Religion and Science
1. The Method of Argument
~ 13 ~
heaven nor hell. They may place themselves if they
will, on a parallel with a man who walks all around
a room, and, trusting to his normal eyesight, says
that there are no elephants or tigers within the
hundred cubic feet which make up the room.
Obviously the anti-religionists are in no position to
make observations of the extensiveness or subtlety
required. They would not even know where to
begin. Then precisely what is the principle, which
has supplied them with the basis for an argument
against religion? Whatever it is, it is not based on
the direct observation of religion, but on an
interpretation of certain observations. For instance,
the discovery of gravitation in the universe lead
them to believe that there was no God who was
sustaining the universe, since the law of gravitation
explains this phenomenon. Obviously, the observa-
tion on which this theory is based is not of the non-
existence of God. That is, no telescope has
definitively given us the news that this universe is
God-free. Rather, it has been inferred on the basis of
an external observation that there should be no
God. That is, the observation or experience was not
one of the non-existence of God, but of another
