A RELIGIOUS VIEW OF NATURE AND THE UNIVERSE
David Wagstaff
These individual essays are intended to lead the reader a short way beyond the book itself. They reflect my own beliefs; but my purpose is not so much to persuade the reader to agree with me, as to persuade him to think out what his own thoughts are, once he sees this world as a God-created Universe. The essays do not lead anywhere, because all I claim to have done is simply to have opened a door onto a new world, a world created by God; or rather onto a new way of looking at the old world. And now I am stepping through the door, to admire the scenery beyond. But I am incapable of going further. It is for other people to set out, and explore this new world. It is beyond me to do it; I have played my part. So I hope to encourage the reader to think things out for himself, and to dare to begin exploring. Life in the early Church must have been an adventure, often rather a dangerous one. Yet in my youth a bishop wrote a book called “God’s Frozen People”, meaning that initiative was now cowed. In the early Quaker Meetings people literally shook with emotion; hence their nick-name. Now in my limited experience, inspiration is virtually dead. So if I encourage a few to embark of their own “Adventure of Ideas”, to use Professor Whitehead’s phrase, I will be content. In time, I expect, my boldness will seem rather timid, compared with what future generations attempt or achieve. That is how it should be.
Francis Bacon, better philosopher than experimenter, saw clearly that scholasticism was dead, and pointed out roughly the correct way for the study of nature to proceed, and therefore science. In his succinct prose he said, "God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world". I agree. "Theories of all things", whether encapsulated in mathematical equations, or in psychological theories, are a consummation best avoided!