[ p. 91 ]
The uproar about the teaching of evolution has brought back once more to the center of the stage the old controversy between science and religion. As one reads the many articles upon the subject one gets the uncomfortable impression that, while the extreme fundainentalists are unmistakably definite in their views about an inerrant Bible and the wickedness of evolution, and while the scientists are clearcut in their attitude about the truth of evolution and the necessity of freedom in teaching it, the position of religious liberals is not being dearly’ put.
Some vaguely progressive minds take too much comfort in such consoling generalities as that true science and true religion cannot conflict. The proposition is so harmless that no one is tempted to gainsay it but, so far from solving any problems, it serves only to becloud the issue. The plain fact is that, however true science and true religion ought to behave toward [ p. 92 ] each other, actual science and actual religion are having another disagreeable raonkey-and-parrot time.
That this ought not to happen, that, ideally, science and religion move in different realms and should peacefully pursue each its separate task in the interpretation of man’s experience, is easy to say, and it is true. Life, like the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians, if it is to be fully understood, needs for one thing the grammarian. He will analyze it into its parts of speech, note the differences between nouns and pronouns, verbs, adjectives, articles, and adverbs, and will formulate the laws by whkh they are put together to make a complex unity. That is an indispensable piece of business in the understanding of the chapter and it represents the scientist’s work on the world at large. But if the chapter is to be fully known, a more comprehensive method of interpretation must be exercised upon it than the grammarian alone can be responsible for. Its meaning as a whole must be apprehended, its lessons understood, its spiritual value appropriated, its autte studied through the medium of his expression. That attitude applied to life is religion. Religion [ p. 93 ] and the interpretation of life, its origin, its purpose, and its destiny, in terms of them. The grammatical analysis and the spiritual appreciation ought not to quarrel. The appreciator ought to thank God for the grammarian whenever he thinks of him.
But, for some reason or other, making the lion and the lamb lie down in peace together hm proved no more ideal a dream than getting science and religion to quit their controversy and become partners in the interpretation of life. What is the reason?
In so far as religion is responsible, there are at least two explanations of this recurrent contention. One is the association of religion with an inerrant book. Every one who knows anything about the historical origins of the Bible knows how little it is an artificial product, the result of supernatural dictation, handed down from heaven, as has been taught of the Koran, or miraculously hidden and discovered, like the Mormon. Modern scholarship [ p. 94 ] has traced the progressive writing and assembling of our Scriptures with a massing of evidence which puts the general outline of the process beyond reasonable doubt. From the earliest documents, such as the war-songs of Deborah, up through the long story of growing laws, changing circumstances and customs, enlarged horizons of moral obligation, worthier thoughts of God, through the prophets, and the Master’s ministry to the early Christian church — stage by stage the writing and assembling of the documents which now comprise our Bible can be traced. How much of the Bible was in existence in the eighth century B. C. we know, and what each new cohtey with its chan^ng thoughts and insighlsi mutributed we can see.
It is obvious that ihis amazing Mtmture came warmly up out of human experience* That is its glory and its strengtL Touch it anywhere and you can feel the pulse of men and women in their joys and sorrows, straggles, aspirations, faiths, despairs. The whole book is “blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.” These were real folk whose spiritual life welled up in psalm and prophecy and [ p. 95 ] whose life stories are told in the most rewarding narratives that literature has preserved. Here also was recorded a development of thought about God, about duty, about the significance of human life, far and away the most valuable that history records. Of course, a Christian who deeply believes in God does not think it was an accident. Of course, he sees in it a revelation, an unveding of the truth by which man’s life is elevated, purified, redeemed. Of course he thinks it was inspired.
But whatever else inspiration may mean, it certainly does not mean that men in writing a sacred book are lifted out of their own day provided with the mental thought-forms, scientific explanations, and world-views of a generation thousands of years unborn. It is that utterly fallacious and futile idea of inspiration which causes the trouble. One wonders why anybody should wish to believe it. What good does it do ? What addition does it to the inherent spiritual value of the book ? Would the Twenty-third Psalm be more beautiful if the writer had had a Ph.D. from Harvard, or is the fourth chapter of Ephesians dependent for its worth upon the [ p. 96 ] supposition that the writer held the Copemican astronomy?
There is no peace for religion in its relationship with* science until we recognize that, of wurse, the Bible is not an inerrant book. As far as the physical universe is concerned, all the writers of the Bible supposed that they were living on a flat earth covered by the solid firmament of the sky, with heaven above and Sheol beneath, and fiery bodies moving across the face of the sky to illumine man. The Great Isaiah did not have to look through Galileo’s telescope to write his fortieth chapter, nor would Micah’s summary of the law, to do justly, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with God, have been any finer if he had been able to explain Einstein on relativity.
