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                14 page printout, page 506 - 519
                           CHAPTER XXX

            The Conflict Between Science and Religion

    The Historical Conflict -- Is There a Conflict Today? --
                    The Twilight of the Gods

                     THE HISTORICAL CONFLICT

     SCIENCE has, ever since its birth, been in conflict with
religion. Apart from the astronomical observations of the
Babylonian and Chaldean priests, which had the ecclesiastical aim
of helping them to keep a calendar, science began in the Greek
colonies on the coast of Asia Minor. On that beautiful and
healthful fringe of coast the first Europeans to be civilized, the
early Greeks, learned the rudiments of knowledge from Persians and
Cretans and Egyptians, and their fresh and energetic minds at once
perceived that tradition was entirely wrong and man must begin to
acquire knowledge by using his own reason and senses. Since these
early Greeks formed colonies in Asia, away from the main tribes in
Greece, they had a certain amount of liberty; and it is a universal
truth of history that where there are liberty and the spirit of
inquiry, religion begins to decay. But, as we see in what remains
of the speculations of these early pioneers of science, the liberty
was restricted. They were clearly in bad odor with their religious
neighbors. The way they talk about the gods and spirits shows
fairly clearly that they had to trim their sails. The more
outspoken of them were chased from city to city, in the name of the
gods.

     When some of them at last reached the great city of Athens,
they found religious prejudice against science much worse. Athens
has a brilliant record in everything except science, in which it
has no record at all. Anaxagoras, who tried to found a scientific
school there, had to fly for his life. The Athenian philosophers
found it advisable to despise science and to devote themselves to
"Spiritual realities"; though even this did not save Socrates from
death on the charge of impiety.

     A few centuries later the work of science was resumed, under
more favorable auspices, in the Greek-Egyptian city of Alexandria.
Here there were so many religions and gods that it would escape
notice whether a man worshiped or not. Science made very material
progress. The mind of the race seemed at last to have entered upon
its proper development. But, alas a new religion, Christianity, got
political power, murdered the last brilliant representative of
Greek thought, Hypatia, and completely extinguished scientific
research. The first thousand years of science, from Thales to
Hypatia, were conspicuously marked by conflict with religion, and
of all the religions Christianity was the most deadly opponent.

     Science began again in Europe. For several centuries it was
quite extinct: rather, it was in the condition of those animalcules
which live in the rain-gutter of your house, flourish on rainy
days, feed and breed, and then, as the moisture disappears, shrink
into their skins, so to say, and become mere dry specks of dust
until the next rain comes. The ideas of the Greeks thus lingered in
Greek literature, but in the Christian Greek Empire no one dreamed
of reanimating them. The beneficent shower of rain came with the
new Arab civilization; not on account of its Mohammedan religion,

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but very clearly in spite of it. Skepticism appeared with
remarkable rapidity in Bagdad and Damascus, and science revived
with just the same rapidity. The ideas of the Greeks were taken out
of their tomb in Greek literature, and commerce with China brought
new scientific ideas to Persia and Syria.

     Then this culture was carried across northern Africa to Spain,
and the Moors developed it with a brilliance that reminds us of the
ancient Athenians. Next, the Jews and a few Christian wandering
scholars took translations of Arab works to Italy, France, and
England; and, as the Mohammedans had settled also in Sicily and the
south of Italy, a similar stream poured northward from there.
Christian Europe began to cultivate science, in spite of the
Fathers; and naive modern Christians, who know nothing about the
history of these matters, clap their hands and say: Look at our
Roger Bacon, our Albert the Great, our Gerbert, and so on.

     We looked at them. We found that from Bacon to Copernicus they
all merely repeated what Greeks or Moors had told them, and that
the moment they opened their mouths, the modern conflict between
science and religion began. Bacon spent nearly half his adult life
in his monastic prison; Albert was extinguished with a mitre;
Gerbert with a tiara; Copernicus dreaded to publish his conviction
that Pythagoras was right until he was beyond the reach of the
Inquisition; Arnold of Villeneuve was hounded from land to land;
friar Jean de Roquetaillade died in prison; Cecco d'Ascoli and
Giordano Bruno were burned; Galileo was smitten on the mouth by the
Inquisition; Vesalius narrowly escaped its holy wrath, and so on,
and so on.

