The Field of Science by Editor

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jan 17, 1884

The Field of Science.

By Editor

FROM an article in the National Baptist, by John M. Gregory, LL.D., we take the following remarks on the proper field of science; on what it can do, and what it cannot do:—

"Modern science has established its claims to the confidence of mankind by the wonderful inventions to which it has lighted the way in the useful arts. Men will not dispute the truths which have given them the telephone, the electric light, and a hundred inventions which stand as witnesses for the value and verity of scientific truth. The issues between science and religion are daily becoming more clearly and sharply defined. They cannot be disguised nor softened, and they are all the sharper because unsought by either party. Science feels itself compelled to adhere to simple, sensible facts, and is therefore shut up to material things. If a scientist recognizes any existence beyond matter, as many eminent scientists do, he either confesses himself unscientific in so doing, or he claims, and properly, that material science does not include all that can be known, or that is worthy of belief.

"It needs to be borne in mind that all is not science which is called science, and every true scientist will acknowledge that much of his science is unproved assumption, or unestablished inference. A competent and candid criticism should dissect these theories and show to the people how much is clear fact and how much is cloudy conjecture. The author of the brilliant discourse under consideration would doubtless tell us that more than half of his statements were mere theories, not proven truths. Next year many of them may be discarded for fresher and more plausible theories. The supposed 'mistakes of Moses' are not half as numerous as may be found in the record of every science of a hundred years' growth. The track of geology is strewn thick with the wrecks of discarded theories, and physics, biology and anthropology have changed front more than once in the memory of living men. But these changes are frankly avowed by scientists, and are claimed as proofs of the progress and honesty of scientific men."