V Religion and Science

Religion and Science They could accept it without causing the slightest harm to their religious beliefs. It is true that tides do occur in consonance with geographical configuration and as a result of gravitational pull. But, after all, what are these things? They too are God’s creations. It is through these phenomena that God acts. As John Wilson observed: ‘This does not destroy my belief. It is still God (working through these things) who is responsible for the tides.’1 Similarly, in the field of biology, the theory of evolution implies that biological processes no longer demand the existence of metaphysical realities. In other words, in order to understand the nature of life, we do not need to believe in a conscious God, modern studies having ‘proved’ that life automatically patterns itself along certain material lines: reproduction, variation and selective survival. That is, through reproduction, living creatures continue to be born, certain congenital variations go on developing, then after a long and complicated process of mutation, an altogether new species comes into being. Thus, according to the antagonists of religion, the application of Darwin’s principle of natural selection in biology has made it not only possible but imperative to reject outright the concept of God’s hand in life’s development. The supposition that the various species of living creatures have come into being through a gradual process of evolution has yet to be established as a fact, but even were we to give credence to this theory, it could still be said with equal conviction, that this is God’s chosen way of creation, rather than its being the result of a blind, automatic force. Mechanical evolution can easily be proved to be a creational evolution. This being so, those anti-religionists who refer to science for support have no genuine basis on which to reject this argument of creational evolution. This is far from being all that there is to the matter. The truth is that twentieth century science has lost its ability to convince. Today, Newton has been replaced by Einstein, and the theories of Planck and Heisenberg have overthrown those of Laplace. Now the antireligionists, at least on an academic level, can no longer claim