Science and Religion

Abstract

Whatever the theologian or the trained scientist may think, the majority of people in the developed areas of the world seems to believe that science has destroyed the need for religion. Repeatedly one hears that God is now superfluous because science has taken his place. Fewer and fewer individuals, particularly among the young, feel that they must make a token religious gesture just in case. As science conquers ever-expanding territories there seems less need than ever for a God to fill the gaps in human knowledge. For the clever young intellectual God is often very, very dead. Many humanists have had to revise early over-confident views about the inevitability of man’s progress, but few have needed to alter their opinion that God is finished. All enthusiasm for belief in him will gradually wither away as the mass of knowledge in libraries and computers becomes more impressive. God is an outworn dream buried beneath the intellectual brilliance of man. His headstone reads: “He served his time, but mechanisation has rendered him redundant.”