Just As True Today
John Adams, the second President of the United States, was a great patriot, a very learned man, and a devout Puritan. He was living in an age of skepticism, as we are today, and made the following apt observation. This is written by his biographer, Dr. Page Smith, and is found in the book John Adams, Double day & Co., p. 1072. (Quoted with the permission of Dr. Smith.)
The trouble with scientists was that they arrogantly assumed that their small systems comprehended man in all his mystery and variety. Buffon, the great French naturalist, was typical of the scientific fraternity in his insistence that the world consisted of nothing more than he or his fellows could observe through a microscope. According to the Frenchman, the world, natural and human, was simply made up of matter, -eternal and self-existent.- All the -good and evil, intellioenra and accident, beauty and deformity, harmony and dissonance, order and confusion, virtue and vice, wisdom and folly, equity and inequity, truth and lies,- were a kind of cosmic incident that had existed from all time. -Planets and suns, systems and systems of systems,- by this philosophy,- are born and die...and...this process will go on to all eternity.- So thought Buffon, so thought D'Alembert, Diderot, and Condorcet. Adams was reminded of the German ambassador who had once said to him,--I cannot bear St. Paul; he was so severe against fornication.-On the same principle Adams wrote, -These philosophers cannot bear a God, because He is just.-