Religion and Natural Science

In former days, when a natural scientist had to address a general audience of laymen on a subject taken from his own special field of activity, in order to awaken a certain interest in the minds of his listeners, he would be forced to link his dis- course to certain palpable experiences and views of daily life, in the fields of technology, metereol- ogy or biology, and to use these as his starting points to explain the methods applied by science in order to push forward from concrete individ- ual problems to a knowledge of universal laws. Not so today. The exact methodology now em- ployed by natural science has proved to be so ex- traordinarily productive in the course of cen- turies that natural-scientific research nowadays dares approach also problems intuitively less ob- vious than those lying within the fields just men- tioned, and is able to tackle successfully also prob-