Religion and Science
5. Religion and Science
~ 79 ~
insufficient. It is in process of being replaced
by a different outlook, and, although the
reconstruction is by no means complete, it is
already apparent that the philosophical
implications of the new outlook are very
different from those of the old one. We are no
longer taught that the scientific method of
approach is the only valid method of
acquiring knowledge about reality. Eminent
men of science are insisting, with what seems
a strange enthusiasm, on the fact that
science
gives us but a partial knowledge of reality.
This change in the scientific outlook seems to
have taken place suddenly. It is not yet sixty
years since Tyndall, in his Belfast Address,
claimed that science alone was competent to
deal with all man’s major problems. But, in
truth, so far as these remarks sprang from the
conviction that the sole reality is ‘matter and
motion,’ their foundations had already been
undermined. The attempt to represent nature
in terms of matter and motion was already
breaking down. That attempt was at its most
triumphant by the end of the eighteenth
