Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/220

206 it is easy to see that here we have the intellectual attitude and temper, not of the calm, unprejudiced judge, but of the interested, brief-holding advocate—an attitude and temper which must inevitably lead to prevarication, special pleading, evasion, and the innumerable evils of sophistry.

In the so-called conflict of science and religion—which in reality is the conflict of newly discovered truth with older and exploded theories of things—we are thus shown again and again that while the finest discipline for philosophical veracity is to be found in the growth of the scientific spirit, its worst foe is always to be sought in the diametrically opposite spirit of theology. "Science abhors finality in belief" said a distinguished English clergyman, "but this is precisely what theologians like. Science discovers facts, but theology accepts revelation, and clings to creeds" Exactly; and the contrasted mental results brought about by such conditions respectively need scarcely be specified. Science has no creed to support; theology has always had, and always will have. Science, therefore, is free to look at all theories from the point of view of facts; while theology is bound to look at all facts from the point of view of accepted theories. In this simple circumstance lies a part explanation of the everlasting warfare between them.

But the spirit of theology is hostile to strict veracity for other reasons than this finality of belief, this tenacity in regard to established creed. Theology professes esoteric knowledge of what lies beyond the reach of verification, and thus breeds contempt for the processes of verification and disparagement of their importance. It labels all sorts of things which transcend knowledge, or contradict accumulated evidence, "mysteries" thus dismissing them from inquiry and encouraging looseness of thought. It fosters undue reverence for tradition, authority, the "wisdom of our ancestors" and therefore tends to mental dependence, sluggishness, and debility. It postulates belief as the ideal of the intellectual life; proclaims implicit faith the greatest of virtues; teaches credence in default or in spite of testimony; and so condemns the skepticism, balance of judgment, reservation of opinion, acknowledgment of nescience, in the absence of which the quest for truth is impossible, and which are often the last results that the truthseeker is able to offer as the reward of all his toil. Finally, theology, by its familiar device of "reconciling" science with its own postulates when the conclusions of science are no longer to be ignored or abused, undermines frankness, straightforwardness, the sense of honor and fair