whatever challenges their
authority. In such a world as we now face, this is not a possibility
to be passed over lightly. Science betrays itself whenever it makes
concessions--unscientific concessions--to the wrong kind of
religion. It contributes in that moment to its own subordination,
its own subjection.
And it does so, not only for the reasons I have already indicated,
but for another reason and a very positive one. It is true, just as
many scientists are now saying, that mankind needs spiritual and
moral reinforcement as never before. Or, in shorter words, it is
true that we need religion. But unless the religion we find can
really meet our need; unless it is free from false beliefs, from
escapism, from trust in the miraculous and supernatural; unless it
is a religion that fosters the utmost moral effort of which we are
capable; unless it is an honest, clear-sighted, open-eyed religion,
then we should be a good deal better off without it. So that
scientists are only right in turning to religion, if they remain
scientific in the process.
No fallacy has done more harm than the widespread opinion that
science and religion can divide the world between them: that certain
provinces belong to the scientific method, such as physics,
chemistry, biology, and so forth; and other provinces to religious
insight, like conscience, personal integrity, social aims, and faith
in God and human nature. This is all wrong. There is no province
whatever in the entire life of man from which science should be
excluded; or religion. I do not mean by this that the scientific
method can be used at present for all possible purposes with equal
success. Manifestly, it cannot. But every effort should be made to
extend it until it can--or until it comes as close as possible to
that standard. It is vital, as it seems to me, that the scientific
method should be used as fully and promptly as determined effort can
make it, in sociology and in psychology and in all that helps us to
understand ourselves and human society. If knowledge is power, we
surely need this knowledge. We need to know how to bring up our
children to emotional wholesomeness, so that they will not be
spiritually distorted. We need to be able to do the same thing with
society as a whole. We have seen entire nations become psychopathic.
Do we not require--and urgently--the best that scientific methods
can bring us in understanding and controlling such things? It is the
great deficiency of modern science that it has done almost too much
in mastering the outer world, and altogether too little in affecting
the inner world.
I contend with extreme emphasis that it is treason both to science
and to religion to exclude the scientific method from the inner life
of man. I also insist that such an exclusion is perilous. We need,
above all, people who are equal to the problems they must solve:
people who think well and think straight, and whose emotional life,
whose spiritual life, is disciplined towards its hardiest and
healthiest. We need the scientific examination of superstition and
prejudice. We need the scientific separation of truth from error. We
need all that science can possibly do for religion--and we need it
badly. As it seems to me, only the religion that admits
this--indeed, proclaims it--can be such a religion as science may
endorse.
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