482 The Shifting Sands of Science. Curie discovered radium, that had some effect on medical science, but none at all on theology. In what way have the wonders of radio modified the doctrines of sin and grace? Theology is not in conflict with the facts of science. It is not pure science which finds mistakes in the Bible, but specnlative science. (That is, of course, a se1£ ~ o n t r a d i c t o r y term, but the idea expressed by it is current on the other side.) Theology is l10t in conflict with the established facts of science, but with c8Ttain conclusions falsely deduced from these facts by the philosophizing scientist. Theology has no fault to find with the cataloguing of the geological strata and the enumeration of the fossils there embedded, but it repudiates the doctrine of evolution which the specula ti \'e geologist spins therefrom. It is not science which objects to the miracles of the Bible; -for there happens to be no science which is equipped to deal with miracles, -but the objection is raised by the alleged scientific consciousness, by the "modern mind," which claims -we cannot see by what right of reason or logic-that, because science has brought to light many new facts and can explain them on the basis of the law of cause and effect, no miracles could have occurred. Dr. H. E. Fosdick accurately describes these thought processes: "The typical twentieth-century man feels that miracles are a priori improbable. Something radically transforming happened to the Illinds of men when Newton first set doVi'1l. in a demonstrable formula the law of gravitation. That formula eliminated chance and in'egularity from a wide axea of human experionce. . .. When, therefore, our modern friend faces in the Bible a story which seems to involve a ruptured law of nature, his first and very stxong impression is that the story is antecedently improbable." (The Modern Use of the Bible, p. 142.) Dr. R. Jelke, Lutherau theologi.an of Heidelberg, puts it thus: "It is the business of the dogmatician to show how the statements [of the Bible] concerning the person of Christ must be formulated in order to pass muster with the model"ll scientific consciousness." (Die Gnmdc70qmen des G7ll'isteniurns, p. 85.) We are asked to square our theology, not with the faots of science, but with the dogmas of the modern critical philosophy, which assumes that it has the support of science and calmly assumes the name of science. The Christian theologian refuses to do so. His chief reasonwhich shall not be enlarged upon at the present time -is that the Biblo is the sole source of theology. He forfeits his standing as a theologian if he refuses to abide by the order of God: "If any man speak, let him speak as the oracles of God," 1 Pet. 4, 11. Nowhere has God given a supplementary order: Let him speak also as the oracles of Darwin. (And that applies not only to science falsely so called, but also to pure soience. We are not asked by God to support our preaching with scientific truths. vVe ask our hearers to The Shifting Sands of Science. 483', accept every statement of the Bible because it is the oracle of God .. How to harmonize certain teachings of the Bible with scientific truths, which seem to contradict them is no concern of ours.) Another reason -and that, too, shall at the present time receive only brief consideration -why the theologian must refuse to keep his theology abreast with science, that is, in harmony with science, is that he cannot keep abreast with science. That is to say, it is beyond the power of mortal man to acquire a thorough knowledge of all the branches of science, moral, mental, and physical science. He would have to do so if the demand we are discussing obligated him. He is certainly not going to take into the pulpit, which deals with the eternal welfare of immortal souls, matters of which he knows only from hearsay. He will want to assure himself that science really teaches it. But then he would have to have nine lives. It takes at least one lifetime to master geology, a second to master psychology, and so on. And so the theologian can take his choice -he will either have to preach things of which he has no certain knowledge, or he will have to resign from the ministry until he has mastered all other branches of learning. -And how unfair the whole thing is ! A mathematician is not required to study zoology in order to prepare himself for the study of mathematics. He may know very little about the number and kind of tape-worms infesting the human body; but that does not estop him from mastering trigonometry. What earthly connection is there between tape-worms and trigonometry? And what have the laws of nature to do with sin and grace? And what will happen when the theologian has reconstructed the faith of the Ohurch according to the findings of the