That cite says:
I don’t think people were forced to think about evolution much in the 60s. That was in the days when prayer in schools was common, and before the “atheists” rammed Roe v Wade down the throats of God fearing Christians. As part of the increased secularization of our society, things like evolution get pushed into the public discussion, and then the doubt appears. That’s what I think is going on, anyway.
Yeah, but that view of physical laws is a reaction to the discoveries of people like Newton and Galileo. It used to be the dogma that there were no universal laws, that celestial matter was different than matter on filthy sin-ridden Earth. Pure and perfect, and obeying different laws; I understand that one of the religious objections to Galileo was his assertion of the existence of sunspots. The sun is perfect, it’s pure; it can’t have spots. Newton’s idea that there are universal physical laws in the first place was an important development in science.
I do agree that the most important reason for the objections against evolution is that it’s because it applies directly to us. But I think that there’s other reasons too. For one, many people seem to have a strong emotional attachment to the idea of essences; the idea that things have innate essences that can’t be changed. Dogs are dogs, humans are humans, roses and roses and nothing can change that; something else that the idea of “microevolution” was manufactured to defend. And also, evolution took away from religion an important trump card against skeptics; before evolution, even people who realized and admitted that religion made no sense had no good explanation as to where the complexity of life came from. Now they do. If the believers can just discredit evolution somehow, they’d have their trump card again.
The view of the “perfect” sun has nothing to do with religion. It was a conjecture by Aristotle based on views shared by Plato and other Greek philosophers. In fact, more of the objections to Galileo were defenses of Aristotle than they ever were of Scripture. Even the “religious” objections were based on Aristotelian notions of placing reality and appearance into carefully controlled boxes rather than on a righteous indignation that Scripture had an error in it. There was clearly a religious component to opposition to Galileo, (which is why Luther and his crowd–who hated Aristotle–also opposed Galileo), but the outrage in the RCC was prompted much more by the perceived attacks on Aristotle’s “truth.”
Christian opposition to Darwin was based more on religion than was opposition to Galileo. Darwin’s theory was a threat to Genesis chapters 2 and 3 in ways that Galileo was never a threat to Judges and Genesis 1 only gets sucked into the discussion because of fears that Darwin makes Genesis 2 and 3 false.
Actually, it sort of does. The objection to the sunspots thing came in part, from Jerome’s statement, “Perfection is to be found in heaven.” But Gallileo didn’t really get in trouble for the sunspots thing, except indirectly.
The guy who discovered sunspots was this Jesuit astronomer named Christof Scheiner, but Gallileo claimed that he had discovered them earlier, which pissed Scheiner off to no end. So later, when Gallileo wrote his discourse, Scheiner was one of the people who started a campaign against it, saying that it mocked the pope and was heretical.
Jerome’s comment is either a remark about heaven as spiritual or simply follows the ancient Greeks regarding their views of the perfections of celestial bodies and really does not come into play.
Scheiner’s actions are more representative of the actual Galileo fiasco with people getting their noses out of joint for personal reasons rather than theological ones.
But it was one that the Christianity of the time picked up and ran with because it fit their mythology so well. Earth is where the Fall of Man happened, Earth alone is imperfect, Earth is inferior materially and spiritually to the heavens.
Well, I certainly agree that most of the Gallileo thing was personal or political more than theological. But I do think you’re maybe drawing too bright a line between “religion” on the one hand and “Aristotle” on the other. Among the Scholastics (and Scholasticism was dominating Catholic theology at the time), Aristotle’s teachings (with certain modifications) were religious beliefs, and while you certainly could disagree with them, you had to be careful about how you did it. It didn’t help that the Dominicans, who were the preeminent heresy hunters at the time, tended to be hardcore Thomists.
I think it all revolves around God creating man in his own image; in other words, that we are special. Earth being the center of the universe or not isn’t all that important, since Earth is still unique in the solar system. But humans beings, many wish to think, were created just as we are, otherwise we are not special..
Poll described here.
So, for many, God guiding evolution isn’t good enough. They don’t want us connected to other life forms at all.
