V Religion and Science

The new knowledge compels us to revise our hasty first impressions that we had stumbled into a universe, which either did not concern itself with life or was actively hostile to life. The old dualism of mind and matter, which was mainly responsible for the supposed hostility, seems likely to disappear, not through matter becoming in any way more shadowy or insubstantial than heretofore, or through mind becoming resolved into a function of the working of matter, but through substantial matter resolving itself into a creation and manifestation of mind. We discover that the universe shows evidence of a designing or controlling power that has something in common with our own individual minds not, so far as we have discovered, emotion, morality, or aesthetic appreciation, but the tendency to think in the way, which, for want of a better word, we describe as mathematical.4 In spite of this complete about-face in science from the academic point of view, it is a fact that, in practice, there have been no noticeable changes in the attitudes of anti-religionists. On the contrary, they are engaged in seeking new arguments to support their theory. The reason for this is not to be found within any academic framework. No, the reason is to be traced, alas, to a biased mentality. How often have we seen educated people refuse to accept the truth when ample proofs have been offered to them, simply because of deeply rooted preconceived ideas. It was just such a prejudiced attitude, in the seventeenth century, which had prevented Italian scholars from accepting Galileo’s theory as an alternative to Aristotle’s, although a ball thrown from the Leaning Tower had demonstrated quite conclusively that Galileo was right. Again, it was this bias which caused scholars at the end of the nineteenth century to ridicule Berlin Professor Max Planck when he gave a physical explanation of light— the quantum theory — which proved the Newtonian concept wrong. Planck’s theory was not accepted for many years, but today it is considered one of the most important principles in physics. There is a common belief that it is only laymen who are guilty of prejudice and not scientists; we should do well, therefore, to mark