science of the third decade of the twentieth century? This; before the fourth decade has fairly dawned upon the world, he will have to cast his reconstructed theology overboard because a new set of findings are clamoring for incorporation into theology. And this is the third consideration to which we would at present direct particular attention. He that builds his theology on science is building on shifting sands. "Science" is too unstable to be received among the eternal verities. It is an axiomatic statement: the science of to-day is the fable of to-morrow. Take, for instance, the science of psychology. It is particularly psychology which to-day claims mastery in theology. We hear Pastor Stricker, president of the Lutheran Society in Germany, declare: "The statement of Scripture concerning man and sin must be rethought, grasped, and comprehended in the light of the present findings of psychology." We hear Freud quoted as an authority in the pulpits. What did Professor Barnes say? "Sin is scientifically indefinable and unknowable. Hence sin goes into the limbo of ancient superstitions, such as witchcraft and sacrifice." And that 484 The Shifting Sands of Science. on the basis of model'n psychology. Now, how much of the present science of psychology is true? We have not mastered this particular science. But what do the masters themselves tell us about it? Henshaw Ward asked them, and in Bl1,ilde1'S of Delusion, "a Tour among Our Best Minds," published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company (1931), he gives us their answer. The book is made up of two parts: "Part One: The Bubbles they build with. Part Two: Some of the Castles they build." 'vVe submit some excerpts from chapter XV: Psychology: "Wilhelm Max Wundt, the man who formulated modern psychology as a science, was a philosopher. . .. He was a man of great vigor and enthusiasm, who inspir8d many able students in the Leipzig laboratory that he founded in 1879. During my youth he was sending them forth to the universities as teachers of the latest and greatest science. It was the psychology of Wundt that William James absorbed and that he taught so brilliantly at Harvard in the 'eighties. Largely because of his wOTk the O e n t ~ i r v D'ictionary could say in 188B: 'Psychology has recently taken the position of a universally acknowledged science.' . .. Undergraduates in the 'nineties took it for granted that pS3Tchology was the noblest mode of science and was going to reveal more wisdom than any other college subject. I can't recall that any suspicion of weakness in psychology crossed my mind till I was more than forty years old. . .. "But E. L. Thorndike, who graduated from HaTVard in 1896 and was then a disciple of James, soon began to suspect that James's system was founded Oil wrong principles. In 1899 he began to teach genetic psychology at Teachers' College, was made professor of educational psychology in 1901, and in 1903 began to make a series of books which convinced the academic world that the basis of James's teaching' was unstable. He experimented with hungry cats and observed how they lem'ned to unlatch a door that admit.ted them to food. His conclusion was that the intelligence shown by animals is merely the result of many random movements, one of which happens to give a pleasurable result, is therefore impressed on the nervous system, and is t.herefore made likely to be repeated. All that had been called intelligence and learning Thorndike reduced to a series of chances. The movements that lead to pleasure are wholly automatic -'reflex actions.' This theory of reflex action has permeated all psychology in America for the past twenty-five years and has made the name of Thorndike famons. A student of his told me admiringly in 1918, 'Thorndike's torch has lighted the road we must take, lighted it farther than we can travel in £ity years.' That optimism is a fair sample of the continuous hope that modern psychology has inspired during the past half-century and that has been constantly disappointed. Robert Mearns Yerkes, the most famous of the American investigators of animal psychology, who has for years The Shifting Sands of Science. 