Reasoning is our great ally in the quest for truth. But reasoning can only start from premises; and at the beginning of the argument we must always come back to innate convictions...We are helpless unless we admit also ( as perhaps the strongest conviction of all) that we have within us some power of self-criticism to test the validity of our own convictions...I think this power can be nothing less than a ray proceeding from the light of absolute Truth, a thought proceeding from the absolute Mind. With this guidance we may embark on the adventure of spiritual life uncharted though it may be. It is enough that we carry a compass. Sir Arthur S. Eddington, Science and Religion, Friends Home Service Committee 1931, p.16 quoted in Colin Chapman, The Case for Christianity, Tring,Herts:Lion Publishing, 1981, p.51 ~~~ It is such a pathetic betrayal of truth to allow to grow in people's minds the idea that 'God had it all his own way until science came along and discovered mechanistic explanation.'To spread the idea deliberately, as some atheists do, seems sheer dishonesty when one thinks that from the biblical-theistic standpoint it is to God's own creative faithfulness, the faithfulness and regularity of his sustaining in being the universe that he has created, that we owe the success and worthwhileness of our mechanistic enterprise in science. It is his story that we are trying to tell in mechanistic terms. This conviction was one of the major motive factors in the rise of modern science; and it is not without significance that the great majority of the most famous developers of the mechanistic world-model - Newton, Boyle, Faraday, Maxwell, Compton, Eddington come to mind as examples - were believers in God. Their belief gave them all the greater confidence in the worthwhileness of studying nature. It is in the biblical doctrine of God as the Creator of our whole drama, its mechanistic level as well as its personal, that I see the one unifying perspective for the scientifically-structured world in which we live. Donald MacKay, The Clockwork Image: a Christian perspective on science, Inter-Varsity Press 1974, p.95 quoted in Colin Chapman, The Case for Christianity, Tring,Herts:Lion Publishing ,1981, p.51
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