Science and the True Foundation of Faith
In discussing the decreasing influence of the church and the preachers over the average layman of to-day the Chicago Inter Ocean says: “Where many preachers have been to blame is in failing to perceive where the church’s true strength lies. . . . In trying to formulate religion by the rules and in the terms of science, many preachers have cut loose the ship of faith to drift upon a boundless sea of mental speculation. Faith, we are told, is the evidence of things unseen. Science declines to accept such evidence. Hence to attempt to formulate religion by the rules of science is as destructive to faith as to attempt to govern science by faith is destructive to science.” True science is a unit, and all the so-called branches of science are merely different parts of the one great field of knowledge of the truth, and the interpreter of this whole field of knowledge is the written Word of God. But an irreconcilable difference at once springs up between science falsely so-called (that science whose conclusions are based upon mere human research, or are the product of human reasoning regardless of the plain teachings of the written Word) and the revelation which God has made of himself in “the scriptures of the prophets.” And that teaching is most dangerous and confusing which uses the familiar phraseology of the Bible as the form in which to express conclusions which have not come from a study of the Bible, and which really subvert the teaching of the Bible. Such are some of the efforts to harmonize science and the Bible, which really end in bringing all spiritual truth down to the plane of the senses, and in making the discoveries of science the complete meaning of the revelation of truth in the Scripture. This is then brought forward as the discovery of a scientific basis for faith. It is in reality the refinement of infidelity. By substituting the revelation of the human mind for the revelation of the mind of God, it destroys the whole foundation for faith, and then we have only the shifting sands of “mental speculation,” instead of the rock foundation of truth, upon which to build. Human science cannot furnish a foundation for faith. “Faith cometh . . . by the word of God.”