OUR MOBILE EARTH

"Instead of believing everything their ministers and Sunday School teachers tell them, as they did when children, they now believe everything their Biology professors tell them." So declared Dean Sperry of the Divinity School, with reference to college undergraduates, at a religious conference meeting in Princeton Sunday.

This statement is a little surprising from as liberal a theologian as Dean Sperry, who elsewhere decries compulsory chapel and the "religious hangover" found in some ecclesiastical colleges. It would be folly to deny the absence among college undergraduates of any very real religious certitude, of the variety dealt out by pious Sunday School teachers: it is, however, not to be assumed at once that students flock unthinking after the frequently flickering electric torch of Science. Theories are born, have their being, and die in rapid tempo: the ideas set down as dogmas in a scientific textbook "brought up to the minute" a decade ago are a laughingstock now. The actual accomplishments of Science are tangible enough, but the reasoning used to explain them today merely forms a link in an endless chain of fallacies tomorrow.

When the date of the Creation was known, and history could be traced step by step along a well-charted and limited route for six thousand years, blind faith had definite pegs to which it could attach itself; now when professors carelessly juggle millions of years in a forty-minute lecture, and pass from electrons to infinity in a moment's time, only to discover in a few years that they are wrong, is it any wonder that faith has for many become a dead letter?