AN APOLOGY FOR THE CHITRCH'S PERSECUTION OF SCIENCE 165 



a product of the human mind, how was it produced ? The church- 

 man's account of the origin of the Nicene Creed is this: God the 

 Father, realizing on the one hand man's inherent inabiUty to arrive at 

 absolute truth unaided, and, on the other, man's need of truth, sent 

 to earth the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. God the Son 

 revealed to his apostles the truth that man needs. The truth thus 

 received the apostles handed on to their successors. The latter 

 handed it to their successors in turn, the Holy Spirit who presides 

 over the Catholic church safeguarding the correctness of the trans- 

 mission meanwhile; until finally the divine message found clear and 

 permanent formulation in the Nicene Creed. But that God is triune, 

 that Jesus was the Second Person of the Trinity incarnate, that there 

 is a Holy Ghost and a Catholic church are some of the very things the 

 creed was drawn up to assert. The truth of these assertions therefore 

 is assumed in the premise of the argument intended to prove their 

 inerrancy. That argument in fact reduces itself to this : The Nicene 

 Creed is true; therefore it cannot be false! It involves a petitio 

 pHncipii; and the calmness with which the unbeHever always ignores 

 the argument proves that he feels even when he cannot define the 

 fallacy. 



The fact is that the famous argument which we have been examin- 

 ing is really not an argument at all but a confession of faith, a formal 

 expression of the church's conviction that her teachings are finahties. 

 That conviction all Christians share. It is an integral part of the 

 Christian faith. But to the unbeUever it is unmeaning, if not absurd. 

 To many it seems a priori impossible that Christian doctrine or any 

 other doctrine should be final. To them Christian certainty appears 

 intellectual Bourbonism, a futile and hateful thing, the source of 

 countless persecutions, the buttress of error and the foe of honest 

 thinking; Christian theology, a bundle of exploded errors; and 

 Christianity itself something which must pass away and give place 

 to something better; which will pass away in its turn. 



Let us grant for the moment that history and logic are wholly on 

 the side of the unbeliever. The historian is not thereby absolved from 

 the task of studying and accounting for the church's beHef in the 



