RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
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possible for me to do what I know I ought not, how do I overcome
this?
IV.
Science) Art) Christianity.
A Christian is committed to believing: a) that there is one
God, b) that He is the source of all truth, c) that He created the
natural universe. From this it follows that any proposition about
nature which can be proved to be true is
ipso facto
,a revelation of
the work of God and that,
a priori)
there can be no contradiction
between true science and true Faith. So far, there has been no gen–
uine advance in scientific knowledge which has not in the end been
found by the Christian to confirm and clarify his faith.
In the short run, of course, from the time of Averroes to our
own, Christianity and Science have repeatedly believed they were
deadly enemies. Christians on the one side have confused the Chris–
tian dogmas with certain propositions which they have come through
cultural habit to associate with them, so that they have reacted to new
knowledge like most people react to modern art, and some scientists,
on the other side (which makes the behavior of the Christians more
sensible if not more excusable), have imagined that in disproving
the propositions they would disprove the dogmas.
Let us take the most extreme case, that of the Biblical Scholar–
ship and "Higher Criticism" of the past century and a half. A Chris–
tian is committed to believing that the Bible is an inspired book, i.e.
that it is ,a unique revelation of the nature, acts and purposes of God
in a way that no other history is, and that it is the clue by which all
other history may be understood; further, that the life, passion and
resurrection of Jesus as recounted in the gospels are not mythical
events like the life of Hercules or Adonis but actual historical oc-
currences.
Before the development of Biblical Scholarship, perhaps the ma–
jority of uneducated Christians identified this belief with believing
that the Bible was a succession of true propositions dictated by God
to the "authors" of its various books without their conscious thought
or control. When historical research into the biblical documents be–
gan, many Christians feared that
if
it were shown that every sen–
tence in the Bible was not true in the sense that a geometrical
theorem can be true, then they could lose their faith; conversely,
