, for the audacity of any learned man terming the
New Testament writings "historical" was beyond his comprehension. It
brought forcibly to his attention the great change which the apologies
for the Church had undergone, and the new methods which they assumed.
The old theological defense of the deity was gone; not even philosophy
was deemed strong enough support for the present day. How the Church had
fallen! The Church which had persecuted, anathematized, burned, and
tortured the scientist, the geologist, the astronomer, the geographer,
the biologist, the chemist, and the physician; this same Church in its
last extremus, casts aside theology as its weapon and its appeal to the
minds of the sceptics whom they aim to convert. The Church casts aside
its own theology, having learned by bitter experience and recanting of
opinions, bulls, and infallible statements by infallible popes, and now
succumbs to the opinions it has formerly anathematized. In the present
age the Church calls science to its aid, and utterly disregards its
obsolete theology which it still practices, and attempts, by means of
the misinterpretation of scientific facts and statements of a few men
such as Eddington and Jeans, to force science into some illogical and
unscientific concordance with the conception of a supreme being.

Ironically it occurs to the Martian that the shades of Hypatia, Bruno,
Galileo, Copernicus, Vanini, Darwin, and the vast numbers of Waldenses,
Albigenses, Huguenots, Jews, and the victims of the Inquisition and the
Witch Hunt, must, as they contemplate the present tactics of that Holy
Institution, the Church, find some consolation in the depths of that
hell to which the Church consigned them. The Martian logically deduces
that by employing science for its defense, the Church admits the
impotence of "divine revelation," in this age, to convince even its own
adherents of the problematical existence of a divine being. _Theology is
no longer recognized as authoritative even by theologians!_

Will the theologians now discard their theology based on the
supernatural, and build a system of theology based on science? Is this
all that is left to the theologian: that he must use the pitiful
"Theology of Gaps"? That is, wherever there are gaps in scientific
knowledge, the theologians insert their idea of God! This is but the
replacing of the question mark with a meaningless label.

CHAPTER V

THE PERSISTENCE OF RELIGION

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