Creation Moment 3/2/2017 - From Whence the Myth?

Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers,

2 Peter 3:3

"One of the criticisms of Christianity urged by skeptics and atheists, from Voltaire to Richard Dawkins, is that Christianity is opposed to science.  The narrative the skeptics promote is that Christian believers discourage investigation into the natural world because they want to lock people in ignorance and superstition so that they can be chained to revealed dogma.  This could scarcely be farther from reality. 

Whence the myth

of conflict between Christianity and science?

Given the foregoing, whence comes the myth that Christianity and science are at war?  The originators of the myth seem to have been two 19th Century writers, J. William Draper and Andrew Dickson White.

Draper, an English-American physician and chemist, seems to have become bitter over the death of his son, and the misbehavior of his Catholic-convert sister in relation thereto.  His screed, “History of the Conflict between Religion and Science” (1874) is sympathetic to Protestants and Muslims and directs most of its bile at the Roman Catholic Church.  But Draper ends by arguing that Catholics and Protestants were "in accord on one point: to tolerate no science except such as they considered

agreeable to the Scriptures." Draper’s book was re-printed 50 times, and translated into ten languages.

White, Cornell University’s founding president, boasted that Cornell would be "an asylum for Science—where truth shall be sought for truth's sake, not stretched or cut exactly to fit Revealed Religion." He was criticized by Christian academics for the arrogance on display in that statement, and for Cornell’s accepting government grants that the denominational universities could not get.  White ginned this minor controversy up into a two-volume tome called, “A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom” (1896) which ended with Cornell and White being the latest of the martyrs to Christianity’s war against science. 

But the myth of the conflict between science and Christianity always boils down to two main topics: 1) the Galileo affair, and 2) Darwinism.

 Galileo affair

Heliocentrism was controversial in the early 17th Century, because it contradicted the ancient Greek philosophers Aristotle (384-322 BC) and Ptolemy (AD 100-170),....Eventually Galileo’s geocentric opponents denounced him to the Inquisition, Rome’s infamous apparatus for suppressing heresy.  At

that time, the Catholic Church had no official doctrine on heliocentrism vs. geocentrism, and noting that fact would have been the most sensible way to dismiss the charges against Galileo. Instead, to the Roman Catholic Church’s lasting discredit, it declared heliocentrism to be a falsehood, and, in 1616, the inquisition ordered Galileo to stop teaching heliocentrism.  Although Pope Paul V and Cardinal Bellermine publicly supported the Inquisition, they quietly protected Galileo from any real consequences of its ruling.....1632, Galileo returned to the topic of heliocentrism and published a popular tract called “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.”  The “Dialogue” was written in the form of a series of conversations between a heliocentrist, Salviati, an impartial but clever observer, Sagredo, and an Aristotelian, Simplicio, who defended geocentrism and was, as his named implied, a simpleton. There was now a new pope, Urban VIII, and unfortunately Galileo made the impolitic mistake of putting one of this new pope’s favorite arguments—that God could have made the universe any way he wanted to and still made it appear as it does—in the mouth of Simplicio, the simpleton who had been ridiculed throughout the piece. The pope reacted swiftly; he convened a special committee to consider the matter, and that committee denounced Galileo to the inquisition.  This time Galileo didn’t have many friends in Rome.  He was not tortured, but was shown the implements of torture, the unspoken implication being that they would be used if needed.  In 1633, Galileo was convicted and ordered to “abjure, curse, and detest” heliocentrism, was sentenced to imprisonment, and was forbidden to publish anything further.  His sentence of imprisonment was commuted to house arrest, and he lived the rest of his life at his villa in the hills above Florence......The real reason Galileo was persecuted by the Roman Catholic Church is that Catholic theology is a blend of Bible doctrine and the teachings of the ancient Greek philosophers.  This amalgamation of Greek philosophy with Bible teaching is the pride and joy of Catholic theologians.  The Greeks philosophized about the natural world, but seldom got out in it and conducted experiments.  Hence, the heavily Greek-influenced Roman Catholic theologians were happy with “natural philosophy”—what science was called up until the late 19th Century—but did not seem to want observational science to upset their Greek-devised philosophical systems.

 

 Darwinism

Experimental science is excellent for studying present, ongoing, or repeating natural phenomena. 

The Christian worldview that God created the world to operate by fixed, rational laws gives the scientist the confidence that, given enough careful study, experimentation, observation, and logical reasoning based upon observed facts, those laws can be understood.
But naturalistic theories of origins are not based upon experimental science.  Quite the opposite.  Otherwise intelligent people cling to naturalistic theories of origins for philosophical reasons, despite the findings of experimental science.  For example, experimental science has shown that life cannot come from non-life. 
Evolutionists are a million miles away from a credible theory as to how a single-celled organism could have come into existence without a parent organism.  Abiogenesis—today’s fancy word for spontaneous generation—is the antithesis of the real experimental science that Christian civilization produced.  Like geocentrism, abiogenesis is ancient Greek philosophy masquerading as science."
DavidRead/Fulcrum7