174 MATTER, ENERGY, CONSCIOUSNESS, SPIRIT 



I do not expect to escape or shirk the question, 

 "Who, then, created all this wonderful and intricate 

 machinery ? " Science answers that matter and energy 

 cannot be created or destroyed. The universe is 

 eternal. The very idea of creation and destruction 

 is drawn not from the inanimate universe, but from 

 the phenomenon of life. These ideas cannot be 

 considered apart from life, whereas the inanimate 

 universe can. Just as the man of science is unable 

 to push his mechanical conceptions to explain life 

 and the Deity, so the theist must not push his con- 

 ception of the Deity and life into the inanimate 

 universe. The Rubicon that cannot be crossed in 

 the one direction obviously must not be crossed in 

 the other. 



It is not sufficient privately to make mental 

 reservations about a creed, and publicly to avow it. 

 For these ancient creeds are working an infinitude 

 of harm in the world, and nowhere more than to the 

 cause of religion. 



The conceptions of the Deity as the creator of the 

 heavens and earth, the controller of the inanimate 

 universe and the worker of physical miracles, have, 

 with the growth of science, merely a historical con- 

 nection with the conceptions which to-day would be 

 regarded as specifically Christian and are definitely 

 alien to them. If to science were rendered the things 

 that belong to science, what is left would gain rather 

 than lose in significance. 



