The place at which curiosity rests is not a fixed point called ‘the truth.’ The unscientific man, like the Schoolmen of the Middle Ages, really means by the truth an explanation of the universe in terms of human desire. What modern science means by the truth has been stated most clearly perhaps by the late Charles S. Peirce when he said that “the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all those who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real.” When we say that something has been ‘explained’ by science, we really mean only that our own curiosity is satisfied. Another man, whose mind was more critical, who commanded a greater field of experience, might not be satisfied at all. Thus “the savage is satisfied by explaining the thunderstorm as the capricious act of an angry God.... (But) even if the physicist believed in the existence of the angry god, he would not be satisfied with this explanation of the thunderstorm [p130] because he is not so well acquainted with angry gods as to be able to predict when anger is followed by a storm. He would have to know why the god had become angry, and why making a thunderstorm eased his ire.” But even carrying the explanation to this point would not be carrying it to its limit. For there is no formal limit. The next scientist might wish to know what a god was and what anger is. And when he had been told what their elements are, the next man might be dissatisfied until he had found the elements of these elements. The man who says that the world is a machine has really advanced no further than to say that he is so well satisfied with this analogy that he is through with searching any further. That is his business, as long as he does not insist that he has reached a clear and ultimate picture of the universe. For obviously he has not. A machine is something in which the parts push and pull each other. But why are they pushing and pulling, and how do _they_ work? Do they push and pull because of the action of the electrons in their orbits within the atoms? If that is true, then how does an electron work? Is it, too, a machine? Or is it something quite different from a machine? Shall we attempt to explain machines electrically, or shall we attempt to explain electricity mechanically? It becomes plain, therefore, that scientific explanation is altogether unlike the explanations to which the common man is accustomed. It does not yield a certain picture of anything which can be taken naively as a representation of reality. And therefore the philosophies which have grown up about science, like mechanism or [p131] creative evolution, are in no way guaranteed by science as the account of creation in Genesis is guaranteed by the authority of Scripture. They are nothing but provisional dramatizations which are soon dissolved by the progress of science itself.