When, therefore, the Bible is set up in op* position to evolution, the whole issue is ludicrously false. The Bible knows nothing about evolution, just as it knows nothing about automobiles and radio. It knows no m«e about Darwin and his mutation of speries tibaa it does about Gopemicus and his revolution the earth. The Bible antedates all that. The first chapter of Genesis simply took the old [ p. 97 ] Semitic story of creation, purified it of mythology, made it monotheistic, and set it in majestic language. It is the noblest narrative of creation in any ancient literature. But it has no possible connection vrith evolution, for or against. It is a picturesque presentation of creation in six literal days, each with an evening and a morning. It is not proscientific ; it is not antiscientific; for the simple reason that it is not scientific at all. And the absurd attempt to make Genesis mean evolution hy streldhing the days into eons never was dreamed of during the long centuries of the Bible’s existence until it was ingeniously suggested hy some scribal mind, as a desperate device to insinuate geologic ages into Holy Writ.
No armistice can possibly be declared in the recurrent war between science and religion unless this elemental fact about the Bible is clear. To suppose that we must think about problems in the way the Biblical writers did is incredible. Nobody does it. The most rock-ribbed fundamentalist never remotely approaches doing it. Voliva of Zion [ p. 98 ] City comes the nearest to it. He beKeres that the earth is flat.
The Bible is the supreme Book of spiritual life. There we touch a valid revelation of the character and the will of God. It is a fountain that never runs dry, and the better it is known the better for personal character and social progress. But to use it as a scientific text-book is perilous nonsense which does far more harm to religion than to anything else. That is indeed hoisting religion with its own petard.
Religion’s responsibility for the contest with science can be traced to another source. Religion may almost be said to consist in a sene of sacredness; it makes man feel that some things in his life are holy, inviolable; it reveirs them, loves them, even worships before them as the symbols and evidences of God. This attitude of religion, throwing a glamour of sanctity over everything with which it is closely associated — shrines, rituals, holy persons and places, ideas and ideals — belongs to its very [ p. 99 ] genius. No one would want a religion that did not do that. The cleansing of religion from superstition does not eliminate this powerful influence which inheres in the sense of sacredness; it simply detaches the feeling of sanctity from unworthy and magical objects and reorients it around moral ideals, transforms it into reverence for personality and devotion to duty seen as the Will of God.
This consciousness that something in lite is sacred, worth living and dying for, is one of humanity’s moral indispensables, and religion is the fruitful mother of it. But it is very dangerous. It is one of the things which we cannot get on without but which it is perilous to get on with. I was talking recently with a student of sociology about the strange contrast between the eager welcome given to new seientific inventions and the apathy, dislike, gctive opposition that greets new suggestions the social and spiritual realms. The automobile, the aeroplane, the radio—how instantly and avidly they are received and utilized! But to alter the ritual observances of ditfrch, to introduce eugenio practices, to get á reformation of theology, or to organize [ p. 100 ] a League of Nations to replace belligerent nationalism — what an uproar of outraged sentiment always accompanies suggested change in such realms!
The reasons for this strange inconsistency are doubtless many, but the sense of sacredness clearly plays an important part. That holds up progress indefinitely in any place where it can get a foothold. Nobody counts a bicycle sacred if he wants an automobile, or regards rowing a boat as holy if he is able to buy a motor. The sense of sanctity does not operate in such realms. We change from candles to kerosene lamps, to gas, to electricity with no struggle against the rebellious sentiment of sacredness. But in the realms of human relationships in general and of religion in particular the feeling of sanctity is one of the most powerful, restraining influences in our lives. Patriotism conceived in terms of my country against yours gains sanctity, and when men wish to change it to my country with yours for the peace of the world, aroused patriots resent the new idea as though a shrine were being desecrated. Even such unlikely things as the rules of the United States Senate can become [ p. 101 ] sacred until any alteration seems sacrilege. As for religion, this truth easily explains most of its ultraconservatism. How typical of all religion it is that, long after the stone age was passed and bronze knives had come in for household purposes, the old flint knife stil was used to slay sacrificial beasts! Religion had cast over the ancient implement the glamour of sanctity and it could not be changed.
