AN APOLOGY FOR THE CHURCH S PERSECUTION OF SCIENCE 1 75 



passed away forever. No intelligent man any longer conceives of God 

 as enthroned in the sky. That crude conception of the location of 

 God, thanks largely to Copernicus, has given away to a conception 

 much more enthralling: "Closer is He than breathing, and nearer 

 than hands or feet." 



5. The parallel between the working hypotheses which science fur- 

 nishes and that great group of working h3q3otheses which we call the 

 Christian faith can be traced one step farther before its lines diverge. 

 Both are held to represent objective truth. The magnificent confidence 

 which the church reposes in the creeds we have already described. 

 The scientist is apt to exclaim at it. Yet it is precisely parallel to his 

 own confidence in the truth of certain of his own convictions. When, 

 however, we proceed to examine the grounds of scientific certainty 

 and of reHgious certainty respectively, the parallel between practical 

 science and religion at last breaks down. Scientific conviction and 

 religious conviction are arrived at by very different logical processes 

 and rest upon very different premises. 



For no reHgious doctrine is susceptible of rigid scientific proof. It 

 is true that theologians in all ages have labored to evolve a scientific 

 demonstration of their teachings. In the Middle Ages, Anselm en- 

 deavored to construct a scientific proof of the existence of God. Few 

 realize how much of the New Testament itself is taken up with 

 attempts to prove Christian doctrine by the logical methods of con- 

 temporary Jewish scholarship.' In our own day there is issuing from 

 the press a flood of books whose aim is to prove the reasonableness of 

 the Christian faith and to show that it is in harmony with modern 

 knowledge. 



But no scientific argument which amounts to a rigid demonstra- 

 tion has ever been evolved for any Christian doctrine. The reason is 

 that the content of the Christian doctrine and the content of the work- 

 ing hypotheses which science evolves are dissimilar. The scientist 

 evolves working hypotheses by registering occurrences and noting their 

 correlations. The working hypotheses which he evolves are always 

 predictions such as this : If a certain volume of hydrogen and a certain 



• Scott, E. F., The Apologetic 0/ the New Testament, New York, 1907. 



