"The great unity which true science seeks is found only by beginning with our knowledge of God, and coming down from Him along the stream of causation to every fact and event that affects us"
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Crosby is trying to flip the prestige of 19th-century science back into the pulpit. The line borrows science's favorite promise - "unity", the elegant system that ties scattered facts into a coherent whole - then insists you only get that coherence by starting with God and moving downward through causes. It's a rhetorical hijack: he adopts the language of empirical ambition while quietly relocating the starting point from observation to revelation.
The intent is defensive but not anti-scientific in the cartoon sense. Crosby isn't saying facts are irrelevant; he's saying they are incomplete without a first cause that stabilizes meaning. That "stream of causation" is doing double duty. It sounds like scientific determinism, but it's also Providence with a lab coat on: events "that affects us" are not random data points, they're legible outcomes of a divine source.
The subtext is about authority. If the proper method begins with God, then clergy retain epistemic primacy even in an age dazzled by geology's deep time and Darwin's natural selection. This is a moment when American Protestant leaders were watching universities professionalize knowledge, often in ways that threatened biblical cosmology. Crosby's formulation offers a compromise that still wins: you can have science, but only as a downstream activity, a disciplined cataloging of what has already been theologically guaranteed.
It's also a subtle warning to the modern mind. Begin with nature alone and you get fragmentation, maybe even moral drift; begin with God and the world becomes one story, one chain, one author.
The intent is defensive but not anti-scientific in the cartoon sense. Crosby isn't saying facts are irrelevant; he's saying they are incomplete without a first cause that stabilizes meaning. That "stream of causation" is doing double duty. It sounds like scientific determinism, but it's also Providence with a lab coat on: events "that affects us" are not random data points, they're legible outcomes of a divine source.
The subtext is about authority. If the proper method begins with God, then clergy retain epistemic primacy even in an age dazzled by geology's deep time and Darwin's natural selection. This is a moment when American Protestant leaders were watching universities professionalize knowledge, often in ways that threatened biblical cosmology. Crosby's formulation offers a compromise that still wins: you can have science, but only as a downstream activity, a disciplined cataloging of what has already been theologically guaranteed.
It's also a subtle warning to the modern mind. Begin with nature alone and you get fragmentation, maybe even moral drift; begin with God and the world becomes one story, one chain, one author.
Quote Details
| Topic | God |
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