BISHOP’S HINT TO SCIENTISTS

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 192, 3 November 1927, Page 15

BISHOP’S HINT TO SCIENTISTS

“TAKE 10 YEARS’ HOLIDAY” REST FROM PROGRESS WANTED There was a controversial clash at Leeds, provoked by Sir Arthur Keith’s presidential address to the British Association recently, in which he vindicated Darwin’s theory of the descent of man from the anthropoid apes. A ten-years’ holiday for scientists was suggested by the Bishop of Ripon, Dr. Burroughs, in his sermon at the parish church. Dr. Burroughs asked whether, amid all our many new discoveries, we did not seem to have lost our sense of direction and whether the several sciences did not increasingly feel the need of a philosophy to coordinate them. “Risk of Lynching “Dare we (he continued) go on enlarging man’s body without some hope of saving his soul? Who can save man but ultimately a personal God? “We must find some means of putting personality into the saddle, instead of letting things ride the world to a ruin already visible. “After all, we could get on very happily if aviation, wireless, television and the like advanced no further than at present. y “Dare I even suggest, at the risk of being lynched by some of my hearers, that the sum of human happiness outside scientific circles would not necessarily be reduced if, say, for ten years every physical and chemical laboratory were closed and the patient and resourceful energy displayed in them transferred to, say, recovering the lost art of getting on together and finding the formula of making both ends meet in the scale of human life?” Sir Oliver Lodge The scientists had their spokesman in Sir Oliver Lodge. “Some people seem to he depressed to find that they are related to the animals,” he said, addressing 2,000 miners and other workers at the Salem Congregational Church, Leeds. “We are here,” he continued, “to wipe out the ape and the tiger. The doctrine of evolution is the opposite of stagnation. If we were already perfect there would be nothing to look forward to. Our bodies came from dust, but the body is not the whole of man. The dust will go back to the earth, but the spirit is another matter —there is no going back for that. We have not only an animal ancestry—we have also a divine ancestry.” “Cheap Philosophy” “Cheap philosophy on the lips of someone who is not a philosopher/’ was the description applied to Sir Arthur Keith’s address by the Very Rev. Bede Jarrett, provincial of the Dominicans in England, preaching in the Roman Catholic Cathedral Church of St. Anne, Leeds. _ Religion, he declared, stood to-day unafraid of truth, for she knew that truth must lead to God. “We only get a little angry sometimes,” he continued. “When the president of the British Association calls in Professor G. Elliot Smith, Professor of Anatomy, London University, to say .that the human brain shows no formation of any sort other than that of the brain of a chimpanzee, then we say that is unscientific, mischievous, misleading and untrue. He did not give us science in uttering that statement. “That is what makes us angry—when they, the scientists, say things not in their line which are not true. The case for science is too often spoiled by mere fanaticism and an utterly unscientific spirit.”