     At last authority in Christendom was weakened by the great
schism, and the world became sufficiently enlightened to see that
one need not be burned at the stake for studying chemistry,
physics, astronomy, or anatomy; though such work was generally held
to be a damnable waste of time. With the nineteenth century a new
phase opened. The Deists had attacked the crudities and
inconsistencies of the Old Testament, and scientific men now began
to reconstruct the real history of the earth and of man on lines
which were very different from those of Genesis.

     And whenever they opened up a new path of research, they, as
Huxley said, found a notice-board: "No road. By order of Moses."
Had the rocks been gradually formed by deposits in water? How old
was the earth? How old was man? What was the origin of the stars,
the plants, the animals, man, language, religion, the moral sense,
civilization? No road. It was all settled by the Old Testament.

     A common statement is that there never was a conflict between
religion and science, but there were skirmishes, in the "no man's
land" between the two, of adventurous representatives of each side.
This would have to be characterized as downright dishonesty if
those who say it knew what they were talking about. The science of
the middle of the nineteenth century formally, as science taught
that the earth had been formed gradually during tens of millions of
years; that man was certainly tens of thousands of years old; that
languages had been evolved; that living things had been on this
earth for millions of years; and that there never had been an


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interruption of life by a great deluge. Religion, just as formally
and officially, taught the opposite. To talk of a few combative
theologians sparring with a few combative scientists about these
matters is utter historical untruth. What every Church and all its
representatives then said about these matters was expressly opposed
to what science taught. The Modernist who holds that the legends of
creation, Adam, Eden, Babel, etc., are not religion should either
hold his tongue about the earlier conflict or explain that to his
clerical grandfathers these things were religion -- and not
"theology," as White says.

     Next, the religious people who dismiss this earlier conflict
with the light-hearted assurance that their grandparents were
unfortunately mistaken as to what religion really implied, are
equally fallacious and untruthful. No one has any right whatever to
put a new interpretation of the plain words of the Bible. The early
chapters of Genesis, which I have read in the Hebrew, are
accurately translated on the whole. It is only when the crude old
Jewish writers begin to talk about "loins" and "thighs," and so on,
that the translator has concealed the real meaning. To put any
other than the obvious interpretation on the early chapters of
Genesis is -- well it is too absurd to be improper. "Progressive
revelation" is the veriest piece of bunk that Modernism ever
invented. The Bible writers, whoever they were, meant what they
said, and the Jews have so understood them for twenty-five hundred
years. Putting a new interpretation on their words "in the light of
science" is not "interpreting" at all. It is a dreary sort of jig-
saw-puzzle game, in which you find a lot of words in the modern
scientific dictionary which cover the same ground as the Hebrew
text and mean precisely the opposite.

     The third and quite modern stage is to quit the
"interpretation" game and say either that the Bible contains no
revelation or that there is no religious obligation to consider it
in regard to facts of science or history. But the person who thinks
that by adopting this attitude he entirely escapes the
unpleasantness of the conflict of science and religion must be
extremely superficial. Is the fall of man a truth of religion or a
statement about prehistoric life which interests science? If the
former, there is a deadly conflict. The unanimous teaching of
science is opposed to it. If the latter -- if it is one of those
statements of fact which the Christian is not compelled to believe
the foundation of Christianity is an error. A few Modernists may
say that they do not admit original sin and an atonement for it,
but they are not Christianity.

     Finally, even the extreme Modernist cannot escape the
consequence of the historical conflict. He concedes that every
branch of the Christian Church and the Jewish Church taught a great
number of errors as religion during the whole of their career. He
maintains very strongly, however, that God knows everything and
takes a special interest in religion, truth, and Churches. To
reconcile these two beliefs is rather harder than reconciling
science and Genesis, at which be smiles. The great conflict,
instead of being a matter which he can airily dismiss as "a
mistake," turns out to be one more very formidable reminder that
humanity gets no help from Gods even in religious matters.


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     Religion changes and grows, he says: just like science, he
adds, in a brain-wave. But science grows larger and more confident,
while religion grows smaller and less confident. Science reaches
unanimity on thousands of points; religion has lost unanimity about
everything, even about God. No, you can't dismiss the nineteenth-
century conflict with a graceful gesture. It has left a corrosive
acid in what remains of religion. However, we are more interested
in the question whether, and to what extent, there is a conflict
today.

                   IS THERE A CONFLICT TODAY?

