That is why nothing is so dead as the scientific religion of yesterday. It is far more completely dead than any revealed religion, because the revealed religion, whatever may be the defects of its cosmology or its history, has some human experience at its core which we can recognize and to which we may respond. But a religion like scientific materialism has nothing in it, except the pretension that it is a true account of the world. Once that pretension is exploded, it is wholly valueless as a religion. It has become a collection of discarded concepts. 6. _The Deeper Conflict_ It follows from the very nature of scientific explanation, then, that it cannot give men such a clue to a plan of existence as they find in popular religion. For that plan must suppose that existence is explained in terms of human destiny. Now conceivably existence might again be explained, as it was in the Middle Ages, as the drama of human destiny. It does not seem probable to us; yet we cannot say that it is impossible. But even if science worked out such an explanation, it would still be radically different from the explanations which popular religion employs. For if it were honestly stated, it would be necessary to say first, that it is tentative, and subject to disproof by further experiment; second, that it is relative, in that [p132] the same facts seen from some other point and with some other purpose in mind could be explained quite differently; third, that it is not a picture of the world, as God would see it, and as all men must see it, but that it is simply one among many possible creations of the mind into which most of the data of experience can be fitted. When the scientist had finished setting down his qualifications, the essence of the matter as a simple, devout man sees it, would have evaporated. Certainty, as the devout desire it, would be gone; verity, as they understand it, would be gone; objectivity, as they imagine it, would be gone. What would remain would be a highly abstracted, logical fiction, suited to disinterested inquiry, but utterly unsuited to be the vehicle of his salvation.