The following passage is from a lecture delivered by Dr. Max Planck in Germany in 1937, as the Nazi Party’s rise to power threatened the stability of not only the European continent, but the entire world. Dr. Planck was one of the greatest scientists of the 20th century. He won the 1918 Nobel Prize for his work in quantum physics and is the name sake of the famous Max Planck Institute.
The young generation of our own era, which in any case is sharply critical, toward traditional views, no longer permits itself to be bound innerly by doctrines which it regards as contradictory to the laws of nature. And the spiritually most gifted members of the young generation in particular, those destined to be the future leaders of their nation and who not seldom harbour a burning desire for religious satisfaction, are the ones most painfully hit by such incongruities. They are the ones who must suffer most heavily if they are sincere in seeking a compromise between their religious and their scientific beliefs.
Under these circumstances, it is no wonder that the atheist movement which calls religion an arbitrary delusion invented by power-hungry priests and which has nothing but words of derision for the pious faith in a supreme power above man, is eagerly taking advantage of the progress of scientific knowledge; allegedly in alliance with natural science, the movement continues to spread at an ever quickening pace its disruptive influence over all nations and classes of mankind. I need not go here into a more detailed discussion of the fact that the victory of atheism would not only destroy the most valuable treasures of our civilization, but - what is even worse - would annihilate the very hope for a better future.
Max Planck,Religion and Natural Science, a lecture delivered in May, 1937, as translated by Frank Gaynor inScientific Autobiography and other papers, Philosophical Library, New York (1949), pages 155-156
What does this quotation from a long-forgotten lecture delivered nearly eighty years ago have to do with the subject of Intelligent Design today? A brief journey through the parallel advancement of “natural scie