     We naturally resent the attitude toward religion of a few
American men of science in the present crisis. They were confronted
with an organized force representing at the most ten or fifteen
million people out of a hundred and twenty million: a body, mainly,
of men and women who were honestly ignorant of the facts, led by
fanatical or professional organizers. Instead of, with dignity and
courage, organizing the vast body of teachers in the United States
to protect their freedom, and appealing to the general public for
support, some of the leaders of American science made an attempt,
as futile as it was inglorious, to conciliate the dervishes by
protesting that science is not inconsistent with religion. It is as
clear as noonday that it is inconsistent with the religion of the
Fundamentalists, which was the real issue.

     But for many years, and in more than one country, scientific
men of some distinction have been giving the world this assurance
that there is no conflict between science and religion. In England
and Germany quite a number of scientific men have stated this. Sir
E. Ray Lankester, one of the most eminent of British men of
science, has actually contributed that assurance to a work in
defense of Christianity compiled by the Christian Evidence Society,
and has in a Rationalist paper acridly resented my own statement
that there is a conflict.

     If any reader is really puzzled by this attitude of scientific
men like Lankester, Osborne, Pupin, and Millikan, it will help him
if I explain the position of Lankester. That distinguished and
venerable zoologist resolutely refuses to say what he believes in
regard to religion, and he sourly resents any person saying it for
him. Nevertheless I will, from my own knowledge, explain that he is
an Agnostic and has not a particle of religious sentiment. When he
says that science is consistent with religion he means with the
ethical teaching of Christianity. Even of this he knows so little
that on the one occasion on which he discussed it (in the "R.P.A.
Annual," 1916) his eulogies of it were so uncritical that the
editor returned his manuscript with a timid request that he would
take some account of my research into the ethics of Jesus!

     The case is typical. When these scientific men, who may know
all that the world knows about some branch of physics, mathematics,
or biology, come to deal with religion, they are as feeble and
inaccurate as is a bishop or a Baptist professor who ventures to
deal with their sciences. But in the absence of any explicit
confession of Christian belief -- not a vague assurance that they
are "Christians," but a plain statement that they believe literally


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in the incarnation, atonement, and resurrection -- we may safely
assume that (as most of them intimate) they mean by religion an
ethical idealism or, at the most, a belief in some kind of God. And
there you get the first condition for understanding the much
discussed theme which is indicated in the title of this chapter.
When any man asks you whether there is any conflict between science
and religion, ask at once: Which religion do you mean?

     One word will suffice as to what we mean by "science." Any
statement of fact or any theory in any branch of science which has
the support of all the living authorities on the subject and is
contained in the received textbooks is quite certainly "science."
That is "the teaching of science" in the strictest sense. The fact,
for instance, that a teacher in a Seventh Day Adventist College, or
a medical man, or a college-teacher of a different branch of
science, disputes that statement or theory, makes no difference
whatever, if all the authorities and all the textbooks used in
education are agreed on it. That is science. Where the living
authorities are divided, the statement of one side, especially of
one man, is not "science." Where only two or three stand out
against the conviction of the majority of the authorities, we must
attach a very high probability to the majority-opinion, but it is
not "science" in the sense in which we use the word here. There is
a vast body, a whole library, of truth which is "science" in this
sense, and a very great deal of it is in deadly conflict with what
most people call their religion.

     Let us understand this again quite plainly. There is a certain
possible ambiguity here, and both theologians and some men of
science avail themselves of it. They deceive their readers and are
to that extent as crooked as the politician who takes a bribe.

     The ambiguity will be best seen by an example. Science
unanimously teaches that man was evolved from an ape-like ancestor,
and that he has made continuous slow progress, with long periods of
stagnation, since early Miocene days (something like twenty million
years ago, on the new estimate). This is totally inconsistent with
the beliefs that man was created, that he was originally a very
superior being and "fell," and that the course of human affairs was
afterwards interrupted by a deluge and a miraculous confusion of
tongues. But it is not the business of science to affirm this
inconsistency or to say a word about creation, fall, deluge, or
Babel. This is a simple instance, and the inconsistency is so plain
to the eye that hardly anyone will venture to say there is "no
conflict." There are, however, more serious inconsistencies, and we
must keep the principle clear. The question is not whether science
officially denies religious statements but whether what science
teaches conflicts with what religion teaches.

