Neither can I admit that "we are indebted to Christianity for natural philosophy."
I do not deny that some natural philosophers have also been Christians, or, rather, that some Christians have been natural philosophers to the extent that their Christianity permitted. But Lamarck and Humboldt and Darwin and Spencer and Haeckel and Huxley and Tyndall have done far more for natural philosophy than they have for orthodox religion.
Whoever believes in the miraculous must be the enemy of natural philosophy. To him there is something above nature, liable to interfere with nature. Such a man has two classes of ideas in his mind, each inconsistent with the other. To the extent that he believes in the supernatural he is incapacitated for dealing with the natural, and to that extent fails to be a philosopher. Philosophy does not include the caprice of the Infinite. It is founded on the absolute integrity and invariability of nature.
Neither do I agree with the reverend gentleman when he says that "we are indebted to Christianity for our knowledge of philology."
The church taught for a long time that Hebrew was the first language and that other languages had been derived from that; and for hundreds and hundreds of years the efforts of philologists were arrested simply because they started with that absurd assumption and believed in the Tower of Babel.
Christianity cannot now take the credit for "metaphysical research." It has always been the enemy of metaphysical research. It never has said to any human being, "Think!" It has always said, "Hear!" It does not ask anybody to investigate. It lays down certain doctrines as absolutely true, and, instead of asking investigation, it threatens every investigator with eternal pain. Metaphysical research is destroying what has been called Christianity, and Christians have always feared it.
This gentleman makes another mistake, and a very common one. This is his argument: Christian countries are the most intelligent; therefore they owe that intelligence to Christianity. Then the next step is taken. Christianity, being the best, having produced these results, must have been of divine origin.
Let us see what this proves. There was a time when Egypt was the first nation in the world. Could not an Egyptian, at that time have used the same arguments that Mr. Peters uses now, to prove that the religion of Egypt was divine? Could he not then have said: "Egypt is the most intelligent, the most civilized and the richest of all nations; it has been made so by its religion; its religion is, therefore, divine"?
So there was a time when a Hindoo could have made the same argument. Certainly this argument could have been made by a Greek. It could have been repeated by a Roman. And yet Mr. Peters will not admit that the religion of Egypt was divine, or that the mythology of Greece was true, or that Jupiter was in fact a god.
Is it not evident to all that if the churches in Europe had been institutions of learning; if the domes of cathedrals had been observatories; if priests had been teachers of the facts in nature, the world would have been far in advance of what it is to-day?