Science vs. Sight

The following from the pen of Professor S. C. Mitchell, Ph.D., of Richmond College, Virginia, appeared in a recent number of the Standard.

It is often said that religion is opposed, not to reason, but to sight. Science, the product of reason, is no less opposed to sight. An obvious illustration of this truth is found in the opposite conceptions of the sun given by the senses and by science. The eye reports that the sun rises and sets, a view in which man rested for thousands of years; science teaches that the sun is relatively still, that the earth revolves — knowledge revealed to the reason only after centuries of toilsome effort. In this case, as so often happens, the truth of reason stands in direct contradiction to the impression of the senses.

Hence it is that Sir John Herschel regards distrust of the senses as the prime requisite of those who wish to enter into the truths of science. "There is," says he, "no science which, more than astronomy, stands in need of such preparation, or draws more largely on that intellectual liberality which is ready to adopt whatever is demonstrated, or concede whatever is rendered highly probable, however new and uncommon the points of view may be in which objects the most familiar may thereby become placed. Almost all its conclusions stand in open and striking contradiction to those of superficial and vulgar observation, and with what appears to every one, until he has understood and weighed the proofs to the contrary, the most positive evidence of his senses."

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