     But how in the name of all that is wonderful are you going to
settle what religion teaches? I forget how many religions there are
in America, and in any case a few are certain to have arisen since
the last enumeration. And that is not the whole difficulty. In any
one sect there are fifty or a hundred shades of belief. I will
guarantee to quote a hundred different "religious beliefs," from
Pantheism to a Pope-less Catholicism, in the American Episcopal
Church alone. No major Church now insists on a literal acceptance


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of all its formulae; and amongst the minor sects one finds
Unitarian churches, for instance, in America which openly state
that no belief at all is imposed as a condition of membership, yet
they exist for the cultivation of "religion."

     If, therefore, you want a thorough answer to the question
whether the teaching of science conflicts with religion, it looks
as if we shall have to take three hundred different collections of
religious beliefs and apply science to them. Thanks for the good
intention, you will say. We would rather collect stamps, oyster-
shells, or silk stockings.

     There is, however, a way out of the difficulty. We can take a
few leading types of religious belief or a few common doctrines. It
will, in fact, suffice if we take the two leading types, the
Fundamentalist and the Modernist. In this section I will show that
the characteristic Fundamentalist doctrines are blatantly in
conflict with received and established science. I will then show
that the doctrines of God and the soul, which are common to all
religions that demand any specific belief at all, are less openly,
but very seriously, discredited, by the teaching of science.
Finally we shall see that even the most advanced and ultra-
Modernist religions which dispense with a personal God (or even
impersonal) and leave open the question of immortality, still lie
in the path of advancing science. Any belief or statement, as
distinct from sentiment, which calls itself religious, is in
conflict with the teaching of science.

     The Fundamentalist beliefs I have dealt with in various other
chapters, and I must simply summarize here what I have said, and
add a few further considerations. There is absolute unanimity
amongst the scientific experts on the fact of evolution, and the
conflict here is deadly and notorious. Not one single living
writer, not one who has lived within the last twenty years, quoted
in Fundamentalist literature as opposed to evolution, is an
authority on the subject. MacCready Price is merely a teacher of
geology -- and he has only been a few years at that -- in a Seventh
Day Adventist College in a backward State. The other writers
quoted, if they are not men who died decades ago, are teachers of
physics (which has nothing to do with the subject) or medical men.
Evolution is "science" in the very strictest sense of the word.

     Genesis is completely irreconcilable with science on a score
of points apart from evolution, and Genesis, as we have it, was
certainly not written until a thousand years after the alleged time
of Moses and is a fraudulent compilation. The legends which are
found in the first few chapters of Genesis were borrowed from the
Babylonians.

     The Fundamentalist may be invited to use his fundamental
common sense. On the one hand are a few professors of divinity of
poor intellectual standing and a large number of preachers of no
intellectual standing whatever: on the other hand are not only the
majority of the more learned theologians of the world but the
united and unanimous experts in astronomy, biology, physiology,
zoology, geology, psychology, anthropology, and archeology. The
experts and professors of the eight sciences concerned are quite


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unanimous. My experience amongst the Fundamentalists is that they,
as a rule, merely need to be undeceived on this point. Their
literature grossly deceived them into thinking that scientists are
themselves not agreed about evolution.

     If it were a question of a single point, evolution, as
Fundamentalists generally imagine, it is just conceivable that a
man might for a time suspend his judgment, but the situation is
very different from this. While eight sets of experts prove
evolution, another set prove by its internal evidence that the
Pentateuch was not written until about 500 B.C.: another set derive
from the ruins of Babylonia and Assyria legends of creation, Eden,
fall, and deluge so closely corresponding to the Hebrew legends
that no one can doubt their identity: another set show that the
history of the race has been quite different from the story of the
Old Testament. And so on. Against this mass of evidence accumulated
by independent bodies of the most highly trained students in the
world, the Fundamentalist can only put ... what? In ninety-nine
cases out of a hundred he could not even tell you why he believes
the Old Testament to be "the Word of God."

     Nor must we forget that the story which is thus assailed by
science in its beginning in Genesis is equally assailed in its
culmination in the New Testament. The science of comparative
religion shows us the origin in the older pagan religions of the
stories of Christ's miraculous birth, atoning death, and
resurrection. These stories were not part of the first Christian
tradition, but were added to it.

     Therefore the position, not merely of the Fundamentalist and
the Roman Catholic, but of any Christian who holds the Church
doctrines of the creation and fall of man, and the miraculous
birth, atoning death, and resurrection of Christ, is quite plain.
He is in flat and flagrant conflict with science. Amateur
theologians like Osborne and Pupin easily forget that comparative
religion is a science as truly as biology is. They talk nonsense
when they say that "science" has no bearing on the virgin-birth and
the resurrection. The science of comparative religion gives us just
such stories centuries older than Christianity; and the issue is,
as we saw, not whether any science declares itself inconsistent
with Christianity, but whether what it teaches is so consistent or
not.