485 experimented with chimpanzees and gorillas, has always felt that Thorndike's conclusion was too simple. Professors Koehler and Spearman have challenged the conclusion as applicd to man and have made the foundation of Thorndike's educational psychology look unstable. In 1929 D. K. Adams published a monograph in which he affirmed that Thorndike's observations were inadequate and his int81'pretations falsc. In the same year the pl'esident of the Amcl'lcan Psychological Association, K. S. Lashley, declal'ed in his pl'esidential address that the reflex-action theory must be rejected. Down goes the fame of Thorndike. "'William JliIcDougall l'ejoices in the downfall: 'Thorndike's conclusions, which for a whole generation have been the main foundation of the saTbon (the "S-R bond," i. e., the stimulus-response bond) theory, are thus finally exposed as fallacious. The theory that man is a machine is left without a single leg to stand upon, it remains fioating upon a cloud of metaphysical pI'ejudice.' :t\fcDougall is an Englishman, a writeI' on social psychology, who was called to a professol'ship at Hanard in 1920. He made for himself so gl'eat a reputation that, when Duke UnivCl'sity was bidding renowned men to its staff at large salaries, it invited him to lend his luster to the department of psychology. He has always been a detel'mined exposer of the fallacies of psychology. 'W undt's physiology of the nenous system,' he says, 'was a tissue of unacceptable hypotheses.' . .. In 1925 L. P. Jacks described the futility of McDougall's reasoning about 'wol'ld science': 'The "world science," which would enable us even to state world problems, docs not exlst. "lVe fear Dr. McDougall has only added one more to the 22,000 solutions.' In the same year R. G. Tugwell printed an even more unpleasant descl'iption of the mental workings of minds of the :iYlcDougall type: 'They have never done bettel' than to sound plausible, have lacked insight, have merely made structures of logic that failed utter1y to fit the facts, have bathed fact in a bath of mysticism.' ... "You may get an idea of the ghastly nature of the conflict among psychologists if you think of what J olm Bl'oadus ~ v V atson did. For twelve years he was director of the psychological laboratory at Johns Hopkins, he had been president of the American Psychological Association, and he was proclaimed on the jacket of his Behaviorism 'America's most distinguished scientist in the neld of psychological research.' . .. He je8l'ingly announced that most psychology is built out of 'an odorless, formless, and colorless gas.' He derided psychologists for trying to deal with consciousness, which he considered a gaseous assumption. . .. There is no evidence, he said in his declaration of war, that we have a mind which can reason: ''''That the psychologists have hitherto called thought is, in shoTt, nothing but talking to ourselves. The muscular habits learned in ovel't speech 486 The Shifting Sands of Science. are responsible for internal speech (thought).' Watson claimed for his Behaviorism the unspeakable power of changing personality: 'Some day we shall have hospitals devoted to helping us change our personality, because we can change our personality as easily as we can change the shape of our nose. Behaviorism ought to make men and women eager to rearrange their own lives. . .. I am trying to dangle a stimulus in front of you, a verbal stimulus, which, if acted upon, will gradually change this universe. For the universe will change if you bring up your children in behavioristic freedom.' . .. In 1930 McDougall described the wide sway of Watsonand it does not seem likely that he would wish to exaggerate the power of a rival-: 'His teaching has spread across the continent like a prairie fire before which nothing can stand. . .. A Southern teacher recently complained to me that wherever he goes he finds Behaviorism rampant in the schools and that, because he cannot accept it, he finds himself regarded by his colleagues as hopelessly out of date.' . . . Yet Behaviorism has probably almost ceased to be a force. Enemies are now descending upon it from every side. Its chance of survival for five years is poor. . .. McDougall's condemnation of Watson is as strong as he knows how to make it in parliamentary language: 'Watson is by vocation an expert advertiser. In any other profession the man who made similar claims would be generally recognized as a charlatan. His book may mark an epoch in the intellectual history of America, but it is to be hoped that the epoch will be remembered as the low-water mark of critical judgment in America. To sweep aside all the immense mass of evidence of the instructive basis of human nature ... is a de.,o-ree of childish presumption that could not flourish for a moment in any other country than America.' . . . "What counts far more among the psychologists than attacks on Behaviorism is the new psychologies that spring up every little while to attract attention by their novelty and their splendid claims. Two years after Watson issued his epoch-marking lectures, Dr. Louis Berman published a little book, The Religion Galled Behaviorism, which expounded the Gestalt Psychology. Berman imagines the case of a successful surgeon who became morose and confided to his wife that he wanted to commit suicide," shows how the specialist, the neurologist, the psychiatrist, and the Behaviorist would attempt to cure the patient, and "then explains his own way of solving the case: 'The Gestalt theory provides an answer. . .. As larger and larger units are seen to take on more and more meaning in the light of Gestaltist formulations, the universe itself, the largest unit and whole of all, must itself be considered the greatest Gestalt the mind of man can bear. The best advice the consulting Gestaltist could offer to my imagined patient might be to configurate with the universe: The The Shifting Sands of Science. 