"As Bertrand Russell has recently pointed out with particular clarity, the growing antagonism between religion and science did not arise from accidental circumstances, nor is it, generally speaking, caused by ill will on either side. A considerable amount of mutual distrust is, alas, natural and understandable. One of the aims, if not perhaps the main task, of religious movements has always been to round off the ever unaccomplished understanding of the unsatisfactory and bewildering situation in which man finds himself in the world; to close the disconcerting 'openness' of the outlook gained from experience alone, in order to raise his confidence in life and strengthen his natural benevolence and sympathy towards his fellow creatures--innate properties, so I believe, but easily overpowered by personal mishaps and the pangs of misery. Now, in order to satisfy the ordinary, unlearned man, this rounding-off of the fragmentary and incoherent world picture has to furnish inter alia an explanation of all those traits of the material world that are either really not yet understood at the time or not in a way the ordinary unlearned man can grasp. This need is seldom overlooked for the simple reason that, as a rule, it is shared by the person or persons who, by their eminent characters, their sociable inclination, and their deeper insight into human affairs, have the power to prevail on the masses and to fill them with enthusiasm for their enlightened moral teaching. It so happens that such persons, as regards their upbringing and learning and apart from these extraordinary qualities, have usually themselves been quite ordinary men. Their views about the material universe would thus be as precarious, actually much the same, as those of their listeners. Anyhow, they would consider the spreading of the latest news about it irrelevant for their purpose, even if they knew them.
At first this mattered little or nothing. But in the course of the centuries, particularly after the rebirth of science in the seventeenth century, it came to matter a lot. According as, on the one hand, the teachings of religion were codified and petrified and, on the other hand, science came to transform--not to say disfigure--the life of the day beyond recognition and thereby to intrude into the mind of everyman, the mutual distrust between religion and science was bound to grow up. It did not spring from those well-known irrelevant details from which it ostensibly issued, such as whether the earth is in motion or at rest, or whether or not man is a late descendant of the animal kingdom; such bones of contention can be overcome, and to a large extent have been overcome. The misgiving is much more deeply rooted. By explaining more and more about the material structure of the world, and about how our environment and our bodily selves had, by natural causes, reached the state in which we find them, moreover by giving this knowledge away to everybody who was interested, the scientific outlook, so it was feared, stealthily wrested more and more from the hands of the Godhead, heading thus for a self-contained world to which God was in danger of becoming a gratuitous embellishment. It would hardly do justice to those who genuinely harboured this fear, if we declared it utterly unfounded. Socially and morally dangerous misgivings may spring, and occasionally have sprung--not, of course, from people knowing too much--but from people believing that they know a good deal more than they do.
Equally justified is, however, an apprehension which is, so to say, complementary and which has haunted science from the very time it came into existence. Science has to be careful of incompetent interference from the other side, particularly in scientific disguise, recalling Mephisto, who, in the borrowed robe of the Doctor, foists his irreverent jokes upon the ingenuous Scholar. What I mean is this. In an honest search for knowledge you quite often have to abide by ignorance for an indefinite period. Instead of filling a gap by guesswork, genuine science prefers to put up with it; and this, not so much from conscientious scruples about telling lies, as from the consideration that, however irksome the gap may be, its obliteration by a fake removes the urge to seek after a tenable answer. So efficiently may attention be diverted that the answer is missed even when, by good luck, it comes close at hand. The steadfastness in standing up to a non liquet, nay in appreciating it as a stimulus and a signpost to further quest, is a natural and indispensable disposition in the mind of a scientist. This in itself is apt to set him at variance with the religious aim of closing the picture, unless each of the two antagonistic attitudes, both legitimate for their respective purposes, is applied with prudence."
At first this mattered little or nothing. But in the course of the centuries, particularly after the rebirth of science in the seventeenth century, it came to matter a lot. According as, on the one hand, the teachings of religion were codified and petrified and, on the other hand, science came to transform--not to say disfigure--the life of the day beyond recognition and thereby to intrude into the mind of everyman, the mutual distrust between religion and science was bound to grow up. It did not spring from those well-known irrelevant details from which it ostensibly issued, such as whether the earth is in motion or at rest, or whether or not man is a late descendant of the animal kingdom; such bones of contention can be overcome, and to a large extent have been overcome. The misgiving is much more deeply rooted. By explaining more and more about the material structure of the world, and about how our environment and our bodily selves had, by natural causes, reached the state in which we find them, moreover by giving this knowledge away to everybody who was interested, the scientific outlook, so it was feared, stealthily wrested more and more from the hands of the Godhead, heading thus for a self-contained world to which God was in danger of becoming a gratuitous embellishment. It would hardly do justice to those who genuinely harboured this fear, if we declared it utterly unfounded. Socially and morally dangerous misgivings may spring, and occasionally have sprung--not, of course, from people knowing too much--but from people believing that they know a good deal more than they do.
Equally justified is, however, an apprehension which is, so to say, complementary and which has haunted science from the very time it came into existence. Science has to be careful of incompetent interference from the other side, particularly in scientific disguise, recalling Mephisto, who, in the borrowed robe of the Doctor, foists his irreverent jokes upon the ingenuous Scholar. What I mean is this. In an honest search for knowledge you quite often have to abide by ignorance for an indefinite period. Instead of filling a gap by guesswork, genuine science prefers to put up with it; and this, not so much from conscientious scruples about telling lies, as from the consideration that, however irksome the gap may be, its obliteration by a fake removes the urge to seek after a tenable answer. So efficiently may attention be diverted that the answer is missed even when, by good luck, it comes close at hand. The steadfastness in standing up to a non liquet, nay in appreciating it as a stimulus and a signpost to further quest, is a natural and indispensable disposition in the mind of a scientist. This in itself is apt to set him at variance with the religious aim of closing the picture, unless each of the two antagonistic attitudes, both legitimate for their respective purposes, is applied with prudence."