     I am not concerned here with believers who put new
interpretations on the old doctrines of creation, original sin,
atonement, resurrection, etc. I share the scorn of the
Fundamentalist for such things. They mean, in plain American, that
the Christian doctrines have been abandoned. In one of my works
("The Religion of Sir Oliver Lodge," 1914) I analyzed the various
professions of faith of a British scientist who, while holding
Spiritualistic views, declares himself a member of the Church of
England and is, I understand, often flatteringly invited to read
the lessons in Birmingham Cathedral. And this is how, from the
study of his works, I find him accepting the simplest of the
creeds:




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     I believe in God -- a God who is one with Nature,
     The Father Almighty -- but not all-powerful,
     Creator of Heaven and Earth -- which were not created, but are
     eternal, And in Jesus Christ, His only son, our Lord -- who
     is, however, a son of God only in the same sense as we, but
     more so,
     Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost -- as an artist conceives
     his work, not miraculously,
     Born of the Virgin Mary -- who was not a virgin,
     Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried
     -- not to atone for the sins of the world.
     He descended into hell -- which does not exist;
     The third day he rose again from the dead -- of his soul made
     a new body out of ether.
     He ascended into heaven -- or made a final phantasmal
     appearance.
     Sitteth on the right hand [which doesn't exist) of God the
     Father Almighty [who is not Almighty] -- though there is no
     heaven to sit in.
     From thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead --
     that is to say, he will persuade them to judge themselves.
     I believe in the Holy Ghost -- which is a figure of speech,
     The Holy Catholic Church -- certainly not the Roman, and the
     Anglo-Catholic only as long as it imposes no belief on me,
     The communion of saints -- by telepathy,
     The forgiveness of sins -- each man forgiving himself,
     The resurrection of the body -- which certainly won't rise
     again,
     And life everlasting -- which may not last forever; we don't
     know.

     I understand that Sir Oliver Lodge was a little peeved when my
very careful reconstruction of his creed appeared. But it is
strictly based upon his works, and it is probably the creed of the
few other men of any intellectual distinction who call themselves
Christians. It is the creed of the extreme Modernists, and on some
such lines runs the creed of all who no longer literally accept
such doctrines as hell, heaven, atonement, etc. All that we need
say here is that they are Christians who believe that Paul and the
Christian Church have been wrong in nearly everything until science
began to enlighten the world.

     With the Fundamentalists the conflict is to the death; and one
needs no gift of prophecy to say which combatant will die. The plea
of Fundamentalist leaders, that they are not opposed to true
science, is too transparent an imposture to deceive their followers
long. "True science" obviously means the science which does not
conflict with their medieval views. They remind one of the early
days of the nineteenth century when the Chinese met their
aggressors with wooden guns. When Fundamentalists and Catholics
realize how they are deceived by the literature put in their hands,
how little competent their leaders are to deal with the questions
they treat with such levity, how really humorous it is for a
handful of preachers, with an eccentric medicine-man here and
there, to attempt to tell the united experts of the world what is
true and what is false science, the religious world in its entirety
will retreat, with great dignity, to "positions prepared in
advance."

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                    THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODS

     We cannot examine every Christian sect, every possible
temporary position on the line of retreat from Fundamentalism to
extreme Modernism, but there is no serious need to make the
attempt. There is no logical and respectable position between the
two. And the decisive factor in this is science. We have
reconstructed the early history of our race, and the truth we have
discovered is fatal to the essential message of the Bible and the
Christian religion.

     Seven thousand years ago there was no civilization on this
globe: I mean that there was no branch of the human race
sufficiently advanced in intelligence to have discovered that
primary and essential requirement of civilized life -- written
language. In the valley of the Nile, in Mesopotamia, and in Crete
men were advancing in the direction of civilization, but it is now
usual to put their actual arrival at the civilized stage at about
3000 B.C.; and the Chinese civilization began later, the Mayan
still later (about 500 B.C.). There is no doubt that ten thousand
years ago no section of the race rose above the level of Neolithic
culture; stone weapons, skin clothing, elementary agriculture and
pottery.