487 italics are Dr. Berman's. He does not explain what the words mean, and I cannot guess. But Gestalt Psychology is becoming a new science that is doing its part to choke out Behaviorism. "Some of the sociologists in Germany have lost faith in all the physiological psychologies and are constructing the kind they need in their work -the Geisteswissenschaftliche Psychology. Before 1935 there will probably be some other revolutionary psychology emerging from that fertile land of thought, where every ten-year-old ism dies and becomes a fertilizer for a crop of new science. 'The new analytic psychology,' used by Margaret N aumburg for her kindergarten method, may grow into a great creative force." ... The French savant .Tules-Bois of the Sarbonne, the champion of the "supe1'conscious mind" declared in 1928: "Freud and his followers floundered in the pedantic labyrinth of the Oedipus complex and the subconscious wish." "Two years ago Dr. R. J. Berry, dean of the Faculty of Medicin8 ill the University of Melbourne, gave his estimate of psychoanalysis in Cttrrent History: On the very insecure foundation of a half-truth Freud has built a veritable Woolworth Tower of untruth. . .. Freudianism is but another example of the many devastating doctrines of mind. These have their brief and fleeting moment in the limelight and die a speedy death. . .. Take the case of Granville Stanley Hall, president of Clark University. Twenty years ago he was so renowned a psychologist that all other scholars in America bowed to him and would have been able to agree pretty closely that his books on adolescence and youth should be published as aecredited science. Yet when he died, seven years ago, his work was appraised, even in the sympathetic obituary notices, as merely clever and unfounded theorizings. . . . "You can feel how likely it is that Bernard De Voto's esti.mate of psychology is the onc that will soon be geneTally held by educated people: 'It seems to me that no other subject is to-day so dominated by uncontrolled enthusiasm, fanaticism, ignorant and absurd pretension, and downrig'ht charlatanism. . .. Psychology is the contemporary phase of the medieval mind.' If you think a mere literary man's judgment in such a matter is nDt significant, couple it with the verdict of one of the world's most famous and most careful physiologists, J. S. Haldane: 'Psychology as a branch of science is still on about the same 1evel as chemistry was in the days of the alchemists.' " -Pity the poor theologian who must rethink the statements of the Bible concerning man and sin eveTY single decade of his ministry! He will have little time left for theology. And he will fare no better when he attempts to rectify his theology with philosophy proper. They tell us that philosophy is the queen of all sciences, assembling the findings of all other sciences and passing authoritative judgment on them; that the best minds of the world 488 The Shifting Sands of Science. have devoted their deepest thought to this branch of learning; that the theologian absolutely must square his theology with philosophy. V{ e ask, ·Which philosophy, that of yesterday or of to-day or of tomorrow? -Here are a few excerpts from chapter XIII: Philosophy: "In the nineteenth century philosophy was the ultimate form of wisdom und logic and knowledge, as is shown by the definition in the Oentury Dictionary, made about 1888: 'The body of highest truth; the organized sum of science; the science of which all others are brunches.' . .. A reviewer in the London Times' LiteTa?'y Supplement, a journal that is always respectful toward philosophers: 'In philosophy, as there is no objective standard, there is really no satisfactory reason why one opinion should be better than another.' ... R. M. Wenley: 'There is nothing like general acceptance of any philosophy as true.' . .. Herbert Croly: 'For more than one hundred years philosophers have written books on human nature in its social and political manifestations which pretended to the virtue of being scientific. Yet their successors have almost always denied the pretension. The new social science persistently has condemned the formulas of its predecessors as pseudoscience. . .. William James: 'Truth for each man is what that man "troweth" at each moment with the maximum of satisfaction