Where Science and Religion MeetPalmer, William Scott
Religion
Where Science and Religion Meet
Palmer, William Scott
Religion and science
The Christian's God certainly is not remote; he is all men's lover and
father and they are all his beloved and his sons. The philosopher's God
is sometimes made blankly, abstractly, identical with us, and then we
may ignore him; because a blank identity simply is, as conceived in
thought, and like the alien God it means nothing for us. But more often
nowadays the philosopher's God is like the Christian's in that he both
transcends his universe and indwells it; for the philosopher has begun
in good earnest to reckon with life and with science and human
experience at large. God indwelt Jesus Christ, and he knew God as lover
and father both. He spoke as though God had communicated himself to him
in a fulness we do not know among ourselves. There was an identity of
will, it seems, recognized by him, between himself and God, and an
identity of reason and knowledge. And if God is Spirit and Lord and
Giver of life, then, if the prophet was right, in this identity by
fulness of communication, this personal coalescence of reason and will,
God, very God, gave himself to very man, and very man entered into
personal union with very God. The transcendent God indwelt the man, was
immanent within him as the man's own self; and the man's own self was
lifted up into the self of God. The intercommunication of person with
person, which we see as the prerogative of persons, was complete.
We have confessed this to be the goal of human endeavour; let us allow
ourselves to think that in regard to us it may be the goal, also, of
divine endeavour, and that in the man who offered no opposition to God
it was attained. As long as we do not indulge in the secret materialism
of regarding a person as a thing _producing_ knowledge or activity,
instead of as _being_ that knowledge and activity, we shall have no
difficulty in recognizing the fact that where knowledge and will in two
persons coincide, there also the persons coincide. We shall be able to
see that a man is identical with God, in the only sense identity can
have for personal beings, when he fully knows the mind of God and his
will is bent on the same ends as the will of God. Then this man is both
man and God in one, for God indwells him by that activity which he truly
is.
If we object, as we frequently do, that no man can fully know the mind
of God, we must tell ourselves that if a man knows the essential,
permanently valuable truth of life which wise men have ever sought as
wisdom, then all that is worth while in knowledge, all that upon which
parts and kinds of 'knowledges' must be built up, is his, included
within his _Weltanschauung_, his living view of the world. The
principle, the ground, of all truth, and therefore of all knowledge, he
knows and has.
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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