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
Let us compare the general resurrection with the first introduction of
life into the world. As far as scientific observation has yet gone that
first introduction of life was a miracle. No one has ever yet succeeded
in tracing it to the operation of any known laws. If it is a miracle it
is a miracle precisely similar in kind to the miracle which believers
are expecting at the last day. And assuredly if a miracle was once
worked to introduce life into this habitable world, there is very good
reason to expect that another miracle will be worked hereafter to
restore life to those that have lived. But there are scientific men who
think that the introduction of life was not a miracle, that it came at
the fitting moment by the working of natural laws; or, in other words,
that such properties are inherent in the elements of which protoplasm is
made that in certain special circumstances these elements will not only
combine but that the product of their combination will live. If this be
so, it is assuredly no such very strange supposition that there may be
such properties inherent in our bodies or in certain particles, whether
particles of matter or not, belonging to our bodies, that in certain
special circumstances these particles will return to life. And if this
be so the general resurrection may be no miracle, but the result of the
properties originally inherent in our bodies and of the working of the
laws of those properties. And as the general resurrection so our Lord's
Resurrection may in this way turn out to be no breach of the uniformity
of nature.
But this new discovery, if then made, would not affect the place which
our Lord's Resurrection holds in the records of Revelation. It is not
the purpose of Revelation to interfere with the course of nature; if
such interference be needless, and the work of revealing God to man can
be done without it, there is no reason whatever to believe that any such
interference would take place.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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