What evidence would that be?
Perhaps you are referring to the letter from H.K.S. Read it again. He does not believe it himself, but suggests that “Perhaps reliance on the Word of God motivated the Indiana legislators.”
Nothing suggests he believes it himself.
The OP mentions the germ theory of disease.
It is my understanding that religious objections to bathing (sins of nakedness and all that) during the middle ages contributed to the poor hygiene that made the plague spread so rapidly. (For more info, see John Kelly’s “The Great Mortality”).
This isn’t a case of religion actually rejecting a theory. More like a religion rejecting a practice that was recommended by a later theory.
Admittedly, the decreased availability of running water also reduced the amount of bathing that people could do. But it would seem to me a chicken-and-egg scenario: if bathing was immoral, wouldn’t it be immoral to running water more available? Etc.
According to Snopes, there was an Internet hoax in 1998 about Alabama legally defining pi as 3. But it was not entirely fantasy – http://www.snopes.com/religion/pi.htm:
Like many such claims, this rang alarm bells and a glance at Burke suggests that you’re misremembering his point.
As far as I can see, The Day the Universe Changed (BBC, 1985) mentions the question of the vacuum in two places: a brief incidental mention of Torricelli on p85 and a longer discussion of Boyle on p317. It’s the latter that introduces religion into the issue. Summarising one of Boyle’s arguments in favour of the vacuum, Burke writes:
So it’s the Anglican Boyle rather than the Roman Catholic Church that Burke actually has appealing to religion - and with essentially the opposite argument.
Since I never trust Burke’s accuracy, I should add that in this instance it’s easy to check that the passage is a fair summary of his views as expressed, for instance, in his Animadversions upon Mr. Hobbes’s Problemata de Vacuo (1674). Nor, for that matter, did the argument originate there, it also having been used by Henry More.
It certainly wouldn’t surprise me to find some scholastics who did argue that a vacuum couldn’t exist because God was everywhere, but a quick search throws up nothing definite. Indeed More and Boyle might even be conciously subverting such an argument.
There were certainly Catholic authors, particularly amongst the Jesuits in the 1640s or so, who did argue against the idea for reasons related to theology, but there were also others who, like More and Boyle, used religious arguments in favour. For example, some argued that for a vacuum to be impossible was a restriction on the power of God’s omnipotence.
I read in a book on viriology that talked about the development of vaccines and other virus-fighting agents and it said that originally a lot of religious leaders were against vaccines. They thought that since virii were God’s creatures, we had no right to destroy them.
Unfortunately, a google search revealed nothing and I can’t remember the name of the book. :smack: I do know that there are some religious groups that refuse to get vaccines for those reasons, so it’s not improbable.
!!! That sounds like a position the Jains might take, or the Hare Krishnas – some sect that preaches vegetarianism and absolute ahimsa. But it’s hard to imagine any Christian sect objecting to the slaughter of viri; I don’t know of a single Christian group that even objects to eating meat.
No, it had nothing to do with vegetarianism. For example, the Jehovah’s Witnesses refused vaccines (this I know for certain) and yet all of them eat meat. When we eat meat we don’t destroy all of the animals so I don’t see how that would be parallel. Jehovah’s Witnesses still reject evolution, btw. I had one of them try to convert me and he ran off when I started converting him.
[ancient punchline]
And son, when you’ve got a fine pig like that, you don’t eat him all at once! 
[/ancient punchline]
Lightning rods were not accepted by all religious folks, it was seen as interfering with divine will. I found some web debates about how widespread this belief was and what religions were involved but no one seems to question that it did occur.
To be fair, that’s not a rejection of a “scientific theory” but a moral judgment on the propriety of a technological application of it. Nobody questions that surgical abortion is effective for its intended purpose, but some question the morality of doing it. That’s a very different thing from pretending that the scientific evidence for biological evolution is inconclusive.
The issue of the effectiveness of lightning rods is possibly why the suggestion of religious opposition to their use can be queried, but it can also be done in a different way. Virtually all claims that there was significant religious opposition derive from Chapter XI of Andrew Dickson White’s The Warfare of Science with Theology. This in itself is grounds for caution. For over the last few decades, historians of science have come to regard White’s assertions as usually tendentious: see this 1987 article by David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers for one example of how White has been reassessed.
