United States or Liechtenstein ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Wasmann and Bethe, two of the leading authorities on ants, take the negative view; Forel claims that they show occasional traces of intelligence. It is at all events clear that the enormous majority of, if not all, their activities and especially those activities of the ant and the bee which chiefly impress the imagination are not intelligent, but instinctive actions.
It is, indeed, as Father Wasmann says, a thousand pities that the reasonableness, the logic, the dignity of the Catholic religion should remain for ever hidden from the eyes and minds of many who so often are as they are, because they were brought up as they were. In all these things we find the key to another problem.
Such is the view which has been enunciated by Father Wasmann, S.J., whose authority on a point of this kind is paramount. It has also been upheld by Professor Bateson, a man widely separated from the Jesuit in all but attachment to science.
I need not cite instances of this feeling; I have dealt with it elsewhere. We may take it for granted, and proceed to look for an explanation for the phenomenon. Wasmann attributes it to ignorance, and he is, I feel sure, right; but let us examine the matter a little more closely. Why should persons even if ignorant have the bias which some obviously present against the idea of a God?
It is to this kind of fear which the eminent Jesuit writer Wasmann alludes when he says that "in many scientific circles there is an absolute Theophobia, a dread of the Creator. I can only regret this," he continues, "because I believe that it is due chiefly to a defective knowledge of Christian philosophy and theology."
Word Of The Day