SCIENCE AND PRAYER.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4388, 13 April 1875, Page 3

SCIENCE AND PRAYER.

Dr. Tyndall lays down as “ science ” the gratuitous paradox that winds and clouds of tomorrow may be, like the planetary motions, predetermined by only brute cosmic forces ; which if as true as it is demonstrably false, would not even then give the fixity he wants, as the planetary system itself is invaded at any moment by unknown comets and meteors, and solar radiation hourly altered by storms of the photosphere. He requires at the outset of his attack all the present century’s discoveries to be ignored. But let us grant him a solar system as simple as mediaeval ignorance ever fancied ; this would not help him. Yonder is a gardener who may dig twenty more spadefuls before dinner, or perhaps only nineteen. Is Dr. Tyndall prepared to prove that whether they shall be twenty or nineteen is already as determined by laws of brute matter as the next transit of Venus? If not, he should have warned his readers that the whole Prayer argument was a mere yea di esprit, hanging on the assumption of this extreme necessarianism. Relax one stitch thereof, and the whole fabric falls thus ;—lf there be any uncertainty about that twentieth spadeful, on this: may depend whether a slug is turned up or not; on the slug may depend a young swallow's dinner, who is feeble, and on this may depend whether he shall follow his colony, and reach Africa; hut on this fledgeling’s arrival or nonarrival may depend whether a certain insect shall serve him for supper, Or be left to lay a million 1 eggs, which, in that ease, will next month be each a locust laying a million more; and on this billion of locusts and their progeny may depend whether at Christmas all Ashantee and three Senegambias of forest shall be green as Eden or a leafless wilderness, and its mean temperature lOOdeg. or only 70deg.; and on whether such an area be the hottest or coolest portion of the planet’s intertropical lands may well depend, by Dr. Tyndall’s own showing, the winds and drought or wet of a season, over half Europe or the whole. It behoved him, then, to be quite sure about the gardener’s last spadeful, and all such causes, which yet he wholly leaves out of account! The weather of large districts may as plainly he still more quickly affected by events that acts of man or beast unconsciously bring about —as forest fires, avalanches that a goat may set rolling, dykes burst, and Zuyder Zees refilled for ages by the burrowing of a rat; shoals of herrings or of whales, that by turning right or left may make a month’s difference in the break-up and drifting to us of half a year’s polar ice. Here we confine ourselves to visible nature and known forces. Let the insane assumption be granted that there is no invisible nature nor aught unknown, and even so, He that owns and actuates the cattle on a thousand hills might thus plainly, by only one of their hoofs, make the winds bis ministers, and flames of fire his messengers. —Quarterly Journal of Science.