History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science

by John William Draper

If this be admitted, all bar requirements must necessarily be assented to, no matter how exorbitant they may be.

With strange inconsistency the Dogmatic Constitution deprecates reason, affirming that it cannot determine the points under consideration, and yet submits to it arguments for adjudication. In truth, it might be said that the whole composition is a passionate plea to Reason to stultify itself in favor of Roman Christianity.

With points of view so widely asunder, it is impossible that Religion and Science should accord in their representation of things. Nor can any conclusion in common be reached, except by an appeal to Reason as a supreme and final judge.

There are many religions in the world, some of them of more venerable antiquity, some having far more numerous adherents, than the Roman. How can a selection be made among them, except by such an appeal to Reason? Religion and Science must both submit their claims and their dissensions to its arbitrament.

Against this the Vatican Council protests. It exalts faith to a superiority over reason; it says that they constitute two separate orders of knowledge, having respectively for their objects mysteries and facts. Faith deals with mysteries, reason with facts. Asserting the dominating superiority of faith, it tries to satisfy the reluctant mind with miracles and prophecies.

On the other hand, Science turns away from the incomprehensible, and rests herself on the maxim of Wiclif: "God forceth not a man to believe that which he cannot understand." In the absence of an exhibition of satisfactory credentials on the part of her opponent, she considers whether there be in the history of the papacy, and in the biography of the popes, any thing that can adequately sustain a divine commission, any thing that can justify pontifical infallibility, or extort that unhesitating obedience which is due to the vice-God.

One of the most striking and yet contradictory features of the Dogmatic Constitution is, the reluctant homage it pays to the intelligence of man. It presents a definition of the philosophical basis of Catholicism, but it veils from view the repulsive features of the vulgar faith. It sets forth the attributes of God, the Creator of all things, in words fitly designating its sublime conception, but it abstains from affirming that this most awful and eternal Being was born of an earthly mother, the wife of a Jewish carpenter, who has since become the queen of heaven. The God it depicts is not the God of the middle ages, seated on his golden throne, surrounded by choirs of angels, but the God of Philosophy. The Constitution has nothing to say about the Trinity, nothing of the worship due to the Virgin—on the contrary, that is by implication sternly condemned; nothing about transubstantiation, or the making of the flesh and blood of God by the priest; nothing of the invocation of the saints. It bears on its face subordination to the thought of the age, the impress of the intellectual progress of man.

THE PASSAGE OF EUROPE TO LLAMAISM. Such being the exposition rendered to us respecting the attributes of God, it next instructs us as to his mode of government of the world. The Church asserts that she possesses a supernatural control over all material and moral events. The priesthood, in its various grades, can determine issues of the future, either by the exercise of its inherent attributes, or by its influential invocation of the celestial powers. To the sovereign pontiff it has been given to bind or loose at his pleasure. It is unlawful to appeal from his judgments to an Oecumenical Council, as if to an earthly arbiter superior to him. Powers such as these are consistent with arbitrary rule, but they are inconsistent with the government of the world by immutable law. Hence the Dogmatic Constitution plants itself firmly in behalf of incessant providential interventions; it will not for a moment admit that in natural things there is an irresistible sequence of events, or in the affairs of men an unavoidable course of acts.

But has not the order of civilization in all parts of the world been the same? Does not the growth of society resemble individual growth? Do not both exhibit to us phases of youth, of maturity, of decrepitude? To a person who has carefully considered the progressive civilization of groups of men in regions of the earth far apart, who has observed the identical forms under which that advancing civilization has manifested itself, is it not clear that the procedure is determined by law? The religious ideas of the Incas of Peru and the emperors of Mexico, and the ceremonials of their court-life, were the same as those in Europe—the same as those in Asia. The current of thought had been the same. A swarm of bees carried to some distant land will build its combs and regulate its social institutions as other unknown swarms would do, and so with separated and disconnected swarms of men. So invariable is this sequence of thought and act, that there are philosophers who, transferring the past example offered by Asiatic history to the case of Europe, would not hesitate to sustain the proposition—given a bishop of Rome and some centuries, and you will have an infallible pope: given an infallible pope and a little more time, and you will have Llamaism—Llamaism to which Asia has long, ago attained.

As to the origin of corporeal and spiritual things, the Dogmatic Constitution adds a solemn emphasis to its declarations, by anathematizing all those who hold the doctrine of emanation, or who believe that visible Nature is only a manifestation of the Divine Essence. In this its authors had a task of no ordinary difficulty before them. They must encounter those formidable ideas, whether old or new, which in our times are so strongly forcing themselves on thoughtful men. The doctrine of the conservation and correlation of Force yields as its logical issue the time-worn Oriental emanation theory; the doctrines of Evolution and Development strike at that of successive creative acts. The former rests on the fundamental principle that the quantity of force in the universe is invariable. Though that quantity can neither be increased nor diminished, the forms under which Force expresses itself may be transmuted into each other. As yet this doctrine has not received complete scientific demonstration, but so numerous and so cogent are the arguments adduced in its behalf, that it stands in an imposing, almost in an authoritative attitude. Now, the Asiatic theory of emanation and absorption is seen to be in harmony with this grand idea. It does not hold that, at the conception of a human being, a soul is created by God out of nothing and given to it, but that a portion of the already existing, the divine, the universal intelligence, is imparted, and, when life is over, this returns to and is absorbed in the general source from which it originally came. The authors of the Constitution forbid these ideas to be held, under pain of eternal punishment.