Nature and Natural Theology

Extract

Those who consider theology worth talking about, form perhaps a very small minority in the country; but at least, apart from Marxists, or humanists at our older Universities, very few of them would still maintain that it has finally been disposed of by science. Against the background threat of total destruction, modem efforts are preferably directed to integrating what has been inherited; so it is the relation rather than the conflict of science and religion which now provides the usual theme in public lectures on those subjects. Two recent publications may exemplify this contrast of styles between old and new.

There is little to show that the greater part of Professor Price’s Eddington memorial lecture was not written thirty or more years ago. Its argument begins with the claim that ‘the materialistic conception of human personality ... is accepted nowadays, almost as a matter of course, by the majority of Western educated people’. Though there is a disagreement as to the exact form materiahsm takes (Epiphenomenalism, Behaviourism, Marxism are suggested ways), it is at least certain, according to science, that ‘mental processes are inseparable from bodily ones’. Since theism, our natural knowledge of God exclusive of particular revelation (though Professor Price’s scope is wider, the essential point lies here), depends on some direct awareness of him, unmediated by the senses, it is thoroughly discredited in a scientific age. But a ray of hope shone through the general gloom on the day ‘when the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 by a brilliant group of Cambridge men’.