JOHN LANGDON-DAVIES 211 



The history of science is the history of the most in- 

 telligent search for God, the best attempt at construct- 

 ing a noble religion, which civilized men have yet 

 known. Were that history well and fully written 

 down we should have the modern man's Bible. Just 

 as Joshua, Judges, Kings and Chronicles, the historical 

 books of the Old Testament, trace the evolution of 

 the Hebrews and of the Hebrew idea of a tribal god; 

 so the lives and works of Copernicus, Galileo and 

 Newton are episodes in the evolution of the modern 

 man's God and the modern man's outlook on life. 

 Without a clear idea of what such men have done no 

 religious outlook to-day is really of much value. 



What then, the reader may say, of the so-called 

 conflict between science and religion? There is no 

 such thing: there is only a conflict between two reli- 

 gious outlooks and two ideas of God. Copernicus, 

 searching after God, discovered a more satisfactory 

 Idea of God than the orthodox one. And from Co- 

 pernicus to the present day the whole of this conflict 

 has been due to the irritation of orthodox religions 

 with the new and better conceptions of the eternal 

 truths revealed by science. 



Do we mean that nature Is God's created word, 

 and the Bible God's written word, and that there is 

 no conflict between them? Far from It: a very dif- 

 ferent God comes out of the scientific search for him 

 from the one whom the fundamentalists have pressed 

 flat, dry and lifeless between Genesis and Revelation. 

 The conflict between science and fundamentalism Is 

 very real: only It began earlier than most fundamen- 

 talists realise; It began long before Darwin; before 



