A New Natural Theology; Based Upon the Doctrine of Evolution (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: demands, without danger to the essentials of religious belief. And only if some new conception of Nature be held, not merely to negative the previous mode of apprehending the ways of God, but also to cast suspicion on the reality of His existence, can the conflict between religion and science possibly assume the form of a chronic antagonism. 2. Herbert Spencer's Claim to have reconciled: Eeligion and Science. It is maintained, however, by Mr. Herbert Spencer, that though religion has its foundation in a true view of the universe, it can give no satisfactory interpretation of the relationship of the universe to God. Spencer sees in the conflicts between religion and science " the oldest, the widest, the most profound, and most important" of all the antagonisms of belief by which men are divided. And assuming, in accordance with his general principle of " the soul of truth in things erroneous," that all antagonisms of belief have, at their root, some common truth, he searches diligently for the truth which shall harmonize this most important of antagonisms. This truth, he concludes, must, from the nature of the case, "be the ultimate fact of our intelligence." Which ultimate fact is equally present, though in different forms, to both religious and scientific thought. To religion it presents itself in the form that, from the moment when self-consciousness is mature within a man, there begins a mystery which continues to be a mystery while the man lives and thinks. And, in reference to science, it compels the recognition that, beyond the definite consciousness of the relations of things, the human mind possesses an indefinite consciousness of something which transcends all relations; and that the relative, or conditioned, which constitutes the sphere of experience, is in...