Sir Isaac Newton was no atheist, he authored many religious tracts. Yet Newtonian physics opened the way to a new thing in Western history, a (potentially) complete picture of the Universe that makes sense without God. That is, God might have been necessary to make it, but it runs on its own, and no role for God need be included in the theories or the equations. Yet nobody raised religious objections to Newtonian physics, that I know of; there was no repeat of the Catholic Church’s earlier reaction to Galileo. How come Darwin’s theory of biological evolution provoked such a different reaction?
The Catholic Church did not react favorably to the Heliocentric theory, but they came around after not too long. I don’t know what their initial reaction to Darwin’s theory was, but they clearly came around, too, after not too long.
So, it’s not clear to me that there was a “different reaction”.
Or did you mean equal and opposite reaction. 
I’d think he wasn’t specifically talking about Catholics. Although plenty of lay Catholics deny evolution, since plenty of Americans in general deny evolution.
My guess would be that celestial mechanics are far removed enough that even highly delusional Christians can accept that they follow rules and that physics describes them. The thought of the origin of man though, that’s where God is supposed to have a finger in the pot. And non-clay-breath-of-lifey-stuff is taken by them as a direct slap in the face.
I think anything outside of very basic Newtonian physics that some people may have learned in High School is just so far removed from most ordinary people’s daily thought process that it is just a total non issue.
Evolution I think is more front and center because it relates to the actual species, and because for the uneducated it really offends their sense of (ignorant) logic. Namely that “apes could turn into humans.” “If that’s true why are there still apes?!?!” I’ve met my fair share of “ordinary” idiots who aren’t particularly religious that scratch their heads over the whole evolution thing. For the die hard fundamentalists, of course, evolution is totally incompatible with a literal reading of Genesis, and that is why it is rejected.
Even the Big Bag Theory is moderately resolvable to Genesis if you feel like putting the work in, but evolution, you can’t look at the bible literally and accept it as fact. So the people who view the bible with a strict literal interpretation reject the science.
Really, as far as I can tell, nobody except the most hardcore literalists have much issue with evolution - except where it leads to the obvious conclusion that humans are just plain animals. Even Catholic dogma - which is pretty much at ease with evolution - states that humans were at some point specially endowed with a soul by God.
Galileo’s claims contradicted the text of scripture in a couple of points.
Nothing in Newton contradicted actual lines of Scripture.
By the time Darwin came along, the entire approach of the RCC had evolved along with the rest of European thinking and the approach to scripture had changed. For that matter, Galileo could probably have gotten away with publishing his results if he had been a bit more patient. Quite a few folks in the Vatican with their own telescopes were coming to the same views that he had, but when he made his unsubtle attack on the pope and then erroneously supported his conclusion by pointing to the oceanic tides, the reactionary forces in the Vatican had the ammunition to stomp on him. Continuing their celestial observations after his trial, church authorities had already removed the censorship of most of his works by 1718, 76 years after his death and 85 years after his second trial. By the time that Darwin published Origin of Species in 1859, the approach of the RCC to science was quite different.
4 in ten Americans believe in evolution. Way more than just the hardcore literalists have a problem with it.
It’s the hardcore literalists who have lied and tried to poison public discourse to create the situation where so many Americans are misinformed, but the effects have spread beyond the degenerate little pool.
Let there be burlap?
I’ll let the OP speak for himself, but he did mention the Catholic Church explicitly. I read his OP as asking why there was a different reaction when the theory was put forth, and not why there is still so much resistance today.
Which is particularly sad, given that in the 1960s, the number of Americans who recognized the accuracy of evolutionary theory was very much higher.
I know, it drives me nuts. It’s like the more evidence we have the less they believe.
I have a friend who went evangelical ten years ago and has now decided that evolution is a lie. He even tried to debate it with my wife on Facebook, and she’s a fucking doctor. He literally thinks that the decade of schooling she underwent is full of blind indoctrination and lies when it comes to everything biological.
The sad part is this is a guy with a fine mind. But he just decided to not use it one day. The power evangelical churches have over people and their thoughts is scary.
6 in 10 Americans have no fucking idea what evolution even means, they only object because it they think it the conclusion is humans are just chimps. See also: “micro evolution” - there’s no problem at all if it produces better medicine or crops or cattle. Evolution is only scary to the majority where it applies to human origins.
Exactly.
Was it? I think the numbers have been steady for a long time, but if you have a cite that says otherwise, I’d be interested in seeing it.
FTR, I was talking about religious controversy in general, not the RCC. (Well, Christian controversy in particular – I know of no other faiths that make a serious issue of evolution.) AFAIK, there is no theocentric theory in physics analogous to intelligent-design theory in biology.
Yes, and if you actually read the cite he gave, it says:
So, while only 4 in 10 of the respondents accept evolution, it doesn’t follow that 6 in 10 don’t. At least not from that poll.
Well, then the answer is very simple: Newton just discovered God’s laws while Darwin was the spawn of the Devil.
Seriously, it’s something like that. The image of God the maker laws governing the physical universe is highly ingrained in our culture, but life (especially human life) is held apart from that as something special.
There’s plenty of objection to evolution within Islam.
I don’t have numbers going all the way back, (a hard drive crash a couple of years ago wiped out some old references I had), but this Wikipedia link seems to show a trend dating to the 1980s. There was never an 80% acceptance of evolution and I apologize if I gave an impression of overwhelming acceptance, but while it appears to be 60/40 for Creationism, today, I seem to remember a 60/40 support for Evolution in the 1960s. Even the Wikipedia numbers are pretty disheartening.
Two big things:
A) The perception that the models of the universe (or at least solar system) are more proven than evolution. This isn’t really true - we know about both conclusively - but there’s a perception amongst the public that since we can build giant telescopes and send people to the moon and send out space probes, we have the whole solar system model pretty well figured out. Whereas evolution is “just a theory” - someone saw some fossils that vaguely look like something else so they got high and started saying DUDE LIKE WHAT IF THIS DINOSAUR… WAS A BIRD AND SHIT
B) The issue attacks the core belief system much more. I don’t think learning about the solar system’s workings would disturb people that much. Yes, it’d be weird to think the earth went from the dead center of the universe to just another component, but not nearly to the degree that thinking you’re just an animal that was the result of random biological processes does. That humans are special and magical in some way, set apart from the rest of biology, is a belief necesary to the sanity of a whole lot of people, so they desperately cling to it. If we’re the result of natural processes, and we weren’t hand-crafted by god, how could we be so special and set apart from everything else? That realization would shake people’s belief to the very core, and hence, they fight much more strongly against it.
And in Judaism and several other religions.
Somethimes it seems bit random about how faiths view scientific theories. Take relatvity (special and general), it seems Catholics embrace relatvity wholeheartedly, they see the big bang (a theory springing directly from general relatvity and a one of whose primary orginators was a Catholic priest) as fitting in well with their revised creation theology. On the other hand looking at conservapedia it seems that relatvity is not too popular among right-wing Christian fundamentalists.
On the other hand quantum physics which sprang up around the same time as relatvity seems to be failry well accepted by most of the established religions.