The application of this to the problem in hand is dear. Whatever else religion may clothe with feelings of reverence, it is sure to do so with those forms of thought, those mental vehicles, in which it has carried the precious freight of its spiritual experience. Listen to good old Father Inchofer in 1631 as he pours out of a pious heart his outraged sense of sacrilege at the idea that the earth moves; “The opinion of the earth’s motion is of all heresies the most abominable, the most pernicious, the most scandalous; the immovability of the earth is thrice sacred; argument against the immortality of the soul, the existmce of God, and the incarnation, should be tolerated sooner than an argument to prove that the earth moves.” Why this rage ? Why [ p. 102 ] should a gentle servant of his fellows thus boil with indignant grief at a new astronomy ? The reason is precisely the same that makes the fundamentalist to-day forget the Sermon on the Mount and ransack the dictionary for something bad enough to say about the evolutionists. Father Inchofer, I suppose, had had a deep and beautiful spiritual experience. He had lived in fellowship with God and love for men. He had always visualized that relationship in terms of a stationary earth with the concentric heavens encircling it. On that mental trellis the flowers of his spirit had bloomed. It was very sacred to him. He revered it as part and parcel of Ms faith. We ought to sympathize with him. No wonder the idea of a moving earth seemed to Mnii ito an advance of science, but an abyss of blasphemy.
Nevertheless, Father Inchofer was wrong and Father Inchofer’s successors to-day are wrong for the same reason. They have let their sense of sacredness run away with them. Their feeling of sanctity has unintelligently attached itself to all sorts of things that are not integral parts of vital religion. A station [ p. 103 ] ary earth is not sacred; a whimsical universe where miracles, not law, are the order of the day is not sacred; creation by fiat is not sacred. Religion has no inherent dependence on such outgrown ideas. Yet all these things, along with many others from the use of anesthetics in operations to acceptance of the law of gravitation, have been bitterly opposed in the name of religion as though the old science to which the religious imagination had clung, around which it had entwined itself, were a holy thing. There is no peace in sight between science and religion until religion recognizes that the sense of sanctity is too valuable an article to be misused in holding up scientific progress. Once many Christians were scandalized at geology just as now they are scandalized at evolution; they called it “a dark art,” “dangerous and disreputable,” “a forbidden province,” “an awful invasion of the testimony of Revelation.” How long will religious people go on making blunder which always reacts disastrously upon the fortunes of religion itself and in the end can do nothing against the new truth?
Always the outcome has been the same: the [ p. 104 ] scientific view of the world has triumphed and the s^ers of the spirit have found the new truth a nobler vehicle than the old for the experiences of the soul. Religion is not dependent on this scientific formulation or that. Religion moves in the realm of spiritual values where the soul does justly, loves kindness, and walks humbly with its God. Through all the centuries, under every conceivable scientific view of the world, men have found their peace and power in that; and if tomorrow our modern view should be upset and Darwin be out-Darwined by some new discoverer, our children’s children at their best would find, flowing in their new channels, the water of eternal life, whereof, if a man drink, he does not thirst again.
One does not mean that blame for ttie repeated contests between science and religion rests exclusively upon religion. Scientists are human; they are quite capable of making fools of themselves. Especially they display an inveterate weakness before one besetting temjptation, They get a working hypothesk in [ p. 105 ] some special wience; they rejoice in its elFectiveness; they organize by means of it the data in their particular realm; and then, infatuated by their success, they proceed to postulate the hypothesis as a complete explanation of the iHUTerse and an adequate philosophy of life. Aj^in and again that has been done. One specialist in the effect of sunlight on life was eren guilty of the ludicrous dictum: “Heliotropiam doubtless wrote Hamlet.” To-day some of our behaviorists in psychology are doliig same thing. One might have expected it. This overweening confidence in the adequacy of a working hypothesis in a special amsMX to explain everything naturally anerges in the early days of the science when the new idea has just burst in all its glory on the ffiou^t of its discoverers. Behaviorism il « vary valuable working method of investiin pt^diology, but behaviorism is not ail account of personality, as some of its devotees consider it; much less does it furnish a comprehensive philosophy of life.
Religion, therefore, does have reason to be deeply concerned about some tendencies in modern science. There is a real conflict between [ p. 106 ] those whom science has led to a materialistic philosophy and those who interpret life in terms of its spiritual values. But this is not a conflict between science and religion; this is a conflict between most scientists and all religionists on one side and a few scientists upon the other.
As for the issues now popularly upsetting the equilibrium of the churches in America, let fundamentalism look to itself. It is not fighting evolution with facts, which alone can be effective instruments in such a war. KTo one who knows the facts is against evolution. It is fighting evolution with authoritative dicta from an inerrant Book and with a horrified sense of outraged sanctity about the disturbance of an outgrown way of thinking. That sort of procedure never yet did anything but harm to religion. Meanwhile, increasing multitudes of devout Christians rejoice in the larger thought of God and the stronger faith in him which evolution has brought.