1. Science and religion are by many supposed to be opposed, if not incompatible; the scientific and the theological tempers are considered to be poles apart. And yet deep down in the scientist’s mind there is a profound element of belief or faith. When he approaches a scientific mystery, or sets about making a discovery in the realms of matter, or devotes himself to the perfecting of an invention, there is one thing he feels sure of beforehand—that there is such a thing as truth, and that it is accessible to him who goes about studying it in the right way. The universe, he feels, is a harmonious, self-consistent, rational order; of this he never for a moment has any doubt; if he has any doubt it is about himself, and whether he is investigating its laws in the right way; if he is, then he knows that at last he will arrive at the truth he is seeking. Now this is faith, and it is faith in its purest form as a postulate, it is something taken for granted as the basis of all inquiry, and without which no scientist would for a moment think of wasting his time in inquiring about anything.
Fundamentally the advance of science and the advance of religion rest upon precisely the same basis, and that basis is faith. We cannot make the least advance in science until we have learned to believe—to believe certainly and without the smallest hesitation in certain fundamental truths outside ourselves. That is why for so many centuries science made no real advance. It was not ignorance, or stupidity, or want of apparatus, that stood in the way; it was want of faith. Men had not learned to believe devoutly in the stability, the orderliness, the reasonableness, the unchangeableness, of nature and her laws. They thought that the forces which ruled in the outward universe were capricious, incalculable. They were so confused by the tangle of shifting phenomena in the midst of which they lived that they altogether failed to grasp the uniformity of law—certain and simple as it really is—which lies behind this tangle. It was faith that saved science, it is faith by which science lives; faith which is not, of course, identical with religious faith, but which is fundamental and closely akin to it. All science, like all religion, rests for ever upon certain assumptions which are absolutely incapable of proof, which are absolutely essential to progress.
By faith we believe in our personality and in the fundamental deliverances of conscience; by faith we believe in memory and its correspondences with our personality; by faith we believe in a transcendence o thought, and in intelligence without consciousness; by faith we believe in the existence of an external world, and in the correspondence between its phenomena and the impression which they make upon our minds; by faith we believe in the genera and species and the extension of growth to the whole universe; and some of those agnostics loudest in their scorn of faith receive on its authority doctrines which would strain to breaking the faith of the firmest believer. By what unparalleled acts of faith do men believe that matter contains the power and potency of things; that the phenomena of the universe have their source and cause in an immaterial, untreated, impersonal, and inscrutable force. But more wonderful still is the act of faith upon which rests /the doctrine of the spontaneous generation of fife. At the present day it has been demonstrated, as far as demonstration is possible, that life comes only from life.
The unqualified acceptance of this law would necessitate the acceptance of the doctrine of life by creative action. But this would be impossible to an advanced man of science, and so by an act of faith he declares that once upon a time the world was in a condition in which life originated de novo; but that that condition speedily disappeared, and has never returned. Not only, then, has a tremendous act of faith been found when required to get rid of a disagreeable doctrine, but the eternity and inviolability of a law of nature has been readily sacrificed for the same end. I have occasionally heard something of the economics of theologians, but what are they to these? [Note: Sir Andrew Clark, in Church Congress Report, 1890, p. 223.]
2. No fact is more familiar to the student of history than the long rivalry and conflict. between science and religion. Yet it is not, prima facie, apparent either that this is a necessary or that it will be a permanent state of matters. On the contrary, one is impressed by the great number of interests, methods, and ideals which they have in common. Each of them aims at the discovery, the unification, and the orderly presentation of human knowledge. Each ultimately rests on faith, inasmuch as each is forced back upon convictions which are beyond the possibility of further analysis or proof. Every one asserts this of religion, but it is not always remembered that it is equally true of science. The reality of an external world, the connexion of cause and effect, the reliability of the inquirer’s powers of observation and reasoning, are fundamental elements in knowledge of the same kind as the ultimate data of religion. Even the methods of their advance are common to the two, for although the deductive method is usually associated with religion, it is often used by science; and all living religious faith is continually verifying and correcting its beliefs by experience, using just those methods of hypothesis and experiment which inductive science uses. Many ideals also—ideals of civilization, culture, and philanthropy—they hold in common, where either is properly understood.
Science and religion are no more separate—far less opposed —than are the animal and the vegetable kingdoms. A man and an oak are extremely different. But go down to the lowest forms of animal and vegetable life, and You do not know which is which; they are not yet differentiated. So it is with science and religion —fundamentally they are altogether alike, for the life and soul of each is faith; and the essential note of faith is the consciousness of being able to rely upon a something outside ourselves which will not alter, will not deceive, will not mock us, will not leave us in the lurch. You may call this something outside ourselves which is reliable “the uniformity of nature,” or “the goodness of God.” To my mind there is no difference in what is meant. And the effect upon the soul of man is the same. He has got his feet upon the rock; in science, or in religion, he can run and not be weary, he can walk and not faint. [Note: R. Winterbotham, Sermons, 410.]
3. Before science can proceed to investigate a single question, she must make a number of pure acts of faith. She must make, for example, (1) an act of faith in the trustworthiness of human reason—i.e. in its ability to lead the inquirer to true conclusions; (2) an act of faith in the trustworthiness of human memory, for unless memory is trustworthy it is impossible either to amass facts or to construct a chain of arguments; (3) an act of faith in the trustworthiness of the senses, for unless the senses can be trusted knowledge of the external world is impossible; (4) an act of faith in a number of unprovable principles, generally summed up in the phrase “the uniformity of nature.” All these propositions are assented to by acts of faith of the most absolute kind. They are not only not proved by science, but never can be proved.
