The Uncertainties of Modern Physical Science Being the Annual Address of the Victoria Institute, Or, Philosophical Society of Great Britain, Arts, on the 29th May, 1876 Classic Reprint

Excerpt from The Uncertainties of Modern Physical Science: Being the Annual Address of the Victoria Institute, Or, Philosophical Society of Great Britain, Delivered at the House of the Society of Arts, on the 29th May, 1876

Those Gnostic heresies and speculations, to which the warn ing first applied, are extinct long ago. Nothing Is left of them but some fossil skeletons in the works of the Fathers. But oppositions of pretended science to the Christian faith have revived In other forms, and exist at the present day. In the name of scientific progress, faith In God, in a life to come, and in supernatural revelation, has been vigorously assailed. The chief leaders in this philosophical sect may be called Agnos tics, and their creed Agnosticism. They affirm that of a Creator, a First Cause, a Supreme Governor of the universe, nothing whatever can be known. But by way of compensation they claim that their own advance in natural knowledge is all but infinite, compared with their predecessors. From this lofty pedestal they affect to look down upon all faith in a living, personal God, and supernatural religion, as a superstition that is waxing old, and ready to vanish away.

A severe moral conflict is thus forced on all Christian believers. And In this strife, which cannot be avoided, a purely defensive attitude, a timid, apologetic tone, ill befits either the dignity of their cause or the strength of their position. There can be no conflict between the genuine sense of God's messages to mankind, and the real facts and authentic conclusions of science. But false constructions of Scripture, on the one side, and the crude hypotheses or fanciful guesswork of men of science, on the other, may and will contradict and clash.

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