Science, Religion and the Future Education in World Ethics and Science Conway Memorial Lecture delivered at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, W.C.I, on March 28, 1943 Discipline for Democracy

Abstract

THE "conflict between religion and science", to quote from the title of J. W. Draper's book published in 1874, which was widely read sixty years ago, means practically for most of us the battle between believers in the Biblical accounts of creation and believers in the theory of evolution. That contest has abated its intensity, but there is evidence, that it still exists, though in milder forms, in places much nearer than Tennessee. This is the point of departure chosen by Dr. C. E. Raven, regius professor of divinity in the University of Cambridge, in a vigorously written book which has recently appeared. Insisting on the necessity of outspokenness, he declares that "while the Christian religion as professed by the churches still clings restrictively to a Weltanschauung that is demonstrably unscientific, to superstitions that violate the intelligence and to conduct that shocks the morality of modern man, no such consistency as is essential can be expected. To be a Christian, or at least to hold official position in the churches, is to accept formulae parts of which can only be explained by being explained away, or else to keep secular knowledge and religious belief in permanent estrangement". Dr. Raven gives a characteristically lively account of the conflict which began on June 30, 1860, with the encounter of Huxley and Wilberforce at the Oxford meeting of the British Association, and which “made overt and abiding the cleavage between traditional Christianity and progressive science”. Science, Religion and the Future A Course of Eight Lectures. By the Rev. Charles E. Raven. Pp. x+126. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1943.) 7s. 6d. net. Education in World Ethics and Science. Conway Memorial Lecture delivered at Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, W.C.I, on March 28, 1943. By Sir Richard Gregory. Pp. viii+40. (London: Watts and Co., Ltd., 1943.) Cloth, 2s. net; paper, 1s. net. Discipline for Democracy By T. V. Smith. (Weil Lectures on American Citizenship.) Pp. xiv+137. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press ; London: Oxford University Press, 1942.) 12s. not.