[ p. 135 ]
In one of our American colleges founded long ago in piety and faith for the furtherance of the Gospel, a professor recently made a “Senior Chapel Address” frankly skeptical of God and immortality, the key-note of which was sounded in the words, “God becomes progressively less essential to the running of the universe.” There is occasion for thought along many lines, not only for religious people but for all our citizenship, in this suggestive spectacle of an American college chapel founded for the worship of God thus transformed into a platform for denying him. But behind all other questions lies the basic issue which the professor raises. He thinks that modern science is making God increasingly unnecessary.
That is the nub of the whole matter in the age-long conflict between science and religion. That way of stating the issue—not that science theoretically disproves God, but that science progressively makes him “less essential” [ p. 136 ] —correctly focuses the problem. Religious people, fretted by fear of modern views of the world, have comforted themselves with the assurance that science cannot disprove God. Of course it cannot! They have assuaged.their grief, mourning the loss of old theologies, by the conviction that, as new telescopes do not destroy the ancient stars, so new ways of viewing God’s operations do not negative the Ancient of Days himself. Of course not! But that is not the ultimate issue in the conflict between science and religion. The professor has that matter correctly put. What modern science is doing for multitudes of people, as anybody who watches American life can see, is not to disprove God’s theoretical existence, but to make him “progressively less essential.” Although its applications and its consequences are innumerable, the reason for this can be briefly stated. Throughout man’s history in the past and among the great majority of people to-day, religion has been and is a way of getting things that human beings want. From rain out of heaven to good health on earth, men have sought the desires of their [ p. 137 ] hearts at the altars of their gods. Closely associated in its early history with magic—the search for some spell or incantation, some Aladdin’s lamp which would make the unseen powers subject to the user—religion has always provided for its devotees methods of worship, forms of ritual, secrets of prayer, or spiritual relationships with God guaranteed to gain for the faithful the benefits they have sought. In every realm of human want and craving, men thus have used religious methods to achieve their aims and, whether they desired good crops, large families, relief from pestilence, or success in war, have conceived themselves as dependent on the favor of heaven. And now comes science, which also is a method of getting what human beings want. That is its most important character. As a theoretical influence it is powerful enough; as a practical influence it is overwhelming. It does provide an astoundingly successful method of getting what men want.
Here is the crucial point of competition between science and religion. In realm after realm where religion has been offering its methods [ p. 138 ] for satisfying men’s desires, science comes with a new method which works with obvious and enormous consequence. Quietly, but inevitably, man’s reliance for the fulfilling of his needs slips over from religion to science. Not many men stop to argue against religion— they may even continue to believe it with considerable fervor—but they have less and less practical use for it. ‘The things they daily want are no longer obtained that way. From providing light and locomotion, or stamping out typhus and yellow fever, to the unsnarling of mental difficulty by applied psychology, men turn to another method for their help. God is not disproved; he is displaced. The old picture of a bifurcated universe, where a supernatural order overlies a natural order and occasionally in miraculous interference invades it, becomes incredible. Creation is all of one piece, a seamless garment. And if, now, in this indivisible and law-abiding world we can get what we want by learning laws and fulfilling conditions, why is it not true, as the professor said, that “God becomes progressively less essential to the running of the universe”?
[ p. 139 ]
It is the more important to visualize this matter clearly and deal with it candidly because the conflict between science and religion is so seldom conceived and faced in terms of this central problem. From the first, an instinctive fear of science has characterized organized religion, as it manifestly characterizes a great deal of American Christianity to-day. That fear is justified and the peril real, but it does not lie in the quarter where it is popularly located.
That modern science is neither the science of the Bible nor the traditional science of the churches, that the ancient Book represents an ancient cosmology no longer tenable, so that . the Bible cannot any more be used as a court of appeal on any scientific question whatsoever, became apparent long ago. ‘The point of danger has been commonly supposed to lie there. Genesis versus astronomy, Genesis versus geology, Genesis versus evolution—such have been the major conflicts between the churches and the scientists. But such contentions, large as they have bulked in noise and rancor, are [ p. 139 ] child’s play compared with this other, central, devastating consequence which science is Silently but surely working in popular religion. Science to-day is religion’s overwhelmingly successful competitor in showing men how to get what they want.
