“SCIENCE FALSELY SO-CALLED.”
“Science” means knowledge. It is generally used as meaning knowledge ascertained and verified by a correlation of facts and experiments. But how much of what men have called science, which scholars thought was demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt, is, after years of research, still tossing upon the sea of doubt. As illustration of this, a paper by T. C. Mendenhall, president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, in the Independent of May, 1901, may be cited. He refers to the unsolved problems passed over from the last century, and says:— “Toward the solution of some of the older problems, which means the explanation of some of the very commonest of physical phenomena, little progress has been recorded. The nature of gravitation is quite as far from being understood as it was a hundred years ago. While we have learned to create and destroy other “fields of force,” electric and magnetic, and to direct and control the lines along which these forces act, we are helpless in the omnipresence of gravitation, which we can neither create, destroy, nor control in any fashion. He tells us that the beautiful, simple law of Newton that two particles of matter attract each other with a force directly proportional to the product of their masses, and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, “has not been proved by actual laboratory experiment,” but rests upon “astronomical observation,” and therefore it is in doubt. Newton’s “apparatus and methods would be regarded to-day as very crude and indecisive.” Electric and magnetic forces are supposed to have much to do with the problem, but this is all hypothesis. Professor Mendenhall tells us that this “greatest of all problems in physics, the solution of which may be the pass-key to innumerable of nature’s storehouses of knowledge” is “now locked against the most cunning investigator.” We wonder that some of the scientists, among whom there must be devout Christians, can not see in all this “gravitational” power the power and life of God. “By Him [Christ Jesus] all things consist [hold together].” Col. 1:17. “Upholding all things by the word of His power.” Heb. 1:3. Simple faith in God and His Word indeed unlocks many of “the storehouses of knowledge now locked against the most cunning investigator” who seeks by his own wisdom, and often uses that imperfect wisdom to seek the overthrow of God’s truth. Another great, unsolved problem we are told is the nature of matter. Are there eighty elementary substances, “or is there a common magma from which they all come?” Again, why not believe that all came from the power of God’s creative Word? The old atomic theory is yet atoss on the doubting sea, and scientists are basing great hope on “the physics of the ether, already found to be one of the most fruitful fields of research.” The nature of some of the physical properties of matter of everyday observation, such as cohesion, elasticity, etc., the writer tells us, “will doubtless continue to be obscure for a long time to come.” “Crystallization” is still a “mysterious phenomenon,” “terrestrial magnetism” is as “yet little understood.” There is a constant hoping for certain, sure conclusions, but each “settled” fact of importance unsettles others. O soul, it is a better thing to be established in God than to follow “science falsely so-called.”