Religion and Science
7. The ‘Religion’ of the Modern Age
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the traditional connotation of an appreciation of
reality through divine revelation. They tend to treat
it as just another intellectual art, in which there has
been a transfer of the seat of power from God to
man. That is why this modern ‘religion’ is termed
humanism.
Dr. Alexis Carrel, (1873-1944) a French surgeon and
physiologist, who won a Nobel Prize in 1912,
attempted in his book,
Man, the Unknown,
first
published in 1935, to elucidate this standpoint.
Although this work cannot be said to be
representative of the majority of these thinkers, it is
probably the most exhaustive book on this topic
written by a scientist using a purely scientific
method and giving a detailed analysis of the facts
hitherto discovered.
In spite of the progress of science and technology,
man is still beset by the problems of not having
been able to bring either himself or his environment
to a state of perfection. Nor is his ultimate
understanding of these matters in any sense
complete. The ensuing difficulties are the constant
preoccupation of thinking men of the modern
