27 September: Boreham on Science and Religion

Life's Basic Harmonies
It was on September 27, 1831 that the British Association met for the first time. It still holds its meetings at this time of the year, and all the other learned bodies hold their annual meetings, and all the world pricks up its ears to listen. Things are said by the most eminent living authorities that may possibly startle or excite us, but that are at least deserving of close and careful attention. As a natural consequence we each experience a quickened interest in scientific research, for we all realise nowadays, that science is everybody's business.

The day has gone for ever in which such exalted matters were regarded as the academic foibles of the few; we recognise them as the vital concern of the multitude. They affect us each: they affect us each all the time, and they affect us each in relation to everything and everybody with whom we have to do.

During the past few years, science has given the average man an entirely new conception of the grandeur of that organic scheme of things of which he himself is a component part. When, at the request of President Roosevelt, Mr. Wendell Willkie made his historic tour of the nations, nothing impressed him more than the basic an fundamental unity of the race. On his return to the United States, he elaborated his thought in the book "One World," completed just before he died. Such revelations as are made to us when the masters of the various sciences meet in solemn conclave impress us with the same conviction on a still more imposing scale. We are confronted, not merely by One World, but by One Universe. A sense of basic unity and exquisite harmony is the outstanding feature of things everywhere.

Many Notes Comprise The Perfect Music
The ancient controversies have died a natural death because men have come to see that, whatever records leap to light, truth can never by any possibility be the enemy of truth. The truth that the astronomer discovers among the stars cannot be at variance with the truth that the geologist finds among the stones. The truth that the botanist reveals from among earth's flora cannot contradict the truth that the zoologist reads among earth's fauna.

If the seeming truth of one age, or if the apparent truth of one school, denies the cherished conviction of another age, or challenges the mature conclusions of another school, one or other of these antagonistic factors must of necessity be masquerading in the guise of truth. In the conflict that must inevitably ensue, error must be vanquished and truth will hold its ground more firmly after the fray.

Stressing this aspect of things, an ancient seer employed a picturesque pair of parables. Watching from an oasis in the desert, he saw two caravans approaching, one from the east and one from the west. The one hurried: the other loitered; but they arrived simultaneously. "That," the observer remarked, "was no coincidence: they had obviously trysted." Again, in lowering the flap of his tent at night, he heard the terrifying roar of a lion: next morning he came on a place where the brushwood was splashed with blood, and the ground littered with bones and horns and hide and fur. These two things—the bloodcurdling roar in the darkness and the gruesome spectacle in the daylight—are, he reflects, no coincidence. They are two aspects of the same thing.

Life is full to overflowing of such coincidental and dovetailing phenomena. When, on the one hand, truth comes to us from the stars, and when, on the other, it comes to us from geologic strata, and when, on their contemporaneous arrival, we find that one consignment of truth is in exact agreement with the other consignment of truth, we instinctively feel that the harmony is not the result of chance. They agree so perfectly because of a basic unity at the heart of things.

Needless Dread Of New Discoveries
Truth can never deny truth: the truth that issues from the womb of the future will recognise its kinship with every particle of truth that has ever been revealed or discovered since the world began. Let the astronomer sweep the vast dome of heaven with ever mightier telescopes! Let the geologist apply himself with increasing fervour to the reading of the records of prehistoric ages! Let the archeologist plough up all the plains and sift the sands of the desert in his search for the urns and monuments and hieroglyphics of antiquity! Let the greatest living scholars scrutinise under the most powerful microscopes every vowel and consonant and punctuation mark in our most sacred literature!

One of the most striking developments of recent history has been the way in which Science and Religion, like the two caravans keeping their tryst in the desert, have moved towards each other. A century ago the young people of Christian homes were forbidden to read the works of scientists; while the sages and savants looked with ill-disguised contempt upon all religious trends and institutions.

Then a new day dawned. Men who were searching after truth along one line of investigation came to recognise that they had no reason to fear the men who were searching after truth along another line. If a contradiction arose, it was felt that the confusion was purely a matter of interpretation. If astronomy and geology reach different conclusions, nobody supposes that the stars and the strata are at strife. Obviously, there is something amiss, either with the interpretation of the stars by the astronomers or with the interpretation of the strata by the geologists. Similarly, when Science and Religion speak with discordant voices, it does not now occur to us that Nature and Scripture are at variance. We ask the scientists to reconsider their interpretation of the one, and the theologians to review their interpretation of the other, in the certainty that, when they have done so, we shall hear once more the music of the Spheres.

F W Boreham

Image: 'with ever mightier telescopes'