Free thought; Modernism (Christian theology) -- Catholic Church; Religion and science; Teaching, Freedom of
These, then, are the often-cited witnesses for the incompatibility of
science and faith. While only taken from the province of natural science,
they may in our case be deemed representative of science in general. For
natural science is generally regarded the most exact of all, and as the
one which, more than any other, has the scientific spirit said to be
incompatible with faith, and which, by many, is believed to have brought
about in the modern world of thought the irreconcilable conflict between
faith and science. This is not so! Such antagonism does _not_ exist. It
cannot exist, because it is certain from the outset that both faith and
science unfold the truth. Truth, however, can never be in conflict with
truth. Nor has that antagonism ever existed historically in any of the
great representatives of science. This antagonism is fictitious, it is
false in its very essence. It is fabricated, either by distorting faith
into a blind belief of absurd things, or else by distorting the human
faculty of conception into infallible omniscience, or, the other extreme,
by denying its faculty for a higher perception.
Faith has nothing to fear from a mature science that has arrived at the
conviction of its cognitions, nor has it anything to fear from the great
intellects who reason profoundly and seriously. But it has to fear
mock-science and ignorance, and those small and superficial minds that aim
at stretching their pseudo-knowledge to a gigantic infallibility.
THIRD SECTION. THE LIBERAL FREEDOM OF RESEARCH.
The Yoke of the Sun.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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