Where Science and Religion Meet

by William Scott Palmer

'Ye have heard that it hath been said'—'But I say unto you.' He maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.' ... 'those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and slew them, think ye that they were sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem?' And then the warning words—'I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.' Warning, these last words are, and, it may be, puzzling. They seem to imply punishment, doom, in this falling of a tower, though no sinners were specially selected from others for the death it brought. What is there behind this? Let us think, and bring to bear on the problem what we have learnt about the world (and therefore about God) elsewhere. And let us consult with the Christian. He is our authority now on his own affairs, as the philosopher and the scientific man are on theirs. Well, in the first place it is plain that no one of our authorities countenances arbitrary enactment. Thus much is plain about the events of nature (usually so-called), that they are no more arbitrary than the judgements, or the punishment and forgiveness, of a just man or a just God. What we want to know is the way in which their order is related to the order of justice between persons. That a tower falls on eighteen sinners who are not worse sinners than those upon whom it does not fall looks bad for justice and consequently for love. But is it bad?

We are opening up one of the most formidable of problems. Let us bear in mind, however, that we have seen one thing precluded by the mind of Christ—a belief on our part that the man who suffers or dies from an 'accident' or catastrophe of nature is thereby pointed out as punished by God. The selective, though equally natural, punishments of God are of quite another order; they single out unerringly, with the utmost subtlety and fineness, man from man. They are determined for himself by each man; he works out his own damnation as he works out his own salvation, God working with him for both. And that is why the adjustment is so accurate between the man who will not be saved and the doom that falls upon him. The calamities of earth are far too rough and ready to be God's instruments of selection. When (or if) one Grand Duke is the sole survivor of a wrecked ship and a Te Deum is sung in thankfulness to God, the mind of Christ is ignored, his plain words are ignored. 'Think ye that this Grand Duke was a man of God above all men that were on that ship?' we hear him ask. And we do not hear him say that if we all repent we shall all likewise be rescued. The kingdom of heaven is neither bought nor sold, and no repentance will purchase safety upon earth.

All this lies on the face of these illuminating words spoken from the mind of Christ. But there is more to be learnt about them and from them. We are thrown back upon the mystery of the fundamental relation between matter and spirit. And if we cannot do more, we can at least consider what experience shows us every day concerning that relation and what we find when we reflect upon it. There is that tower now. Towers may be built to stand for centuries, perhaps thousands of years. There is no indication that the fall of this particular tower was due to an earthquake, against which its strength would have been useless. We may reasonably suppose that it was not strong, that there were faults in its design, or building or material, or all three or any two. A tower well designed, well built and of good materials may, perhaps, outlast mankind upon this earth. And at least it will not fall; it will only wear away and crumble. This tower fell through the fault of sinners. Was the fault moral, or was it, as we say, merely intellectual? Was there anything of the spirit about it? And we must answer that as it was fault in a human being, a spiritual and moral person, there certainly must have been moral fault. The intellectual element is not separate from the moral.

Think—if all the men concerned in building that tower had been disinterested seekers after goodness and truth and beauty, would it have fallen as it did? What, you may say (but I am assured that you will not, if you have read thus far), what is the connexion between a love of goodness, truth and beauty, and the building of a tower? What, in fact (and this you may well ask), is the true relation between spirit and life on the one hand, and the successful use of material things on the other? Does a man use them better, that is, more successfully, because he is as God would have him be, morally and spiritually?

The narrow outlook of some religious men, and their abstraction of religion from the wide range of its concerns into the narrowness of theirs, blinds them to the wide range of goodness, of beauty, and of truth. The man who is as God would have him be (according to the mind of Christ), if he had to build a tower, would seek as he seeks salvation to find out the truth of towers, of their materials, of their design and of their building. He would not only know that this was his duty, but he would know or feel that it was his heart's desire. He would throw himself into the pursuit of this truth because he was a lover of truth. And in loving truth he would show his love of God. Therefore he would use good materials, not bad, good stone, good mortar, and he would put these together with due regard to their characters, their truth. And his love of beauty would conspire with his love of truth to bring about the strength and stability of his tower. Beauty in these things is a guarantee of truth, or rather its evidence. So closely are the three linked in the love of them and the realization of them, that we may know them to be one. They are to be distinguished, but they cannot be separated, one from another. And so those builders of our tower who should be disinterested in their worship of the three in one, would (we may well say) have set up at Siloam a tower very different from that which fell. It might have endured, like the Tower of David, to this day.

Sin, then, that is, the refusal to follow after truth, beauty and goodness, and thus after God made known to the soul, had a very real connexion with the fall of that tower. But in this respect of sin its builders were no worse than other men 'who dwelt at Jerusalem.' All these men had come short of full devotion to God as they saw God, to the light they perceived, the truth they might attain, the beauty that summoned them and the goodness that should have been theirs. Not in this regard is the fall of the tower selective. Indeed there is nothing to show that it fell upon a single one of its builders, any more than that it selected the worst of the sinners. It may have caused to 'perish' a party of mere sight-seers.

Only through that solidarity of man which links 'the crimes of each to the sorrows of all' is the fault of the builders linked with the perishing of those eighteen. And again we have testimony against any selection of the bad from the good by the calamities of earth. Not even the retribution of the kind of badness which bad building is falls, by God's determination, upon the evil-doer, through instruments of the earth. They are far too rough, these things, too indiscriminating. They do not pierce to the joints and the marrow; they hit like a blind man's bludgeon.

Yet this they assuredly are not. As the personal punishment and forgiveness of God seek and find the sinner himself in the depths of his being and to the utmost of his activity, so these things, Towers of Siloam, Armageddons, plague and pestilence, search out our corporate sin and sinfulness, reach the community of sinners in their interaction. By pain and sorrow for all, they bring to light both the sins and the shortcomings of each. Our responsibility for Armageddon extends over the devastation it has wrought, as the responsibility of those builders of the tower made the deaths of the eighteen it killed their own work. In the community of life is community of crime and suffering and all their consequences. There is an identity one with another among men, which they cannot escape. They are one body even when they are not one spirit, and every member of the body may entail disaster on the rest, as he may bring redemption. If we could not hinder life we could not help it. And therefore that word of Christ which was no doubt primarily addressed to those men of Jerusalem whose sins were inviting doom, has other points of significance we need to note. 'Unless ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.' All—the community; likewise—through aid from the calamities and catastrophes of that outer world of things and persons with which we are so closely bound, as well as from the snares and the beguiling, the temptations and betrayal, we make for ourselves in our misuse of it.

We are one with the earth—let us remember that. And even those catastrophes of earth for which we seem to have no responsibility, storm and flood and earthquake, are not cut off from a relation with ourselves that may some day be more clear. We are but beginners in the task of entering upon our heritage of earth. And when we try to look deep into the mystery of matter and spirit what we see makes us think that they are not unlike the red and violet ends of a spectrum, which between them passes from colour to colour, but which, when our analytical stretching out is over, returns to the multiplicity in unity of white light. The Christian, by his sacramentalism and his emphasis on incarnation, confesses their kinship, as does the artist when out of three sounds he frames 'not a fourth sound, but a star,' and out of mud or marble, a vision.

We cannot penetrate this mystery; but when we recognize the solidarity of man with man, we may try to remember that it must reach beyond man, not only above him but below.