RELIGION AND SCIENCE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 540, 28 October 1949, Page 5

RELIGION AND SCIENCE

Sir-A hundred years ago Spurgeon Said that the shores of the centuries were littered with the wrecks of systems of unbelief. His prophesied continuange of such wrecks has been verified. Ephemeral scientific theory serves to hide, as the trees in Eden, men who wish to keep God afar. Scientists are sinners, like other men, and have the personal right of .all men to trust in God, through Christ. No scientific fact blots out the cross of Christ. Nothing discovered since the Christian Newton first promulgated theories of a mechanistic universe that dominated thought for a quarter millennium, to Alexis Carrel and others of more recent years, has any adverse bearing on Christianity. Archaeology has greatly strengthened Christian: evidence. Less than before this century does science provide any foundation; its theories of "rélativity," . "probability," "uncertainty," prop a universe that is not a four-dimensional, time-space continuum, but one that is suspected to pass the bounds of human sénse, to be unknowable. According to Jeans, matter shows properties inconsistent with either "waves" or "particles," and radiation, "like matter, is all a matter of probabilities." The hottest stars’ eventually die, the universe is about the same age as the earth, the whole universe is expandihg — all parts rushing away from each other in a confessedly quite unintelligible manner. In short, perpetual motion is as i bable in the universe, to the scientist, as it is on this speck of its matter. Seeing through a telescope, or mathematically, a universe with apparent beginning and ending-that he confessedly cannot understand-is no barrier to a scientist’s belief in a CreatorGod and the manifestation of His nature in Christ Jesus: rather should it induce a humility that hastens to welcome reasons for! existence, that science cannot approach.

A. E.

ROBINSON

(Auckland)

Sir,-My original purpose, to criticise the panel "Speaking for Ourselves" for their failure to discuss issues basic to the questions, has been emphasised by your correspondents who do advert to that issue in this particular case, Whether or not a scientist can be a Christian depends upon a definition of the word "Christian." Lack of definition is responsible for the idea that a person can be a Christian and not a member of a church. If "Christian" has a set definition which means believing in a set of known truths, and one of those truths is a Christian church, a Christian must belong to a church. If set beliefs are not necessary but can be contradictory one with another, as many Christian churches are, then membership of a church is not necessary because a man can logically be a church unto himself. If set beliefs are not necessary, then what is neces‘sary? For the word could come to mean three or three thousand different things, which is absurd. , The result is that by general belief each church is partly right and perhaps partly wrong. The question can only be solved by a strictly reasonable examination of Christianity with the firm conviction that two and two cannot make four and five at the same time, and consequently that Christianity either is. something or it is nothing. It cannot logically be two things at once. A person who believes in Christ is not therefore a Christian, because such | a belief does not imply a way of life any more than a belief in Napoleon does. The ethics of Christianity, including the Ten Commandments, are there

because the Church teaches them and says they are Christianity, . Only if it can be proved that all churches are in error do the ethics of Christianity become doubtful. The fact remains that a scientist can be a Christian if scientists admit the validity of thought. Upon the validity of thought as opposed to experiment depends the proofs for the existence of God, and unless those proofs can be disproved the scientist must consider the result and the results of the deductions from those proofs. The proofs that there is a God and that Christ was God who founded a church make it clear that science can never conflict with Christianity. The philosophy of Christianity has its source in God, and since God is truth and cannot, being perfect, admit contradictions, nothing can contradict His philosophy-Christianity. The panel and your correspondents clearly accept the idea that a definition of the word "Christian" is impossible without a great deal of room for variation. This is to say that it is impossible to attain truth, Once it is impossible to attain truth, except experimentally, con7 is the natural and inevitable result.

IPSO FACTO

(Wellington

(This correspondence is now closed.-Ed. )