lO 



NATURE 



[September 2, 1920 



The Christian Revelation and Modern Science.* 



By the Rev. E. W. Barnes, M.A., Sc 



"I am the Light of the world," — St. John viii. la. 



T HAVE been asked to preach here to-day in 

 -'- connection with the meeting of the British 

 Association which has been held in this city during 

 the past week. My subject is Christ, the Light of 

 the world, and I ask you to think of the Christian 

 revelation and scientific progress. For more than 

 a hundred years there has been strife — sometimes 

 veiled, but more often open — between " religion 

 and science." I use the popular phraseology. 

 More accurately, opinions as to the origins of the 

 earth and of man which were held as a result of 

 Christian tradition have been directly challenged 

 by a succession of novel theories put forward by 

 men of science. At the beginning of last century 

 the foundations of geology were being laid, largely 

 in this country. GraduaUy it became clear, from 

 a study of our rocks and their fossil remains, that 

 the earth had an almost unimaginable antiquity. 

 The coal which we dig is all that is left of vast 

 tropical forests that once flourished here for tens 

 of thousands of years. In successive ages of vast 

 duration the most diverse forms of animal life 

 have existed in these lands. The East of England 

 has repeatedly for long periods lieen submerged 

 beneath the sea. The climate has varied from 

 tropical heat to arctic severity. 



Such knowledge is now a commonplace. But 

 when it was being established by patient discovery 

 during the early part of last century Christian 

 theologians showed violent hostility to the new 

 ideas. The curious may examine the expression 

 of this hostility in Bampton Lectures of the period, 

 which are now happily forgotten. On second-hand 

 bookstalls it is not uncommon to find pathetic 

 attempts to reconcile geology and Genesis such 

 as were continually made even to our own time. 

 But truth triumphed. Just as two centuries earlier 

 the Roman Church had failed to prevent men from 

 receiving the then new knowledge that the earth 

 was not the fixed centre of the universe, so the 

 new geological ideas won their way despite re- 

 ligious prejudice. Galileo triumphed ; it is agreed 

 that the earth moves round the sun ; heliocentric 

 books were removed from the Roman Index in 

 1835. The early nineteenth-century geologists 

 triumphed; it is agreed that life has existed on 

 this earth for something like a hundred million 

 years. Though in each case the new views are 

 directly opposed to those which Christianity took 

 over from Judaism, we accept them with con- 

 fidence and surely without harm to our faith in 

 Christ. 



But sixty years ago a far more vital controversy 

 began when the Biblical account of man's origin 

 was disputed. A s.eries of discoveries in caves 

 and river-beds in England and in France made it 

 clear that primitive men had lived here when the 



I Sermon preached in St. John's Church, Cardiff, on Sunday. August 29, 

 to members of the IJrltish Association. 



NO. 2653, VOL. 106] 



D., F.R.S., Canon of Westminster. 



mammoth, the cave lion, and the rhinoceros 

 flourished in Western Europe. Evidence quickly 

 accumulated which showed that even in this corner 

 of the world human beings existed more than a 

 hundred thousand years ago. Scarcely had these 

 novel conclusions been reached when a scientific 

 theory was put forward which to the great 

 majority of the religious people of the time 

 seemed destructive of essentials in our faith. It 

 was in the year 1859 that Darwin, in his book 

 "The Origin of Species," urged the truth of the 

 doctrine of evolution. At the ensuing Oxford 

 meeting of the British Association, Bishop Wilber- 

 force denounced the idea that man shared a com- 

 mon ancestry with the higher apes. His speech 

 showed deplorable prejudice ; it contained a grave 

 error in taste, and Huxley's dignified rebuke of 

 the Bishop is still remembered. For forty years 

 after that famous encounter evolution was a casus 

 belli between religion and science. Christian 

 opinion refused to accept the new doctrine, and 

 religious teachers traversed it by arguments good 

 and bad. It is not fair to regard them with the 

 scorn which the younger people of to-day, trained 

 in modern science, not seldom feel. 



Evolution was, and still is, not an observed fact, 

 but a very probable theory. Our forefathers saw 

 that acceptance of it meant the abandonment of 

 the story of Adam ; it meant giving up belief in 

 the Fall, and in all the theology built upon it by 

 theologians from St. Paul onwards. Half a cen- 

 tury ago, the evolutionary view of man's origin 

 meant that what then appeared to be the strongest 

 reasons for the belief that man has an immortal 

 soul had to be set aside. But truth has triumphed. 

 In our own time the leaders of Christian thought 

 have, with substantial unanimity, accepted the 

 conclusion that biological evolution is a fact ; man 

 is descended from the lower animals. It is even 

 becoming common to say that there is no quarrel 

 between science and religion. But let us be 

 honest. There has as regards the origin of man 

 been a sharp conflict between science and tradi- 

 tional religious belief, and the battle has been 

 won by science. Furthermore, let us not when 

 driven from one position take up another that 

 may have to be abandoned. It is dangerous to 

 assert that, although God may not have specially 

 created man, nevertheless He did specially create 

 life. Probably the beginning of terrestrial life was 

 but a stage in the great scheme of natural evolu- 

 tion. We may even expect that some day in the 

 laboratory the man of science will produce living 

 from non-living matter. 



The time has come when we must not try to 

 evade any implications of the theory of natural 

 evolution. We must, not silently, but explicitly, 

 abandon religious dogmas which it overthrows. 

 We must, moreover, avoid the temptation to 

 allegorise beliefs which it is no longer possible 



