If, however, we ask Natural Science to discuss these questions with us,
she declines the invitation on the ground that it is not her business to
do so: her business is to find out in what way, not with what purpose,
animal life has come to assume the various forms in which we know it;
and she can do this, her business, quite well--indeed better--without
discussing such questions. If it were proved that the history of animal
life upon this earth had been intended from the beginning to follow the
lines on which it has actually developed, not one of the problems which
Natural Science has yet to solve would be brought a whit nearer
solution; nor would she be any the better off, if it were proved that
there was no design. She therefore very properly declines to discuss the
question: there may be a Design and a Designer, or there may not; she
does not know; if it is the business of science to answer the question,
it must be of some other science, not of Natural Science.
So too Physical Science, when asked whether the laws of motion and
matter were not designed to produce the effects which they actually do
cause, replies that they may or may not, but that the law of
gravitation, for instance, is equally true for her purposes, whether
bodies were or were not designed to fall to the earth at the rate of
sixteen feet in the first second, and so on. It may be the business of
some other science to answer such questions: it is not the business of
Physical Science.
And so the inquirer may go the round of the whole family of Sciences. It
is an extraordinarily industrious family. It has an enormous amount of
work to do: it has to feed, clothe, and generally provide for all
mankind. And it can only carry on at all by a very careful division of
labour: each science has her allotted task, and can only get the day's
work done in the day by strictly confining herself to that task. Each
science has her own questions to answer, and can only succeed in doing
so by refusing to listen to any others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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