V Religion and Science

discovered by science evinced no signs whatsoever of the hand of God—which is surely the basis of all religions. Then how could it be considered rational to believe in God? All the heroes who had discovered the laws of nature were believers in God, but, ironically, when their research was brought before the public, it was thought that their discoveries had rendered meaningless the very existence of God. Since, in order to explain events, one had only to have recourse to the causes and laws of the material universe, there seemed to be no need to postulate the existence of a God who was extraneous to that universe. It was said, for example, that the rising and setting of the sun had not been properly understood until telescopes had been made and mathematics developed. The former ascription of these phenomena to the will and power of supernatural beings had been due merely to man’s poor comprehension of these matters. And now that astronomy had proved that there was a universal system of gravitation, which controlled the movements of the sun, moon and stars, there was no further need to believe in God. Gradually, all those happenings in nature, which were supposed in ancient times to have invisible superhuman forces at work behind them, were shown to be the results of the action and reaction of the forces of nature. It was as if, after the natural causes of events had been described in modern scientific terms, belief in God should automatically cease. Julian Huxley, in his book, Man in the Modern World, says: If the rainbow is generated by the refraction of the sun’s rays on falling rain, it is not set in the sky as a sign by God. If the plague is inevitably generated by the Bacillus pestis and spread by rat-fleas, an outbreak of plague can no longer be looked on as sign of divine wrath. If animals and plants have slowly evolved through hundreds of millions of years, there is no room for a creator of animals and plants, except in a metaphorical sense totally different from that in which the word was originally and is normally used. If hysteria and insanity are the natural results of disordered minds, there is no place remaining in them for possession by devils. After presenting this piece of ‘reasoning’ with great conviction, he