Remember the widely different aspects of events which are dealt with in science and in religion respectively. The clash is a sign that there are wider truths and finer perspectives within which a reconciliation of a deeper religion and a more subtle science will be found. If you check that impulse, you will get no religion and no science from an awakened thoughtfulness. To get around these restrictions, the slaves started to equate their gods with Catholic saints. The Vatican City Gift Shop is a treasure trove for those seeking items related to the popes that have shaped the history of the Catholic Church. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has more than 1,000 members in 5 congregations in Angola. Runciman, Steven. The Great Church in Captivity. This is one great reason for the utmost toleration of variety of opinion. Therefore, people didn’t come to believe that God is wrong, they just updated their opinion on what God thinks. An unflinching determination to take the whole evidence into account is the only method of preservation against the fluctuating extremes of fashionable opinion. We see at once that either of these ways would have been a method of facing the issue in an entirely wrong spirit.

The important question is, In what spirit are we going to face the issue? Even in the email above, he refers to me “choosing” Orthodox Christianity as if it were an issue of personal taste. It is absolutely necessary to trust to ideas which are generally adequate, even though we know that there are subtleties and distinctions beyond our ken. These ideas we inherit – they form the tradition of our civilization. You may preserve the life in a flux of form, or preserve the form amid an ebb of life. In the Synoptic Gospels he speaks about the kingdom of God in short aphorisms and parables, making use of similes and figures of speech, many drawn from agricultural and village life. There are short cuts leading merely to an illusory success. The apostle Paul said in his letter to the Colossians: My purpose is that they may be encouraged in heart and united in love, so that they may have the full riches of complete understanding, in order that they may know the mystery of God, namely, Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Chapter 2 vs.

3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing. We should believe nothing in either sphere of thought which does not appear to us to be certified by solid reasons based upon the critical research either of ourselves or of competent authorities. It belongs to the self-respect of intellect to pursue every tangle of thought to its final unravelment. Knowledge is a matter of proceeding from particulars to unity, beyond which is a unity with the divine surpassing all differences, “a silent desert.” The divine being is therefore inexpressible. In one sense, therefore, the conflict between science and religion is a slight matter which has been unduly emphasized. What one side sees the other misses, and vice versa. It may be that we are more interested in one set of doctrines than in the other. Today there is one large group of phenomena which can be explained only on the wave theory, and another large group which can be explained only on the corpuscular theory. There we come to something absolutely vital.

In an intellectual age there can be no active interest which puts aside all hope of a vision of the harmony of truth. Since the time of Newton and Huyghens in the seventeenth century there have been two theories as to the physical nature of light. What were two specific changes made in the English Bill of Rights of 1688? The two theories are contradictory. But, granting that we have honestly taken this precaution, a clash between the two on points of detail where they overlap should not lead us hastily to abandon doctrines for which we have solid evidence. A clash of doctrines is not a disaster – it is an opportunity. Also, apart from the necessities of action, we cannot even keep before our minds the whole evidence except under the guise of doctrines which are incompletely harmonized. They can see it in the scars on their elbows and knees and remember exactly the way it felt to fly through the air just like Evel Knievel — even if they missed the landing. We cannot think in terms of an indefinite multiplicity of detail; our evidence can acquire its proper importance only if it comes before us marshaled by general ideas.