to himself.' . .. There never was a time when philosophers agreed on the interpretation of Plato's thought. They could only agree when Plato bad been dead for six centuries that Plotinus was. all wrong in his interpretation. They could only agree in the nineteenth centmy that Schleiermacher was all wrong in his interpretation. . .. Santayana's gorge always rose when he thought of Kant. Here is one of his descriptions of the @haracter of Kant's mind as revealed in his transcendentalism: "It really expresses and sanctions the absoluteness of a barbarous soul, stubborn in its illusions, vulgar in its passions, and cruel in its zeal. It is nothing but a mass of foolish impulses and boasts ending in ignominy.' . .. J. Loewenbery: 'Hegel's Phenomenology thus became for me a comedy of errors, a vast playground of human ideas striving to be more than human.' .. , No philosopher's reasoning has ever been verified by a later generation. . .. Paul Weiss: 'There are almost as lllany species of Pragmatism as there are so-called Pragmatists.' . .. Locke became a l;ind of pope of philosophy for a time; but after fifty years David lIume helped Berkeley to topple his reasoning to the ground. Now the consensus of judgment about Locke's central thesis is that expressed by J. B. Pratt: 'It is not only false; it is the root of many hopeless vagaries.' . .. In 1930 the most-quoted philosopher in the United States is John Dewey. We read that he 'brushes all the great classical philosophical systems quietly aside.' J. E. Boodin: 'Modern philosophy got on the wrong track at the outset on account of a false psychology. Present philosophy is a whited sepulcher, calcimined with a coating of science The Shifting Sands of Science. 489 and mathematics; but within are the dead bones of the past, and the ghosts walk abroad.' .. , These modern complaints against philosophy were outdone half a century ago by the indictment of Oharles S. Peirce, 'whom James, Royce, Dewey, and leading thinkers of England, France, Germany, and Italy have placed in the forefront of the great seminal minds of recent times': 'Tho particular series of important fallacies which have desolated philosophy must be closely studied . . " . Not so much by Kant's answer to this question as by the mere asking of it the current philosophy of that time was shattered and destroyed. . .. The nfty or hundred systems of philosophy that have been advanced at different times of the world's history are exceedingly interesting and instructive and yet are quite unsound.' ... Bertrand Russell: 'Ever since the end of the ::\i[iddle Ages philosophy has steadily declined in social and political importance. . . . ,A. 11 tloaditional philosophies have to be discarded, and we have to start afresh with as little respect as possible for the systems of the past.' , I wonder why some department of philosophy in a progressive university does not placard in all its recitation-rooms the calm estimate of philosophy that was made by Santayana: 'The whole of British and GeTman philosophy is only literature. In its deepest Toaches it simply appeals to what a man says to himself when he surveys his adventures, analyzes his cUTious ideas, guesses at their origin, and imagines the varied experience which he would like to possess ... 0 Not one term, not one conclusion in it has the least scientific value, and it is only when this philosophy is good literature that it is good fOT anything.'" -,Vhile we do not caTe to appropriate the ultraradical statements and the violent language of Santayana, this much is clear: there is no agreement among the philosophers. On this point they aTe agl"eed. They are sure that the other schools are wrong. So the theologian will refuse to considel" their views until they offer us dennite, well-established Tesults. And that will never be. On the questions at issue between theology and philosophy the philosopher is unable to give a satisfactory answer. He will, if he is a pllilosopher, confess his ignorance. Sir William Hamilton dues so. "T'here are two SOTts of ignorance. We philosophize to escape ignorance, and the consummation of our philosophy is ignorance. We start fTOm the one, we repose in the other. . .. The highest reach of human science is indeed the sci enhfie recogni tion of human ignOTancc: '(jui nescitignoTaTe. ignoTat scire.' This 'learned ignorance' is the rational conviction by the human Jl1ind of its inability to transcend certain limits. It is the knowledge of om'selves, the science of man." (Modern Philosophy, by Francis Bowen, p.97.) In the Bible the innnite wisdom of God speaks, in philosophy the nnite, limited wisdom of man. Shall theology how to Ilhilosophy? The theologian who believCls that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God will not do it. TH. E ~ G E L D E R o