The Idea of God as Affected by Modern KnowledgeFiske, John
Religion
The Idea of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge
Fiske, John
God (Christianity)
All this accumulation of physical and historical knowledge has not
failed to react upon our study of the human mind itself. In books of
logic the score of centuries between Aristotle and Whately saw less
advance than the few years between Whately and Mill. In psychology the
work of Fechner and Wundt and Spencer belongs to the age in which we
are now living. When to all this variety of achievement we add what has
been done in the critical study of literature and art, of classical
and Biblical philology, and of metaphysics and theology, illustrating
from fresh points of view the history of the human mind, the sum total
becomes almost too vast to be comprehended. This century, which some
have called an age of iron, has been also an age of ideas, an era of
seeking and finding the like of which was never known before. It is
an epoch the grandeur of which dwarfs all others that can be named
since the beginning of the historic period, if not since Man first
became distinctively human. In their mental habits, in their methods
of inquiry, and in the data at their command, "the men of the present
day who have fully kept pace with the scientific movement are separated
from the men whose education ended in 1830 by an immeasurably wider
gulf than has ever before divided one progressive generation of men
from their predecessors."[2] The intellectual development of the human
race has been suddenly, almost abruptly, raised to a higher plane
than that upon which it had proceeded from the days of the primitive
troglodyte to the days of our great-grandfathers. It is characteristic
of this higher plane of development that the progress which until
lately was so slow must henceforth be rapid. Men's minds are becoming
more flexible, the resistance to innovation is weakening, and our
intellectual demands are multiplying while the means of satisfying
them are increasing. Vast as are the achievements we have just passed
in review, the gaps in our knowledge are immense, and every problem
that is solved but opens a dozen new problems that await solution.
Under such circumstances there is no likelihood that the last word will
soon be said on any subject. In the eyes of the twenty-first century
the science of the nineteenth will doubtless seem very fragmentary
and crude. But the men of that day, and of all future time, will no
doubt point back to the age just passing away as the opening of a
new dispensation, the dawning of an era in which the intellectual
development of mankind was raised to a higher plane than that upon
which it had hitherto proceeded.
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