228 HAS SCIENCE DISCOVERED GOD? 



sented by the Hebraic Yaweh, the Indie Buddah, the 

 Moslem Allah, and the Christian God. 



It is in reviewing the books of religion covering 

 the development of a race consciousness that one finds 

 the evolution of Deity reflecting each change of social 

 organization in the history of civilization. In the 

 book of the Christian religion one finds, for example, 

 a continuous change in the tradition of God, from the 

 anthropomorphic Elohim of Genesis through the 

 tribal King Yaweh, to the God of spirit and paternal 

 care as taught by Jesus. All of these conceptions, 

 however, tended to create a self-consciousness and 

 magnified the importance of the individual quite con- 

 sistent with the primitive conception of the cosmic 

 scheme where the universe of stars was but an inciden- 

 tal background for the divine drama. 



It is almost pitiable that many of the doctrines of 

 theology which made the conflict of science particu- 

 larly acute were being crystallized in a mediaeval epoch 

 upon which the dawn of an era of scientific discoveries 

 had its beginning. The uninformed fundamentalist of 

 to-day might indeed suffer some disillusionment were 

 he to realize that Augustine and Thomas Aquinas 

 placed no literal interpretation upon the creation story 

 of Genesis. The sad story of the warfare of science 

 and religions is the more tragic when one reflects that 

 many of the astronomical discoveries which have dis- 

 pelled the anthropocentric traditions of religion were 

 made by scholars skilled In the school of eccleslasti- 

 cism. The new era of science marking the renaissance, 

 and which turned the world of thought topsy-turvy 

 through the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, New- 

 ton and Darwin, could no more be stopped by the 



