And, indeed, on studying Lord Gifford’s bequest with the object of
finding in it some reference to the natural sciences, one easily notes
that he has assigned to them a very high place compared with the other
sciences, at least in one respect: with regard to their methods.
There is a highly interesting passage in his will which leaves no doubt
about our question. After having formally declared the foundation of
this lectureship “for Promoting, Advancing, Teaching and Diffusing
the study of Natural Theology in the widest sense of that term,” and
after having arranged about the special features of the lectures, he
continues: “I wish the lecturers to treat their subject as a strictly
natural science, the greatest of all possible sciences, indeed, in one
sense, the only science, that of Infinite Being.... I wish it considered
just as astronomy or chemistry is.”
Of course, it is not possible to understand these words of Lord
Gifford’s will in a quite literal sense. If, provisionally, we call
“natural theology” the ultimate conclusions which may be drawn from a
study of nature in connection with all other results of human sciences,
there cannot be any doubt that these conclusions will be of a rather
different character from the results obtained in, say, the special field
of scientific chemistry. But, nevertheless, there are, I think, two
points of contact between the wider and the narrower field of knowledge,
and both of them relate to method. Lord Gifford’s own phrase, “Infinite
Being,” shows us one of these meeting-points. In opposition to history
of any form, natural sciences aim at discovering such truths as are
independent of special time and of special space, such truths as are
“ideas” in the sense of Plato; and such eternal results, indeed, always
stand in close relation to the ultimate results of human knowledge
in general. But besides that there is still another feature which
may be common both to “natural theology” and to the special natural
sciences, and which is most fully developed in the latter: freedom from
prepossessions. This, at least, is an ideal of all natural sciences;
I may say it is *the* ideal of them. That it was this feature which
Lord Gifford had in view in his comparison becomes clear when we read
in his will that the lectures on natural theology are to be delivered
“without reference to or reliance upon any supposed special exceptional
or so-called miraculous revelation.”
So we might say that both in their logical and their moral methods,
natural sciences are to be the prototype of “Natural Theology” in Lord
Gifford’s sense.
NATURAL SCIENCES AND “NATURAL THEOLOGY”
But now let us study in a more systematic manner the possible relations
of the natural sciences to natural theology as a science.
How is it possible for a natural scientist to contribute to the science
of the highest and ultimate subject of human knowledge?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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