This shift of reliance from religious to scientific methods for achieving human aims is so obvious that any man’s daily life is a constant illustration of it, and in particular it grows vivid to one who travels in lands where memorials of old religions stand beside the achievements of new science. This would have been a famine year in Egypt in the olden time; so low a Nile would have meant starvation to myriads. One stands amid the ruins of Karnak and reconstructs in imagination the rituals, sacrifices, prayers offered before Amon-Re seeking for help in such a famished year. But no one went to Karnak this year for fear of starving, or to any Coptic church or Moslem mosque or Protestant chapel. Men have got [ p. 141 ] ten what they wanted through another kind of structure altogether—the dam at Assuan. This sort of thing, indefinitely repeated in areas where man’s most immediate and clamorous needs lie, constitutes the critical effect of science on religion. It does not so much controvert religion as crowd it out. The historians are saying that it was malaria that sapped the energy of ancient Greece and drained her human resources. For centuries folk must have prayed against their mysterious enemy, sacrificed to the gods, and consulted oracles. From the days of the Dorians to the Christian churches in Corinth and the Moslem mosques that succeeded them, they tried by religious means to stave off their stealthy foe. But when a few months ago the Near East Relief took over old Greek army barracks at Corinth, put two thousand refugee children into them and straightway had twelve hundred cases of malaria, it was an American trained nurse who went into the community and despite apathy, ignorance, piety, and prejudice, cleaned up the whole countryside so that no one need have malaria there again. Reduplicate that sort of thing interminably [ p. 142 ] and the consequence is clear: we rely more and more on scientific methods for getting what we want. Travelers among primitive people must remark how deeply and constantly religious they are, so that no hour of the day is free from religious motive. Of course they are thus uninterruptedly religious. ‘They would better be. Religion is the chief way they know of being sure of everything they want, from children to crops, from good health to good hunting. But with us many an area where only religious methods once were known for meeting human needs now is occupied by science, and the mastery of law-abiding forces, which science already has conferred, puts into our hands a power that makes trivial all the Aladdin’s lamps magicians ever dreamed. A clever statistician recently has figured that in the mechanical appliances used in the United States in 1919 there was a force equal to over a billion horse-power, and that with a hundred odd million people to be served and each unit of horse-power equal to ten of man-power, every inhabitant of the United States, man, woman, and child, had on the average as good as fifty [ p. 143 ] human slaves now working for him. There is no limit to the possibilities of that procedure, men think. Wecan in time have what we want.
Where, then, does God come in? Learn the laws, master the law-abiding forces—that seems to an ever-increasing number the only way to achieve our aims. It holds as true of mind as of matter, as true of morals as of mind. Whether in improving our crops, healing our diseases, educating our children, building our characters, or providing international substitutes for war, always we must learn the laws and fulfil the conditions, and when we do that the consequences will arrive. Such is the scientific method which everywhere wins out as the competitor of traditional religion in meeting human needs. And the upshot is that religion seems ever less necessary: “God becomes progressively less essential.”
It is a tragic pity that, with this crucial problem facing religion in its relationship with science, anybody should be wasting time over foregone conclusions like evolution. For this [ p. 144 ] far-more-central matter must be faced, and it can be faced triumphantly.
In the first place, science may be a competitor of religion conceived as a means of getting what we want, but it is not on that account a competitor of the kind of religion that the great souls of the race have known. Religion at its best never has been merely or chiefly a means of serving man’s selfish purposes; it has rather faced men with a Purpose greater than their own which it was their business unselfishly to serve. The real prophets of the spirit have not so much relied on their religion for dole as they have been called by their religion to devotion. They have found religion’s meaning, less in getting gifts from it, than in making their lives a gift to it. Religion, as Professor Royce of Harvard kept insisting, is at heart loyalty— loyalty to the highest that we know. ‘The prayer of primitive religion and of a lamentable amount of traditional and current religion is “My will be done,” and the sooner science breaks up that kind of sacramental magic, pulverizes that vain reliance on supernatural sleight-of-hand, the better. Real faith will not thereby be touched; that has another sort of [ p. 145 ] prayer altogether: “Not my will, but thine, be done.”’ Any man who in this morally loose and selfish time undertakes to show that that prayer, translated into life, is less necessary than it used to be has a task on his hands. The generation is sick for lack of it. Our prevalent doctrine of moral anarchy—let yourself go; do what you please; indulge any passing, passionate whim—is a sorry, ruinous substitute for it. God as a benign charity organization that we can impose upon—let science smash up that idea! But God as the Goal of all our living, whose will is righteousness and whose service is freedom—he does not become “progressively less essential.” He becomes progressively more essential, and unless we can recover him and learn anew loyalty to the Highest in scorn of consequence, our modern society, like that other group of bedeviled swine, is likely yet to plunge down a steep place into the sea.
