Science & Faith

Anglican bishops squirmed restlessly one day last fortnight during a Convocation of Canterbury (Church of England meeting) in London. Lean little Dr. Ernest William Barnes, famed "scientific bishop" of Birmingham, was shocking them once more. This time it was with proposals to reduce England's population 10% by sterilizing the unfit and teaching birth control to lower class women. Up jumped Bishop Arthur Foley Winnington Ingram of London, to cry that this was "rather off the mark." Suave Dr. Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, intervened and changed the subject.

Dr. Barnes, born on All Fools' Day in 1874, went to King Edward's School in Birmingham and to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a Second Wrangler (honors man in mathematics), fellow, lecturer, junior dean and tutor. He became an inspirational, evangelical preacher, was made canon of Westminster. In 1924 Ramsay MacDonald had him appointed Bishop of Birmingham. Anglo-Catholics protested, have continued to protest. As a churchman, Bishop Barnes is as low as a sole. During one church quarrel he exclaimed that he would "not be driven to Tennessee or to Rome." To him they both represent "degenerate religious thought," one a "refusal to admit the truth of man's evolution from lower forms of life," the other a "belief that spiritual presence can be attached to, or reside in, inanimate objects."

When Bishop Barnes opens a missionary exhibition with African settings (see cut) his mind is likely to be on the evidences of primitive mankind in Africa. As a scientific man of God, he is shrewd, erudite, pragmatical. The impact of science on the views of Bishop Barnes has lately produced a thick book, compilation of the Gifford Lectures he delivered at the University of Aberdeen in 1927-29.* Bishop Barnes recalls that at one point in the 19th Century, science seemed about ready to crowd out religion. But science is not yet free of error or boundless in scope. Bishop Barnes travels its length, then looks toward God.

Not for the plain man-in-the-pew nor even for the average preacher-in-the-pulpit are Bishop Barnes' thoroughgoing expositions of matter, space, spacetime, relativity, electricity, heat & light, the quantum theory and Rontgen rays, the solar system, galactic universe and nebulae, evolution and man's origin. As Dr. Barnes points out: "The intellectual gulf between the leaders of science and the educated citizen is dangerously wide." Yet in his lectures there are numerous stout little bridges:

God is transcendent. His universe is unified, well-planned, still in process of evolution. God has a personality like Man's. Dr. Barnes believes Him good but finds evolution disconcerting because God sponsors Sin and Evil. Dr. Barnes leaves the dilemma unresolved.

Virgin Birth, he believes, may some day be proved biologically possible. An individual so produced would probably be a male, with half the normal number of chromosomes. Of the propriety of investigating virgin birth, Dr. Barnes says: "Reverence and truth can always be combined, unless the object of our reverence should happen to be untrue."

Prayer. If the universe is unified and guided, prayer theoretically has no limits. Dr. Barnes would not exclude prayers for rain or for good weather, though such petitions are not the highest type of religious experience.

Religious Experience. Dr. Barnes says he has felt moments of mystical exaltation. He believes religion should include emotion, though in moderation: "The novel entitled Elmer Gantry was written with the exaggeration born of desire to expose an evil; but I fear that in the religious life of America there does exist a misuse, such as its author describes, of emotion which ought to be held sacred." Dr. Barnes deplores the loss of enthusiasm for conversion in British churches. Unless they recapture it they will die. "Churches die of respectability just as they become a nuisance through superstition. Conversion takes a man so fully into the realities of the spiritual world that he ignores respectability and has no need of superstition."

*Scientific Theory and Religion (Macmillan, $4).

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