214 HAS SCIENCE DISCOVERED GOD? 



petent judge of certain questions, or even able to 

 understand the nature of the arguments.' Then he 

 should have time to believe." The modern man re- 

 fuses to take this lazy attitude: he has his religion, 

 his total reaction to life, his myth, but he takes every 

 pains to see that it squares with all that science can 

 tell him. 



And why does the modern man have a religion? 

 Because the material facts of life are not sufficient for 

 his happiness. Nothing is more certain than that for 

 the majority of human beings alive to-day the future 

 holds more that is unpleasant than that is pleasant. 

 There are disappointments, disease, loss of friends, 

 poverty, misunderstanding, thwartings in front of all 

 of us, and then the last enemy, death. When men 

 were children they invented a loving father to whom 

 they could fly as chickens to a hen, and they invented 

 another life with all the unsatisfactory features of this 

 one left out. Science set out to find proofs of the 

 existence of this loving father and of the perpetual 

 holiday after death; and it must be confessed that it 

 has failed completely in Its quest. 



Now science was made for man and not man for 

 science; and if science failed to do what was required 

 of it, we might expect man to abandon it as good for 

 nothing. Let it remain for mundane things, man 

 might say; although it has not quenched our thirst with 

 the elixir of life it has healed our diseases and made 

 bodily life more tolerable. It has multiplied our 

 powers and our activities and made many things 

 easier and more comfortable. But of its chief func- 

 tion, that of discoverer of God, the kind father, and 