     There is, further, no doubt that fifty thousand years ago no
section of the human race rose above the level of the Australian
aboriginal of today: a very low type of savage. The earth has been
raked from Patagonia to Siberia, from Scandinavia to South Africa,
and we have a very good knowledge of the men of fifty to a hundred
thousand years ago. And there is just as little room for doubt that
with every fifty thousand years that we penetrate into earlier time
the race sinks still lower in culture. What we may almost call a
geological accident, the formation of flint, led to the recording
in every age of man's mental advance. His flint implements, of
which we have millions for the last half million years, reflect his
degree of intelligence as faithfully as the printed page reflects
ours. They are immortal and unalterable.

     Thus we may leave the question of the evolution of man
entirely out of consideration. It is merely foolish to make that
question the main issue in the conflict between science and
Genesis. The fundamental and essential Christian doctrine is not
based upon the creation, but upon the fall of man, upon a certain
version of man's early history. And whether or no man was evolved
from an ape-like creature, the scientific record of his slow
development as man is fatal to the legend of Eden and the fall. The
essential part of the Christian structure of doctrine breaks down
when the legend is abandoned. Paul, on whom, rather than on the
gospels, theology is based, was entirely wrong. The primeval curse
is a Babylonian legend now completely discredited by what science
teaches about early man, quite apart from evolution, and therefore
a divine redeemer of the race becomes superfluous. When, as I said,
we also take the science of comparative religion into account,
belief in the fundamental Christian doctrines becomes impossible.



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     One word, in passing, to the Modernist. He would talk less
foolishly sometimes if he kept clearly in mind the fact that he is
in a very small minority. Of the fifty million Christians of
America probably forty-nine millions are not Modernists. Let him
therefore not say airily that science does not conflict with
religion because it does not conflict with his religion. He is one
in fifty. I am more concerned about the forty-nine. Moreover, the
semi-Modernist might justly be warned to see that new verbiage is
not necessarily new thought, and that a book is not necessarily
profound because it costs two or three dollars. The land which lies
between straight Fundamentalism and straight Modernism is the Land
of Bunk.

     By straight Modernism I mean the candid admission that the
Bible story is wrong -- that there was no revelation, no fall of
man, and no atoning death -- coupled with the claim that there is
a God, that he has put in the breast of men a hope of immortality
which he may be expected to fulfill, and that Christ and
Christianity are the supreme guardians and exponents of the moral
law. Science certainly pursues any Christian believer until he
reaches that position.

     Does the conflict then cease? Of course, say the Modernists
and the religious professors. Let us be humble and consider very
patiently what these great men condescend to tell us about the
matter.

     The mischief is that they tell us so very little and say it so
very loud. As to Professor Osborne, the high priest of the little
tribe of Aaron in the American scientific world, I have shown
elsewhere that his "Earth Speaks to Bryan" contains so many errors
on vital points that a scientific examiner, if one were, for the
fun of the thing, appointed to examine it by the usual academic
standards, would not give the author fifty points out of a possible
hundred. He is not even correct about science -- Cro-Magnon man,
for instance and his proofs that there is a revolt against
Materialism in the scientific world are so slovenly and inaccurate
that the examiner's blue pencil would wrathfully erase this whole
section of his book. And in the end we are left wondering -- I
mean, some people are left wondering -- what particular religious
doctrines Professor Osborne really does believe.

     Scarcely less arrogant and pompous is the assistant high
priest of the group, Professor Millikan, and fortunately he has
told us a little more clearly what we are to believe -- I mean,
what he believes. I have before me an article in "Collier's Weekly"
(October 24, 1925) in which the writer gives a (presumably
corrected) report of a very serious and solemn talk he had with
Professor Millikan.

     Compose yourselves, my brethren, and listen to the oracle. For
Professor Millikan knows so much about the electron that he thinks
he discovered it; and this gives him a very high authority to talk
about God. You see the connection, don't you? Not many years ago
the preacher used to say that scientific men knew least about
spiritual things because they were engaged all day and night



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groping in the bowels of matter. Now, it seems, the men who grope
deepest in the bowels of matter -- physicists like Millikan and
Lodge -- are the most fitted of all scientists to deal with
spiritual realities.

     Professor Millikan, anyhow, is very positive. "I have never
known a thinking man who did not believe in God," he says. Somehow
the apologists for the angels have not made much use of that
impressive testimony. They like audacity, but ... Millikan forges
ahead. "Men who have the stuff in them which makes heroes all
believe in God," he says. Every American soldier in the war, of
course, believed in God; though the chaplains reported that nine-
tenths of them would have nothing to do with him. It "pains"
Professor Millikan when he hears men express "crudely atheistic
views." Without religion our age is going to be destroyed by the
very powers which science has given it, and, as to a conflict
between science and religion, it is "impossible."

