Religion and Evolution

Abstract

AT the present time it is especially interesting to compare the way in which, in different parts of the world, thoughtful men regard the relation between religion and science. We should expect to find a general uniformity in the different attitudes of representative thinkers in Great Britain and America. We are largely of the same stock. We speak substantially the same language, so that books in large numbers pass in both directions across the Atlantic. But it is a curious fact that the popular religious dislike of evolution, which even enters into politics in the Middle Western States, affects leaders of American thought. No theologian of eminence in England would now challenge a scientific conclusion, for which experts combine to demand our assent. Yet, in the book before us, the professor of biblical history and literature in a college at Hanover, N.H., makes a vigorous attack on “the religion of science,” and argues that man cannot be fitted into the scheme of biological evolution. No J fossil or organic half-man, says the professor in impres- I sive italics, has ever been discovered, and never will be. (Grammatically the final clause means the opposite fl of what the professor intends; but we will let that pass.) The Religion of Science. By Prof. William Hamilton Wood. Pp. xi + 176. (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., n.d.) 6s. net.