When we try to make contact, for the purpose of teaching and explaining the faith, with the pagan mind of our generation, something we might call ‘scientific mindedness’ at once arises as a barrier. (The inverted commas are strictly necessary.) We are not speaking of the truly scientific attitude but of a by-product, to be found both among scientists and among those several removes away from any field of scientific research. I do not mean by ‘scientific mindedness’ simply the attitude that demands tangible proof for every assertion made. Neither do I mean actual knowledge of recent scientific discoveries and theories, requiring particular answers to particular objections. The difficulty is really one of basic mental patterns. The more we are pre-occupied, as Christians, with the truths of revelation, the more these truths will determine the shape of our thinking and our approach to all questions, not only doctrinal ones. The unbeliever is not, of course, so shaped in his mind. But this naturally does not mean that his mind has no determinate shape. The basic mental patterns of the unbelievers of our day are, as we all know, to a large extent laid down by ideas stemming from the scientific discoveries and theories of die last hundred years. It does not matter that a particular individual has perhaps read very litde, even in popular works, of what these discoveries and dieories actually are. He absorbs his mental outlook from them none the less.

But the fact that his actual knowledge is probably slight deprives him of the riches of the scientific outlook, its humility before facts and its acute realisation of its own limitations, and leaves him with illegitimate by-products—a vague assumption of materialism, a vague conviction of the near-omniscience and nearomnipotence of ‘scientists’, and a vague certainty that practically every teaching that has not come directly from ‘the scientists’ has at some time, somehow, been discredited and disproved by them. Against this background we try to trace the truths of revelation.