COSMOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGY 103 



even actively malevolent deities. Modern science takes its departure 

 from a quite diflFerent moral conviction— kin perhaps to Einstein's 

 faith that: 



Raffiriiert ist der Hen Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht. 

 The Lord God is subtle, but malicious he is not. 



Beyond belief that man can understand nature, there is the further 

 feeling that man may be obligated to seek such understanding. His 

 mind, the gift of God, is most fittingly employed in searching the 

 world that God created for what Bacon calls that 



spark of knowledge of God which may be had by the light of nature 

 and the consideration of created things; and thus can be fairly held 

 to be divine in respect to its object and natural in respect of its source 

 of information. 



This conception of natural religion becomes a powerful stimulus to 

 science— particularly in England right through the period of Priestley 

 —and perhaps even today it has not fully spent itself, for Oppen- 

 heimer notes that: 



. . . Einstein has seen in his theories of relativity only a further con- 

 firmation of Spinoza's view that it is man's highest function to know 

 and to understand the objective world and its laws. 



Here surely we gain some sense of what Snow describes as "a moral 

 component right in the grain of science itself." 



Powerfully influenced by accepted religious doctrine, the scien- 

 tifically relevant moral tone of a society depends also on other factors. 

 Of four predominantly Roman Catholic countries— Italy, France, 

 Spain, and Ireland— the first two have developed important indige- 

 nous scientific movements, while the last two have not, though each 

 of these was at one time a substantial center of learning. Observe 

 however that, unlike Spain and Ireland, France and Italy have sus- 

 tained important movements of religious dissent. May a decisive 

 factor be the extent to which dissent is accepted as a moral right? 

 If not also elsewhere, in science capacity for dissent (from existing 

 "self-evidencies") and the possibility of progress are firmly linked. 

 If Roman Catholicism does not encourage capacity for dissent from 

 established doctrine, can this explain the results of the Notre Dame 



