V Religion and Science

that science has arrived at the ultimate truth. Indeed, the theory of relativity and the quantum theory have led scientists to the conclusion that it is impossible in science to separate the observer from the observed. This means that we can see only certain external manifestations of reality; we cannot apprehend it in its essence. The revolution that has occurred in science in the twentieth century has itself proved the importance of religion from the scientific point of view. In his book, The Limitations of Science, J. W. N. Sullivan states the case thus: What is called the modern “revolution” in science consists in the fact that the Newtonian outlook, which dominated the scientific world for nearly two hundred years, has been found insufficient. It is in process of being replaced by a different outlook, and, although the reconstruction is by no means complete, it is already apparent that the philosophical implications of the new outlook are very different from those of the old one. We are no longer taught that the scientific method of approach is the only valid method of acquiring knowledge about reality. Eminent men of science are insisting, with what seems a strange enthusiasm, on the fact that science gives us but a partial knowledge of reality. This change in the scientific outlook seems to have taken place suddenly. It is not yet sixty years since Tyndall, in his Belfast Address, claimed that science alone was competent to deal with all man’s major problems. But, in truth, so far as these remarks sprang from the conviction that the sole reality is ‘matter and motion,’ their foundations had already been undermined. The attempt to represent nature in terms of matter and motion was already breaking down. That attempt was at its most triumphant by the end of the eighteenth century, when Laplace was emboldened to affirm that a sufficiently great mathematician, given the distribution of the particles in the primitive nebula, could predict the whole future history