The Relations Between Religion and Science: Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 — John Shaqi
The Relations Between Religion and Science: Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884Temple, Frederick
Religion
The Relations Between Religion and Science: Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884
Temple, Frederick
Religion and science
The Science of Mathematics, for instance, has a history; but no
mathematician will admit that the fact that it has a history affects its
claims to acceptance as truth. We may ask, how men have been brought to
believe the deductions of the higher mathematics, and we may answer our
own question by tracing the steps; but our conviction is not shaken that
these deductions are true.
And so, too, we can trace the steps by which the great generalisations
of Science have been reached, and we may show that Kepler grew out of
Copernicus, and Newton out of Kepler; but the proof that the knowledge
of one truth has been evolved out of the knowledge of another, and that
out of the knowledge of another, is not used to show that all this
Science has nothing to do with truth at all, but is only a natural
growth of human thought. Science has grown through all manner of
mistakes--mistakes made by the greatest thinkers and observers, mistakes
which men ignorantly laugh at now, as their own mistakes will be no
doubt laughed at in turn hereafter. But we do not, therefore, treat
scientific thought as nothing more than one of the phenomena of
humanity; ways of thinking which necessarily grew out of the conditions
in which men have existed, but sufficiently accounted for by their
origin and mode of growth having been shown, and having no solidity of
their own.
What has been said of Science may be said also of Religion. Religion
also has had its development, and in some respects a development
parallel to that of Science.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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