Evolution seems to undercut the entire concept of salvation. If there was no adam and eve, then where was no original sin and Jesus was crucified for nothing. I would assume on some level that that is part of it.
Obviously a Satinic plot…
The people (including the many Christians) who believe that evolution is in conflict with Christianity are just as ignorant about Christianity as they are about evolution.
Nevertheless, AFAIK, YEC and ID theory are both distinctly Christian projects. I’ve never heard of a non-Christian being involved, though it’s certainly plausible.
fe, hdiw?
Take a good look at who is on your school board too. Many fundamentalist churches get certain members elected so that they can control what books their school districts buy.
A 2008 Gallop poll showed 44% of Americans believed God created man in his present form within the last 10,000 years. That same year, a Pew-forum poll showed 42% believed that all life forms existed in its present form from the very beginning of time.
When 32 countries were surveyed about evolution, America ranked next to dead last, only beating out Turkey. 14% of Americans accepted that evolution was definitely true, one-third firmly rejected it. Compare to many European countries where it’s often more than 80% that accept the concept of evolution.
I’m amazed at how much we’ve kowtowed to the pilgrims, and what they are allowed to get away with.
Actually, even the Aristotellian/Ptolemaic model of the universe isn’t compatible with a literal reading of Genesis; it’s just that (1) the experimental results from physics are more irrefutable (if the Earth is flat and has a physical firmament placed above it that keeps the rain up, how do weather satellites work?) and (2) there’s a much longer tradition of waffling around the obvious unworkability of the physical model in Genesis (or else understanding it as a metaphor/myth etc).
Don’t have a cite handy, but there are definitely Muslims who have extensive web pages “debunking” the theory that people came from apes, etc. I once visited a natural history museum in Sharjah (in the UAE, and probably the most religious of the Emirates - unlike elsewhere in the UAE, alcohol is completely banned, for instance), and it was interesting to note that although there was a lot of coverage of ancient fossils and the process whereby the ancient animals and plants ended up underground and forming petroleum, there was a careful elision of natural history before the appearance of the first humans.
Actually Newton’s discovery that the same gravitational argument prevailed on earth and throughout the solar system was considered pro-Christian. Newton wrote a letter (to the Archbishop of Canterbury, if I recall correctly) explaining how his work could be incorporated into Christian apologetics. The reason requires understanding the history of scientific thought. In the world of Ancient Greece and Rome, the skies were perceived as full of a mythological significance, and the sun, moon, planets, and stars were generally anthromorphized, though the extent of it varied among different groups. Christian thought about the universe was grounded on the assumption that God created everything heavenly as well as earthly, so in the early Christian centuries that mythological view of astronomy was gradually replaced by one in which the sun, moon, et al were mere physical objects. By the late Middle Ages this process was complete*, but there was still the Aristotlean division between physical laws on earth and in the Heavens. Newton’s theory of universal gravitation erased that division, thus pushing the universe farther still from the Pagan view.
*There were a few holdouts, however. For example, Giordano Bruno was a 16th-century priest who eventually went rogue and was executed for heresy. While there may be reason to condemn the Church’s harshness, there’s no justification for the myth that Bruno was condemnded for any scientific theory. Bruno believed in Hermeticism, a religion who followed certain texts they believed to be from ancient times which conflated the Greek god Hermes with other ancient gods and sages. (The texts were actually a hoax.) Included in hermeticism was a partial return to the deification of the sun and other heavenly bodies, so Bruno was actually trying to roll back centuries of scientific progress.
But, then, Galileo’s heliocentrism was merely a stage in the centuries-long, Church-sanctioned process of the depaganizing of the Heavens. Why was it such a sticking point for the Church?! And what changed, between his time and Newton’s, to the point that nobody AFAIK even called Newton impious for this theories?
This guy (better known as Harun Yahya) is probably the best-known Islamic creationist, and he’s at least as ignorant as his American Christian counterparts.
I would really be thankful for a citation that shows that the Creation account in Genesis is contradicted by the heliocentric model. Is it because the Earth was created first and/or the stars were apparently created on the fourth day? Because both of those have commonly accepted explanations.