168 HAS SCIENCE DISCOVERED GOD? 



To be guarded against is a too ready acquiescence 

 with the widespread view which regards science as a 

 bedrock kind of knowledge, deeper and surer than all 

 other attempts to understand and appreciate. When 

 a conclusion has once passed the tribunals of science, 

 both in idea and in formulation, it is reliable down to 

 the ground until some new discovery demands a change 

 of statement, and even then it is usually a subsumming, 

 not a recantation, that is required. There are no 

 alternatives in concrete scientific description at any 

 given time. But this is not to say that the only way 

 of trying to appreciate a given set of phenomena is 

 by scientific methods. As we have already said, 

 science Is admittedly and deliberately partial and ab- 

 stract; there are other lines of approach. Therefore 

 when the matter-of-fact man Inquires: "What has 

 Science to say about it?", he Is asking a necessary 

 question — would that it were oftener put, but he is 

 deceiving himself if he thinks that the scientific answer 

 is the last word on the subject. 



This brings us to the Important position, that Science 

 asks: What is this? How does it keep a-goingf 

 Whence came it and by what factors did it come to 

 he as it is? What is it leading on to?, but never asks 

 Why is this? What is its meaning or purpose? This 

 last question — the deeper Why? — is quite beyond 

 the metier of Science. Science cannot answer It; In- 

 deed it never asks. Yet the question is for most 

 minds irrepressible, and answers come from the re- 

 flections of the philosophers or from the more naive 

 interpretations of the religious mind. 



Science aims at a description of things and processes 



