V Religion and Science

21-day law exists which is responsible for creating conditions, which make it possible for the chick to emerge from the shell. This is a mere fallacy. What modern observation has done is to add a few more links to the chain of factors, which lead up to an event. It does not tell us the real cause of the occurrence. It has just shifted the problem of the breaking up of the shell to the development of the horn. The breaking of the shell by the chick is simply an intermediate stage in the occurrence rather than its cause. Will the cause of the event be understood only when we learn what made the horn appear on the chick’s beak? In other words, when we have traced the event back to its primary cause, the cause which ‘knew’ that the chick required some hard instrument to break through the shell and, therefore, in exactly twenty-one days, compelled a hard substance to appear on the beak in the form of a horn and to fall off after having discharged its function? ‘How does the shell break?’ was the question that faced man previously. Now, in the light of recent observations, instead of an answer, we have another question: ‘How does the horn develop?’ In the context of perceived phenomena, there is no difference in the nature of these two questions. At the most, questions of the type that lead us from one link to another in the chain of cause and effect demand an extension of the observation of facts, if they are to be answered at all. On this basis, they do not elicit any valid explanation. The discoveries held by the atheists to be an explanation of nature and, as such, an alternative to God, can just as easily be thought of as being the way nature works. We can, quite rationally, say that God implements his will through these laws, only parts of which man, with his limited skills, has been able to discover. Let us suppose that religious minded people, who believe that it is God who causes the ebb and flow of the tides, are confronted with the scientific explanation that the tides are actually caused by the gravitational pull of the moon and vary according to the geographical configuration of the seas and land surfaces. There would be no need for them to deny this explanation in order to uphold their belief in God’s instrumentality.