by Don Cameron
Introduction is here. Part 1 is here. Part 2 is here. Part 3 is here.
4) THE CONFLICT WITH SCIENCE
Before When?
Before around 1500 CE life was little different from thousands of years before. Most people had little education, worked in agriculture or basic trades and lived and died without travelling far from where they were born. Communication was limited and most people would have little awareness of what was happening outside their immediate area.
The only people with education would have been priests. Their curriculum would be mostly about religion, perhaps with Latin or Greek and some history. Little that could be described as science existed. The orthodox version of Christianity had secured total victory in Europe over other religions and the many early variant versions of Christianity branded as “heresies”. It enforced its beliefs with draconian vigour. To defy the Church would lead to a most horrible death, often by burning. The individual was powerless.
Gutenberg
But in 1436 Gutenberg invented printing. He was the first in Europe although a version had existed in the Orient long before. Ideas could now be distributed widely and across distance and passed down generations. Luther could never have defied the Catholic Church without printing. Observation and enquiry began to take hold. Ironically, early science was often carried out by clergymen because they had education and leisure.
Allegory
By the late 1700s the Enlightenment was firmly established and religion had to adapt. They could no longer execute people, but the churches remained powerful. As time went on, people began to notice that science proved that many biblical accounts are false. It was only then that they began to say, oh it’s not meant to be taken literally; it’s all an allegory really. But they had never said that before.
Evolution
There are many conflicts, but evolution is more important than all the others. Evolution has sunk the Genesis creation myth and the story of the flood. Some say it can be reconciled with the creation story, but it could not be more different. On the one hand we have come into existence by an undirected process of selection in nature over billions of years. On the other, our finished design was made by an intelligent creator in a day. It follows from evolution that the Adam and Eve story cannot be true as there was always a population in our descent from apes.
Evolution also implies that our consciousness can only be a biological phenomenon of nerve cells which could not survive the death of an individual.
One of the most curious stories from the history of science is that Lord Kelvin said that evolution was impossible. He had made boreholes in the ground and worked out, from the temperature gradient, that the Earth was cooling and must have been hot and molten only 20 million years ago. Only after both Kelvin and Darwin had died, it was discovered that radioactivity is slowly producing heat and has been doing so for billions of years.
[Looks a bit like a hell fire preacher to me. Ed.]
Religious zealots have gone into simple denial based on ignoring the vast evidence confirming evolution; they promote creationism and try to get that into schools. It is very difficult to find a professional biologist who will take them seriously. It is amazing, but true, that they have even built well funded theme parks in USA to spread their hopeless message.
Some cling to their beliefs by saying that evolution happened but God was guiding it. There is not the tiniest scrap of evidence for that. The whole point of evolution is that natural selection acts without external direction.
Catholicism
The Roman Catholic Church accepts evolution but tries to co-exist with it. It leads to fantastic ideas. We would have to assume that evolution followed its course over billions of years until humans appeared in their finished form, complete with speech and a moral sense. Then God installed souls in two of them called Adam and Eve. We must assume that the rest of the population were soulless including the parents of Adam and Eve and their siblings if any. Perhaps there are soulless descendants around today (no doubt employed as parking wardens). Did humans with souls and those without interbreed? The whole idea is too far-fetched to be worthy of argument.
Since the 1700s there has been a growing conflict between a developing science and religion. Evolution was the biggest and most controversial, but there were many more.
The Age of the Earth
The first attempts to find the age of the Earth was by analysis of the ages of the patriarchs in the Old Testament. Archbishop Ussher in 1650 calculated the date of the creation as 23rd October 4004 BC and other biblical scholars had reached similar (if not quite such precise) answers.
The developing science of geology began to question these estimates which seemed too short to account for sedimentary rock formations. Modern science has now established that the Earth is more than four and a half billion years old. There are still some creationists who maintain that the Earth is about 6000 years old.
The Bible says that the earth is flat, even though Greek scientists knew it was a sphere at around the same time that the Old-Testament priests were writing the scriptures. Their idea was a three-storey world with Hell below and a solid firmament sky above with Heaven on top of that.
The Bible also states that the earth is fixed and cannot move. The Church in Rome kicked up quite a fuss when it was discovered that it rotated on its axis once a day and it travels in an orbit around the Sun each year. They tried to suppress this knowledge, but without success.
Galileo
[There is a bit of a resemblance here. Do all hell fire preachers and great scientists look the same?. Ed.]
In 1615 Galileo was summoned before the Inquisition for suggesting that the Earth orbited the Sun, when the Bible clearly stated that it is fixed. He escaped burning, but spent the later part of his life in permanent house arrest.
Astronomy has shown that the stars are not lights hanging on the firmament as the old priests believed, but are other suns a very long way away. Giordano Bruno, who was burned to death, suggested that. Revelation describes stars falling to the ground, perhaps as little twinkly things. Its author had little idea of what a star really is.
Later astronomical discoveries revealed the Earth’s total insignificance. It is a piece of rock orbiting a minor star which is only one of millions in a minor galaxy. And even that galaxy is one of many stretching to unimaginable distances. It became harder to suppose that the Universe had been created as a home for humanity.
Further Reading:
Paul Kurtz (editor): Science and Religion, an excellent compendium of articles covering many aspects of the conflict between science and religion.
