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arranged as a stage for God to watch man’s struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.
    Some will tell me that I have just described a religious experience. Very well, you may call it what you will. Then, in that language I would say that the young man’s religious experience is of such a kind that he finds the religion of his church inadequate to describe, to encompassthat kind of experience. The God of the church isn’t big enough.
    Perhaps. Everyone has different opinions.
    Suppose, however, our student does come to the view that individual prayer is not heard. I am not trying to disprove the existence of God. I am only trying to give you some understanding of the origin of the difficulties that people have who are educated from two different points of view. It is not possible to disprove the existence of God, as far as I know. But is true that it is difficult to take two different points of view that come from different directions. So let us suppose that this particular student isparticularly difficult and does come to the conclusion that individual prayer is not heard. Then what happens? Then the doubting machinery, his doubts, are turned on ethical problems. Because, as he was educated, his religious views had it that the ethical and moral values were the word of God. Now if God maybe isn’t there, maybe the ethical and moral values are wrong. And what is very interesting is that they have survived almost intact. There may have been a period when a few of the moral views and the ethical positions of his religion seemed wrong, he had to think about them, and many of them he returned to.
    But my atheistic scientific colleagues, which does not include all scientists—I cannot tell by their behavior, because of course I am on the same side, that they are particularly different from the religious ones, and it seems that their moral feelings and their understandings of other people and their humanity and so on apply to the believers as well as the disbelievers. It seems to me that there is a kind of independence between the ethical and moral views and the theory of the machinery of the universe.
    Science makes, indeed, an impact on many ideas associated with religion, but I do not believe it affects, in any very strong way, the moral conduct and ethical views. Religion has many aspects. It answers all kinds of questions. I would, however, like to emphasize three aspects.
    The first is that it tells what things are and where they came from and what man is and what God is and what properties God has and so on. I’d like, for the purposes of this discussion, to call those the metaphysical aspects of religion.
    And then it says how to behave. I don’t mean in the terms of ceremonies or rituals or things like that, but I mean how to behave in general, in a moral way. This we could call the ethical aspect of religion.
    And finally, people are weak. It takes more than the right conscience to produce right behavior. And even though you may feel you know what you are supposed to do, you all know that you don’t do things the way you would like yourself to do them. And one of the powerful aspects of religion is its inspirational aspects. Religion gives inspiration to act well. Not only that, it gives inspirationto the arts and to many other activities of human beings.
    Now these three aspects of religion are very closely interconnected, in the religion’s view. First of all, it usually goes something like this: that the moral values are the word of God. Being the word of God connects the ethical and metaphysical aspects of religion. And finally, that also inspires the inspiration, because if you are working for God and obeying God’s will, you are in some way connected to the universe, your actions have a meaning in the greater world, and that is an inspiring aspect. So these three aspects are very well integrated and interconnected. The difficulty is that science occasionally conflicts with the