I The Method of Argument

will not, however, see both sides of the coin. They insist on using the fact that religion belongs to a supra-rational sphere as if that were a scientific argument against it. Nor will they admit of any attempt on the part of religionists to make a positive rationalization of religion in scientific terms, again because they say scientific argument is simply not applicable to it. This contradiction is not so much due to the fact that religion indeed belongs to a sphere in which scientific arguments cannot be applied to it, as to the fact that antagonists of religion do not want the same criterion, by which they have rejected religion, to be brought forward by religious people to affirm its truths. They should, in that case, be obliged to admit to the reasonableness of religion. They can be likened to a court in which the lawyer for the prosecution may perform his duties, but in which the accused may not engage the services of a lawyer to defend himself. The presence of the official lawyer shows that the government does agree in principle that to deal with a case, a lawyer is required, but when the culprit wishes to invoke the same principle, the government turns against him for fear that he may benefit from it. If the operative principle is that it is only whatever comes under our observation and within our experience, which is factual, then the claim of the anti-religionists will be justified only when they have discovered directly through observation and experiment the baselessness of religion. It will be only when their observation has been so acute and exhaustive that they are able to say with finality that whatever exists in the world and outside it has all been observed down to the smallest detail, and without the smallest exception, that they will be able to claim that there is neither God nor angels, heaven nor hell. They may place themselves if they will, on a parallel with a man who walks all around a room, and, trusting to his normal eyesight, says that there are no elephants or tigers within the hundred cubic feet which make up the room. Obviously, the anti-religionists are in no position to make observations of the extensiveness or subtlety required. They would not even