6`HORRID RED THINGS'M ANY THEOLOGIANS AND SOME SCIENTISTS ARE NOW READY to proclaim that the nineteenth century `conflic
6
`HORRID RED THINGS'
M ANY THEOLOGIANS AND SOME SCIENTISTS ARE NOW READY to proclaim that the nineteenth century `conflict between science and religion' is over and done with. But even if this is true, it is a truth known only to real theologians and real scientists - that is, to a few highly educated men. To the man in the street the conflict is still perfectly real, and in his mind it takes a form which the learned hardly dream of.The ordinary man is not thinking of particular dogmas and particular scientific discoveries. What troubles him is an allpervading difference of atmosphere between what he believes Christianity to be and that general picture of the universe which he has picked up from living in a scientific age. He gathers from the Creed that God has a `Son' (just as if God were a god, like Odin or Jupiter): that this Son `came down' (like a parachutist) from `Heaven', first to earth and later to some land of the dead situated beneath the earth's surface: that, still later, He ascended into the sky and took His seat in a decorated chair placed a little to the right of His Father's throne. The whole thing seems to imply a local and material heaven - a palace in the stratosphere - a flat earth and all the rest of those archaic misconceptions.The ordinary man is well aware that we should deny all the beliefs he attributes to us and interpret our creed in a different sense. But this by no means satisfies him. `No doubt', he thinks, `once those articles of belief are there, they can be allegorised or spiritualised away to any extent you please. But is it not plain that they would never have been there at all if the first generation of Christians had had any notion of what the real universe is like? A historian who has based his work on the misreading of a document may afterwards (when his mistake has been exposed) exercise great ingenuity in showing that his account of a certain battle can still be reconciled with what the document records. But the point is that none of these ingenious explanations would ever have come into existence if he had read his documents correctly at the outset. They are therefore really a waste of labour; it would be manlier of him to admit his mistake and begin all over again.'Man's reason is in such deep insolvency to sense.
Where, then, do we draw the line between explaining and `explaining away'? I do not think there is much difficulty. All that concerns the un-incarnate activities of God - His operation on that plane of being where sense cannot enter - must be taken along with imagery which we know to be, in the literal sense, untrue. But there can be no defence for applying the same treatment to the miracles of the Incarnate God. They are recorded as events on this earth which affected human senses. They are the sort of thing we can describe literally. If Christ turned water into wine, and we had been present, we could have seen, smelled, and tasted. The story that He did so is not of the same order as His `sitting at the right hand of the Father'. It is either fact, or legend, or lie. You must take it or leave it.