History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science

THE ORIGIN OF SCIENCE. Religious condition of the Greeks in the fourth century before Christ.—Their invasion of the Persian Empire brings them in contact with new aspects of Nature, and familiarizes them with new religious systems.—The military, engineering, and scientific activity, stimulated by the Macedonian campaigns, leads to the establishment in Alexandria of an institute, the Museum, for the cultivation of knowledge by experiment, observation, and mathematical discussion.—It is the origin of Science.

GREEK MYTHOLOGY. No spectacle can be presented to the thoughtful mind more solemn, more mournful, than that of the dying of an ancient religion, which in its day has given consolation to many generations of men.

Four centuries before the birth of Christ, Greece was fast outgrowing her ancient faith. Her philosophers, in their studies of the world, had been profoundly impressed with the contrast between the majesty of the operations of Nature and the worthlessness of the divinities of Olympus. Her historians, considering the orderly course of political affairs, the manifest uniformity in the acts of men, and that there was no event occurring before their eyes for which they could not find an obvious cause in some preceding event, began to suspect that the miracles and celestial interventions, with which the old annals were filled, were only fictions. They demanded, when the age of the supernatural had ceased, why oracles had become mute, and why there were now no more prodigies in the world.