     Let us see. Conflict is impossible, he says, because the
business of science is to accumulate knowledge and the business of
religion is "to develop the consciences, the ideals and the
aspirations of mankind." Some would say that this development of
consciences and ideals is religion, and its sufficient motive is in
this present life. After all. if there is a danger of "destruction"
unless our ideals are developed, we really have some incentive to
developing them. For Professor Millikan religion is based upon
belief in a personal God, and this is what we want to test. These
skirmishes are, he says, between "men who know very little about
science and men who know very little about religion," and the
professor who knows a great deal about both is offering the world
a profound faith in God which science can never disturb. Let me
give it in his own words, for if even Millikan's theism is open to
conflict with science, we need hardly go further:

          The more we investigate, the more we see how far we are
     from any real comprehension of it all, and the clearer we see
     that in the very admission of our ignorance and finiteness we
     recognize the existence of a Something, a Power, a Being in
     whom and because of whom we live and move and have our being
     -- a Creator by whatever name we call Him.

     Someone once said that it did not follow that water was deep
because you could not see the bottom at a glance; it might be
muddy. it seems applicable here, I am, according to Millikan, one
of those "men who have never known the deeper side of existence."
We can forgive a mere physicist for not being able to write
ordinarily decent English ("deeper side of existence," etc.), but
we really have a right to expect cleaner thinking from a
mathematician. All that I can distil out of the above verbiage is
that we are still very ignorant, which I quite admit, and that
because we are so very ignorant there exists a Creator.

     Now, supposing that Professor Millikan had some definite idea
in his head, it must have been this: that a Power or Being is
responsible for our existence, and since we have searched so long
and remain so ignorant, that Power must be beyond or behind the
universe, and we call it God. And the answer, or answers -- for you


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could shoot all day at this kind of stuff if it were worth it, are
short and sharp. First, science is only about a century old, and it
is premature to talk about things being "behind the mystery of
existence." Secondly, there is no mystery of existence, for
existence is an ultimate fact. Thirdly, our "ignorance" expressly
forbids us to use such words as "Whom" and "Him" and "Creator" and
"God." Fourthly, we have not the slightest reason for talking about
anything that "gives meaning to existence." Fifthly, this despiser
of atheistic crudities and praiser of his own profundity is just a
shade cruder than the most threadbare of God-provers who argues
about First Causes. ...

     What Millikan really means, in his muddle-headed way, is that
some Power unknown to us explains the universe and its contents.
That is bad philosophy and bad science -- let me boldly say, bad
physics. Powers do not make anything. Power is an abstract idea.
Some agencies or agents made the universe what it is. We have an
imperfect knowledge of matter and ether as such agents and
Professor Millikan gives us no reason why he should talk of another
agency or agencies "beyond and behind" these. His "beyond" and
"behind" are simply words he has picked up in sermons. He talks
loosely from beginning to end. He drags in Copernicus, who, he
says, was "a priest," and was "persecuted"; and he was (though a
canon) not a priest and was never persecuted. in any case, Millikan
is very obviously basing his whole case on our present ignorance,
and he is therefore doing what theologians have done for decades:
saying that science cannot (today) explain something, so God must
(until tomorrow). The only logical deduction from ignorance is
Agnosticism.

     And he only makes matters worse when he -- in the usual
arrogant manner -- says that materialism is "altogether absurd and
utterly irrational," because "love, duty, and beauty" are spiritual
things, and tracing these back to his "Power behind Nature," he
concludes that this Power is spiritual and personal. It is a
platitude of the lower forms in the theological seminary. When did
any man ever prove that they are spiritual? Love is an emotion:
duty is an abstract word: beauty is an aspect of material things.
At the most, Professor Millikan means that the mind is a non-
quantitative reality, which no one has ever proved, while science
suggests precisely the contrary. This "profound" thinker, who is
assuring the world that conflict between science and religion is an
impossibility, at once gives as the second basis of his religion a
statement which is actually being used as a target for a hot fire
of scientific criticism; and the first basis is an ignorance which
his own science is daily striving to overcome!

