Through Science to Religion

Science has been considered religion's most formidable enemy. On the contrary it is destined to be religion's savior and redeemer. Religion has sunk to abject impotence in the life of humanity because it has abandoned science in the ancient day, suppressed and thwarted science in its late medieval and modern resurgence and looked at it with jealousy in the whole period of its manifestation. All in all it is an amazing and nearly incredible story and it has never been told in the glaring light of its full revelation hitherto. The gist of the broad sweeping truth in the foregoing statements can be compacted in the one comprehensive affirmation that religion in very early times turned from the exploitation of its highest values in the world of the natural and sought them in the field of the supernatural. It shifted the area of its operations and realizations from the regular and common procedure of cosmic law over to the realm of the magical and the miraculous. No founder of a religion was considered to have presented adequate credentials until he had demonstrated his power to work "miracles". If he could not heal the sick and maimed, the lame and blind, he did not come properly certified as an authentic proclaimer of the power of God. The prime word in all religion became "conversion". Religion was considered to be doing its work when it transformed a natural man over into a person who had put himself in contact with a power outside himself which would take him out of nature and bless him with adventitious and exceptional influences. The field of religion came to be regarded as lying not in the world of commonplace events under nature, but reaching into an area of special dispensation, of extraordinary manifestation, of transcendental causality. Religion was to take a man out of the world and make him a citizen of a diviner kingdom, in which he would no longer be amenable to the currents and forces that affect the man of the natural world, but would enjoy an immunity from them along with a liberty stated by revered Scriptures to be the unique portion of the elect and the redeemed. Religion thus aimed to liberate its votaries from the sluggish bondage to the natural and elevate them to a state of blessedness in a boundless freedom in the world of spirit. There are grounds for comprehending the course of this development in world religion and seeing it, in part at least, as the inevitable result of forces generated from given historical situations and working ahead in wrong directions. Nevertheless it represents tragic misfortune for mankind. Our concern here is to demonstrate that it was in toto due to religion's defection from and hostility to science. - Alvin Boyd Kuhn