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The Relations between Religion and Science Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 August 2010
‘No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.’
1 Cor. xii. 3.IT is now the proper time to review the arguinent of these Lectures, and to endeavour to trace, if possible, the source of the estrangement which just at present separates Eeligion and Science.
The postulate of Science is admitted on all hands to be the uniformity of nature, and the proof of this postulate has been found to consist in an induction from the facts which nature presents and our senses observe. Uniformity is quickly noticed, and after it has been noticed for some time it is instinctively used as a working hypothesis. So used it accumulates perpetually increasing evidence of its truth, and if we except two great classes of facts, we never find any instance of its failure. The two classes of facts which are thus excepted are the acts of the human will and the miraculous element in Revelation, both of them instances of one thing, namely, the interference of the moral with the physical. To complete the induction and to deprive the denial of universal uniformity of all evidence to rest on, all that is necessary is to get rid of these two exceptions. If Science could get rid of these exceptions, though it could not be said that the fundamental postulate was demonstrated, it could be said that all the evidence was in its favour and absolutely no evidence against it.
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