The Dawn of a New Religious Era Author:Paul Carus Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE NEW ORTHODOXY ORTHODOXY is the confidence that a certain proposition is right and that all other propositions which contradict it are wrong. Accordingly, ... more »orthodoxy, or Tightness of opinion, is the natural aim of both science and religion, and what we need most in our churches, schools, and universities is genuine orthodoxy. But how shall we obtain it? Is not orthodoxy, perhaps, a fata morgana, an unsubstantial vision which eludes our groping hand and surrenders us to the illusion of blind faith? Indeed, it has come to pass in these days in which agnosticism is the fashionable philosophy of the time, that a religious indifference like a spiritual blight has taken a strong hold of the human mind so as to discredit any kind of orthodoxy, and the doctrine of the vanity of all faith, be it scientific or religious, has come to be recognized as the sum of all human wisdom. But the very existence of science plainly demonstrates that whatever errors we may have inherited from the scientists and the religious teachers of the past, we must never lose faith in the ideal of orthodoxy, which implies that there is truth and error, that the truth is one and self- consistent, and that whatever conflicts with the truth is error. This is no denial of the theory of the relativity of knowledge, nor does it imply the assumption that a man can become omniscient; but in spite of the relativity of knowledge, and in spite of the insufficiency of our means of investigating all the details of the immeasurable universe, we must remain assured that man can discern between truth and error, he can solve the various problems with which he is confronted, and he can realize, at least in part, and step by step, the ideal of orthodoxy. Science has made many new discoveries in this century and has establishe...« less