     The arrogance of men who use this empty and ancient verbiage,
these moth-eaten pulpit arguments, is amusing; but my chief concern
for the moment is, not to refute the arguments, for the thousandth
time, but to show the nonsense of all talk about the conflict of
science and religion being over. The fine work which Professor
Millikan has himself done in physics crowns only a century of
research. What will science know about the "powers" of the universe
in ten centuries? What will it know a million years from now?
Conflict is impossible, he says, because the business of science is



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to develop knowledge, and the business of religion is to develop
ideals; and forthwith he makes his religion a business of getting
knowledge in parts of the universe which science has not yet
illumined!

     Nor is this all; but to illustrate the next aspect of this
"new scientific religion," which was a platitude in the days of
Socrates, I turn to another member of the group of religious
scientists, Professor Calkins. I am not aware that Professor
Calkins has ever used the arrogant and offensive language we get
from Osborne and Millikan -- the men who so much fear that our
character will deteriorate without religion -- but I really cannot
take his religion more seriously. I remember years ago, when I was
engaged in microscopic work, using a very fine manual on the
Protozoa by Professor Calkins. On the title-page was an old German
motto, and, as the book is no longer in my library, I must quote it
as well as I can from memory:

          Les' dieses Buch, und tern' dabei
          Wie gross Gort auch in kleinem sci.

Which means: "Read this book and learn from it how great God is
even in small things."

     I am not going to examine the argument for God which must have
been in the mind of Professor Calkins, or to enlarge on the fallacy
of it. I do all this in the chapter, "The Futility of Belief in
God." As I there state, Professor Calkins' book gives a most
admirable description of microscopic animalcules and germs, with
excellent illustrations of the apparatus by which they prey on each
other and on man. The most deadly enemies of the human race and of
all animals precisely because of their invisibility, the most awful
disseminators of poison and pain since man became the nervous
creature he is, the causes of most of the worst diseases and
suffering in the world ... and we are asked particularly and
pointedly to see the finger of God in these things! I could
understand an Atheist, in irony, putting such a motto on his book,
but in a religious scientist it is incomprehensible. And we are
superficial!

     According to these professors Ingersoll was a "superficial"
man. When a young lady, carefully nurtured in the deep Millikan-
Calkins wisdom, one day said to him: "Colonel, who made these
beautiful flowers?" be replied: "The same, my dear young lady, that
made the poison of the ivy and the asp." That is as deep as any man
need go or can go. It is not at all clear that a "spiritual power"
is needed to make flowers and birds of paradise; in fact, it is
totally incomprehensible how a spiritual power could, and the more
deeply you think the more improbable it becomes. But it is clear
that loving beings do not put scorpions, poisoned thorns. or
hypodermic needles charged with typhus-germs in the path of the
children they love.

     The shrewder theologians of the last century saw that the most
deadly effect of the new science was that it prolonged the tragedy
of nature over millions of years. It was the light-headed
chanticleers of the pulpit who crowed that evolution was "a more


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splendid revelation than ever of God's power." The suffering in
nature had always saddened really devout minds. When science
established that this suffering had gone on for fifty million
years, instead of six thousand, the thoughtful believer shuddered.
Now, in the last few years, science has established that the
tragedy of life has proceeded for something like a billion years.
The fact that evolution contradicts Genesis is a feather in
comparison with this.

     I once, in debate before a Fundamentalist audience, forced Dr.
Riley to admit that this story of life on earth during a billion
years might be true. He smiled as he admitted it, thinking that he
could save his face by pleading that the "days" of Genesis were
periods of unknown lengths. It did not even occur to him that this
meant hundreds of millions of years of ghastly suffering and
brutality.

     As long as men retain a belief in a personal God, this
teaching of science rudely conflicts with it. Evil was always felt
to be a hostile element to the belief in God. Evil as formulated by
modern science -- evil in the shape of myriads of deadly structures
playing a vital part in the progress of life during hundreds of
millions of years -- is far more hostile. No conflict, indeed!

     And even if only the first part of Professor Millikan's
argument or rhapsody be followed, if the claim is made that, since
science cannot at present explain the fundamental features of the
universe, a power beyond the sphere of scientific investigation
must be admitted, there is an essential conflict. It is precisely
the business of the man of science to find out if the agencies
known to him -- ether, matter, force, electrons, or what you like
-- will explain any and every phenomenon known to us. Every advance
he makes dislodges the theologian from a patch of "ignorance."
Every lamp that is lit in another dark chamber shows that the ghost
is not there. The conflict is continuous, essential, and to the
death.



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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY
                               by
                          Joseph McCabe

                              1929





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                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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