It’s therefore worth examining what White’s evidence actually was. Much of his discussion is taken up with a series of claims that specific churches dragged their heels about erecting rods. But this assumes that the merits of Franklin’s suggestion was otherwise plainly obvious to these contemporaries. They weren’t. Rather, there was a messy debate over quite some time about whether they worked at all, whether they might be dangerous (attracting lightning and causing damage that might not otherwise have struck), how they were supposed to work and what design they should have. In these circumstances, White’s allegations begin to look rather thin: there wasn’t a great rush to erect rods in general, so why single out churches for not doing so (though, of course, churches tended to be the tallest buildings in town). Unsurprisingly, what White omits from his story are those instances where the clergy were the ones advocating erecting rods.
White’s better example is probably the Rev. Thomas Prince:
Judging by the version on this site, which is rare in that it isn’t depending on White, the quotes are accurate:
The title page of Prince’s earlier 1727 book on earthquakes, which he was reissuing in the wake of the 1755 one, can be seen here.
What bothers me about that paragraph I quoted from White is that “widely ascribed”. One would really want better evidence than White provides for this claim.
To echo Foible in making the suggestion, it’s thus probable that a small number of people argued against lightning rods (though with at least Prince seeming to accept Franklin’s theorising about how they worked) on religious grounds. But I suspect people have lazily extracted more mileage over the years from White’s quoting of Prince than the example deserves.
Well, there was an attempt to prevent the germ theory, at least with respect to malaria. I think you protest too much. Evolution is a theory, it, and other theories should not be taught in science classes as fact. This has nothing to do with religion, it is called false teaching.
http://english.epochtimes.com/news/5-1-26/26040.html
Nope, I’m not going to bother.
Jehovah’s Witnesses refused vaccines on their understanding that they were based on the blood of animals, their doctrines in this regard are based on dietary laws and so have far more in common with vegetarianism than they do with the idea that the pathogens are God’s creatures.
So is gravity. So is music.
Well, music theory isn’t quite the same thing . . . .
But at any rate, every description of how the world works is a theory, since nothing can be proven about what’s real. I mean, if the whole world were an illusion, how would we know? But science presumes that our observations correspond to what’s really there (*), and furthermore that inductive evidence gives genuine support to our conclusions. We don’t know that the theory of gravity is in any way an accurate description of the world, but there’s strong inductive evidence that it is. Likewise, we don’t know that the theory of evolution is correct, but again there is strong inductive evidence in its favor. To single out evolution as requiring some special declaration that it is theory rather than fact strikes me as a sign either of misunderstanding evolution or misunderstanding the notion of a scientific theory.
Now if one wants to say that it should be emphasized that all science is theory rather than fact, that’s another matter – but in that case the same rule ought to be applied to history, and pretty much every other subject that makes any claims whatsoever about reality. But personally, I don’t consider the possibility that we live in a world run by a God so capricious that He deliberately structured the universe to mislead us to be likely enough to warrant continually reminding students of it.
(*) There have however been some scientists who prefer to think of science as the study of our observations – e.g., “if we observe this then we can expect to observe that” – and completely sidestep the question of what is the underlying reality. Heisenberg for instance held this view. He dismissed discussion of the underlying nature of reality, saying: “[S]uch speculation seems to us to be without value and meaningless, for physics must confine itself to the description of the relationship between perceptions.”
You’re right; music theory isn’t the same thing as a scientific theory, however, it’s worthy of mention just to drive home the point that not everybody means ‘I just pulled this uninformed wild guess straight out of my ass’ when they say ‘theory’ - in fact, like so many distortions of definition, it’s only the creationists that insist on it.
And only for the theories that they feel conflict with their beliefs . . . funny how that works.
Indeed, while we’re here, we might as well mention that specific theories/methodologies (or distortions thereof) are simultaneously vital to one part of creationism and rejected by another; just one example:
The (wildly distorted, creationist mutant version of the) Second Law of Thermodynamics states that order cannot increase in a system without intelligent direction
…however…
The high degree of order in the distribution of forms in the fossil record is alleged to be the largely the result of hydrologic sorting processes.
[/end hijack]