Even so decided an agnostic as Professor Huxley says: “The ground of every one of our actions, and the validity of all our reasonings, rest upon the great act of faith which leads us to take the experience of the past as a safe guide in our dealings with the present and the future. From the nature of ratiocination [reasoning], it is obvious that the axioms on which it is based cannot be proved by ratiocination.” And again: “[The laws of Universal Causation and of the Uniformity of Nature] are neither self- evident, nor are they, strictly speaking, demonstrable. . . . If there is anything in this world which I do firmly believe in, it is the universal validity of the law of causation; but that universality cannot be proved by any amount of evidence, let alone that which comes to us through the senses.”
Not many years ago it might with justice have been said that the attitude of some leaders of scientific thought was strongly antagonistic to acceptance of many of the miracles, more particularly those which appeared to involve conflict with their preconceived ideas. But let us examine for a moment what should be the attitude of a scientific man to the apparent miracles of his own science. The position has been well stated by a former President of the American Chemical Society, as follows :— “He, who would carry out successful scientific research must exercise belief, based on suitable evidence outside personal experience, otherwise known as faith. This will require no great mental effort on the part of the student of the physical sciences. He has to apply the very highest orders of faith to the fundamental principles of these sciences. What is more, reliance on the dicta and data of investigators whose very names may be unknown to him lies at the foundation of physical, science, and without this faith in authority the structure would fall to the ground; not the blind faith of the Middle Ages, but a rational belief in the concurrent testimony of individuals who have recorded the results of their experiments and whose observations and whose statements can be verified.” [Note: J. A. Harker, in Science and Religion, 90.]
4. As we look at the great men of science, we see that faith is the very breath of their life. They believe that there is some great rational law which connects and explains what are now mere disjointed items of truth. Their ideas as to the nature of that law are crude and unsatisfactory at first. Their theory will not work; it does not explain things; the facts reject it; the tight-shut doors of truth do not fly open at their talisman. But they do not despair; their faith does not fail: they recast their hypothesis, modify, alter, enrich it. Again and again they manipulate their blocks with a clearer and more luminous picture before them, until at last the stubborn facts group and relate themselves; the ideal of the mind is realized before the eyes; the magic formula which induces order has been pronounced, and faith has given birth to new knowledge.
Darwin believed in the kinship and common origin of species now quite separate and distinct, and set himself to find the law of their derivation. If their parentage was the same, how is it that the members of the family diverge so widely in after-ages? “Variation through natural selection” is the answer, the hypothesis of faith, which by vast and patient labour is shown to fit and explain the most alien and discordant facts. It was only by unconquerable faith in system and order, and in the ultimate connectedness of things, that the greatest discovery of our age was won. [Note: A. Chandler, in The Faith of Centuries, 3.]
5. However much the truth may be overlooked, physical science is occupied with the invisible. It is the revelation of the invisible. That with which the student of nature deals is not the phenomenon, the appearance, but the fact which he is led to infer from it. He constructs the universe with atoms which no eye has seen or ever can see, and we rejoice in the vision of unimagined order which is laid open to us. He detects the presence of movements of exquisite sensibility in the inorganic masses which seem to us to be dead matter, and we rejoice in the presence of a life immeasurably vaster than we had known. He carries backward the lessons which he reads today, and “the everlasting hills” unfold a record of progress which enlarges and ennobles our conception of the Divine counsel and of the Divine working. He carries these forward, and in doing so He teaches us with solemn emphasis that the earthly order which we can trace and follow is a limited episode in the order of existence, of which the end can be fixed in the scale of years. By faith not by sight is, in a word, the phrase which must be written over the most splendid achievements of the physicist.
When Leverrier (and Adams in England) discovered the planet Neptune by pure calculation, he was able to predict the precise time and place in the heavens when this planet could be seen. But as yet no eye had seen it. Up to this point, no one would question that belief in the existence of Neptune was, even for the discoverer, an act of faith. But when the telescope was actually pointed to the heavens, and the new planet was identified in the very spot which had been indicated, faith was changed to sight. [Note: J. Orr, Ritschlianism: Expository and Critical Essays, 252.]
6. The demonstration of by far the greater part of scientific hypotheses consists simply in showing that the facts are unintelligible upon any other assumption. No one ever saw an atom, and no one ever will. But the phenomena of matter are inexplicable except upon the atomic theory, and this fact is its only proof. No one ever saw the ether, but’ we cannot comprehend heat and light without assuming it. To show this is to verify the theory. No one was present when the earth was fluid. We verify such an assumption only by showing that the present state of the earth is incomprehensible without it. The hypothesis of a spiritual author of nature is verified in the same way; and if • it can be shown that the physical universe is unintelligible without this assumption, and that from every side we are led down to this ultimate affirmation, then the hypothesis of an intelligent Creator has just the same kind of verification as the bulk of scientific theories have.
The assumption that all space, or all at least of which we have any cognizance, must be imagined to be completely filled with a supposed medium of which our senses give us no information, already makes, we might reasonably say, a severe demand on our credulity; and indeed there are, or at least have been, minds to which the demand appeared to be so great as to cause the rejection of that theory of light. And when we provisionally assume the existence of an. ether, and use it as a working hypothesis in our further investigations, we find ourselves obliged to admit properties of this supposed ether so utterly different from what we should have imagined beforehand, through our previous experience, that we are half staggered. . . . How the ether can at the same time behave as an elastic solid in resisting the gliding of one portion over another, and yet like a fluid in letting bodies freely pass through it, is a mystery which we do not understand. Nevertheless, we are obliged to suppose that so it is. [Note: Sir George Stokes, Natural Theology, 2Q.]