Whenever any man discovers something ‘greater than himself and in self-forgetting service gives his life to it, there religion has struck in its roots. There is such a thing as the “religion of science,” where men at all costs [ p. 146 ] and hazards live for the love of truth. Knowing, as I do, some churchmen formally religious but really undevoted to anything greater than themselves, and some scientists formally irreligious but devoted with all their hearts to the love of light, I have no doubt what the judgment of the Most High would be. He who faithfully serves the More-than-self has, in so far, found religion. So there is a religion of art in which men give their lives to beauty, as Ghiberti spent laborious years upon the bronze doors of the Florentine Baptistery that Michelangelo called the Gates of Paradise; and there is a religion of human service where men count others better than themselves and live for the sake of generations yet unborn. The Over-Soul appears to men in many forms and claims allegiance. When, however, man ceases this fragmentary splitting of his ideal world—truth here, beauty there, love yonder— and sees that God is love, truth, beauty, and that he who dwells in these and lives for them is dwelling in God and God in him as the New Testament says, he has found religion crowned and consummated. What is there in our modern knowledge that has disparaged this [ p. 147 ] spirit of devotion to the Highest or made it less necessary? What is there that can possibly take the place of it?
There is nothing peculiarly modern about this idea of religion as loyalty; it is at least as old as Gethsemane, as old as the prison house of Socrates, and the great hours of the Hebrew prophets. it has challenged conscience many a century in those who have thought it needful “to obey God rather than men.” Religion may have started with selfish magic but it did not flower out there. It flowered out in a Cross where one died that other men might live abundantly. When that spirit takes modern form, it turns up in folk like Doctor Barlow, a missicnary who deliberately swallowed the germs of a Chinese pestilence and then went to Johns Hopkins that by the study of the results the plague, whose nature had been unknown, might be combated. Science is no competitor of that kind of Christianity; that kind of Christianity uses science and all its powers in the ‘ service of its God. :
It strikes an interested observer of this present generation’s life that nothing has happened to make that spirit less necessary than it used [ p. 148 ] to be. It strikes one that there are some things which a college professor might better say to our youth than that God is becoming less essential.
This impression is deepened by another fact. Though the mechanical equivalent of fifty human slaves be serving each of us in the United States, and though that be multiplied as many times as imagination can conceive, by no such scientific mastery of power alone can our deepest needs be met. Religion is, in part, like science, a way of satisfying human wants, but there are wants that science cannot satisfy. The idea that the scientific method by itself can so fulfil the life of man that a new psalm sometime will be written beginning, “Science is my shepherd; I shall not want,” and ending, “my cup runneth over,” is not borne out by the actual effects of modern knowledge on many of its devotees. Consider this picture of creation drawn by one of them:
In the visible world the Milky Way is a tiny fragment. Within this fragment the solar system is an [ p. 149 ] infinitesimal speck, and of this speck our planet is a microscopic dot. On this dot tiny lumps of impure carbon and water crawl about for a few years, until they dissolve into the elements of which they are compounded.
Call that, if you will, a reductio ad absurdum of blank skepticism, yet anybody who is acquainted with our colleges knows students who are in that pit or on the verge of it or scattered all up and down the road that leads to it. A purposeless physicochemical mechanism which accidentally came from nowhere and is headed nowhere, which cannot be banked on for moral solvency, and to which we have no more ultimate significance than the flowers have to the weather—that is the scientific universe without religion. Something that man deeply needs is obviously left out of such a world-view. There are human wants, profound and clamorous, which that picture cannot supply.
While it is true therefore, that there are areas where traditional religion and modern science -meet in cutthroat competition and where the winning method of getting what men want is sure to be the scientific, it is also true that when every area that belongs to science has been [ p. 150 ] freely given up to her religion is only liberated, not obliterated. Whether or not a man will think he needs God to supply his wants will depend altogether on what his wants are. He may get his Rolls Royce and his yacht, have his fields irrigated, his houses built, his cuisine supplied, his pestilences stopped, without religion, although one may wonder how much of the stability and vigor of the civilization which produces such results has depended on faith in a morally reliable creation. He may even get health without God, although the experience of most of us is that the body is not well unless the mind is and that the mind is never well without faith and hope. But whatever else he may obtain without God he will still live in a world that, like a raft on the high seas, is aimlessly adrift, uncharted, unguided, and unknown. Any one who has ever supposed this world to be so futile and inconsequential an experiment of chance and now has entered into the faiths and hopes of a vital and sustaining religion will regard with utter incredulity the idea that God has become less essential.
If a man cannot honestly believe in God, let [ p. 151 ] him honestly say so, but let him not try to fool himself and us by the supposition that he is giving up a superfluity. Never in man’s history has faith in God been more necessary to sane, wholesome, vigorous, and hopeful living than to-day amid the dissipating strain and paralyzing skepticism of modern life.