Some Thoughts on Hardy and Religion

Abstract

‘In essence all living things — including man-are the result of a purely accidental and unpredictable biochemical ‘situation” which produces the succeeding genetic mutation. In short man is an accident based on chance and the accident is perpetuated by the necessity of chemical reactions … in a universe without causality’ This is the summary given on the jacket of a recent work by an authoritative evolutionary geneticist, Professor Jacques Monod.1 I don’t suppose such a statement causes any holder of any religious belief, whether institutional, independent, esoteric or anything else-and it is surprising how many there are today even in the scientifically enlightened West-any trouble at all. We shall have a look at the reasons why later. Monod’s conclusion, whether true or false, was inherent in scientific investigation from its inception; for if something outside nature exists-the supernatural, God or whatever name you like to give to what has been the object of man’s religious impulse since he ‘first emerged from the den of time’2 — it will not be discovered by inquiry into nature; and if it is only the product of imagination, it will not be discovered anyhow. It will not be found by looking at what natural science cannot yet explain. ‘There are reverent minds who ceaselessly scan the fields of nature and the books of science in search of gaps-gaps which they fill up with God. As if God lived in gaps.’ So Henry Drummond wrote in The Ascent of Man in 1894.