"Only one thing is certain--that is, nothing is
certain.
If this statement is true, it is also false."
- Ancient Paradox
"The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and
all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that
mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and
confine man in the bonds of Hell."
- Augustine
Wonder was the motive that led people to philosophy ... wonder is a kind of desire in knowledge. It is the cause of delight because it carries with it the hope of discovery. — Saint Thomas Aquinas
"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who
has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forego
their use."
- Galileo Galilei
"Knowledge of the sciences is so much smoke apart from
the heavenly science of Christ."
- John Calvin
"I have recently been examining all the known
superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition
religion one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and
mythology."
- Thomas Jefferson
"Every great scientific truth goes through three
stages. First, people say it conflicts with the Bible. Next they say it had
been discovered before. Lastly they say they always believed it."
- Louis Agassiz
“Religion is the
opiate of the masses."
- Karl Marx
"There is more RELIGION in men's SCIENCE than there is
SCIENCE in their RELIGION."
- Henry David Thoreau
"The great tragedy of science - the
slaying of a beautiful theory by an ugly fact."
- Thomas Henry Huxley
"A legitimate conflict between science and religion
cannot exist. Science without religion is lame, religion without science is
blind."
- Albert Einstein
"The most heinous and the most cruel
crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of
religion or equally noble motives."
- Mohandas Gandhi
"One Galileo in two thousand years is enough."
- Pope Pius XII
Science... never solves a problem without creating ten more.
- George Bernard Shaw
"Science can purify religion from error and
superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.
Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish…We
need each other to be what we must be, what we are called to be."
- Pope John Paul II
"Some things need to be believed to be seen."
- Guy Kawasaki
embryonic stem cell research has
“shattered the barriers meant to protect human dignity”
- Pope Benedict XVI
“[There] is for me powerful evidence that there is something
going on behind it all…It seems as though somebody has fine-tuned nature’s
numbers to make the Universe…The impression of design is overwhelming.”
- Paul
Davies
“There is a theory which states that if ever anybody
discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will
instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and
inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”
- Douglas Adams
From these quotes, it would seem that there has been a battle between religion and science that has been going on for ages. Looking at the rise of science and the fracturing of churches in the 20th century, this battle seems to be playing out across the world’s cultures. Science advanced much in the last two centuries and the vast majority of all scientists throughout history are still alive today. Inarguably, we live in a time of rapid change.
Traditions have been challenged. What was once common sense is now old fashioned or outdated. Justifications that have been around for as long as the written word have been questioned. The 20th century has seen an end to slavery as an institution. It has seen the creation of world courts to govern conquering armies who can no longer pillage with impunity. When Antarctica and the Moon were reached, it was done in the name of progress for all, not just one nation.
I just painted a broad story of progress. The details are rarely that rosy. There are always backwards steps. Sometimes what is done in the name of progress is itself a destructive move that leads further from a world flourishing with the richness of a peaceful humankind. Much of this has played out along the lines of one of the holding places for traditions, religion. The battle lines are often defined as science against religion. But is that what is happening?
I will examine the history of the debate, focusing on the last 150 years. I will look at the roots of science and the changes that have come to religions during that period. I will suggest a deeper explanation for what sometimes appears silly on the surface, no matter which side you are on. Finally, I hope to provide an approach that moves away from debate and battle to an understanding.
This is not a scholarly article and as yet has not been reviewed. Rather than go into detailed proofs of every point, I will rely on Internet links. Footnotes will also be used. In many cases, the books referenced in the footnotes can be found in whole or in part on the World Wide Web. I will leave it up to you to do that searching. With a couple exceptions, I will avoid linking to Google Books and Wikipedia.
Who Cares?
The Battle Between Science and Religion.
The
difficulty of finding a starting point in history
The
environment of the 19th century
End of the
Battle - 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial
“History is
written by the winners”
Did all
those miracles happen?
The battle between science and religion is probably as old as religion itself. That statement requires some defining of the terms science and religion. That will be left for near the end of this thesis. When examining the history of anything, it is always difficult to choose a starting point. No matter where you begin there is always something that led to that point. The earliest artifacts of human beings are theorized to have religious meaning. Bishop John Shelby Spong in Jesus for the Non-Religious puts the origin of religion at the earliest awakenings of human self awareness. In truly historical terms, finding the beginnings of religious practice is extremely difficult.
We can only imagine an ancient ancestor having a sensation of energy flowing through their body, or a vision of someone they knew to be dead, or an insight that they could not explain. How would they have come to terms with it? How would they have communicated it? They would not have known the names of the Prophets we know so they would not have used them. They may have articulated something that we would find comparable to a shaman.
Whatever that might have been, there is a good chance that someone else there had a different view. Particularly if the person who had the experience attempted to use it to their advantage. As modern people, if we were there, we most likely would agree with this second opinion. A modern doctor might easily recognize the symptoms of an epileptic seizure, which sometimes includes feelings of oneness with the universe. We might note something they ate recently and know that it was a plant that caused all sorts of out of the ordinary bodily sensations. We might simply see that they were obviously exhausted and under nourished, something we know is associated with irrational behavior.
I am making no blanket statement here that all religions are based on medical problems or hallucinations. But I will say, that one common factor of religious organizations is that they have all met with opposition. Most religious texts include stories of it in their scriptures or suggestions for how to handle it. Most also include instructions on how to spread their teachings. It can be safely assumed that the first religion had its detractors.
Science is a recently defined discipline. Certainly, it has not always been employed and is not exclusively employed in the business of disproving religious doctrines. In a sense, it is only the most recent, in a long line of ways of thinking that have come in conflict with some forms of religion.
In the history of mankind, the advent of the scientific method is quite unique. While empires have risen and fallen under a variety of ideologies, science has crossed cultures, beliefs and languages in an unprecedented manner. Its demise seems unlikely. Likewise, a few decades ago, it was commonly accepted by sociologists and many in the general culture that the rise of science and modernization would see increasing secularization. That idea is no longer popular among sociologists. Religion is increasing in many parts of the world and hanging on in places it was not expected to. It seems its demise is also unlikely.
"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does
not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at
-- Carl Sagan
"There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's
consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period." From Michael Crichton’s fiction book State of
The earliest universities in
This was not to the exclusion of other schools of thought. In fact the Church had to adjust its notion of hell to allow for the “noble pagans” such as Socrates and Plato. As they were teaching from their works, they could hardly preach that they were burning in hell. (Eternal Life: A New Vision: Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven p 112 John Shelby Spong.)
This tradition of universities associated with churches
continued in the first universities set up in
It is not coincidental that the rise of these secular universities came on the heels of the rise of scientific discovery. As we entered the 19th century great milestones in science were occurring. Galileo had long ago ended the debate on which heavenly bodies were at the center of the universe, but the vastness of the space over our heads and how everything got here were still mysteries.
v In 1796 Pierre LaPlace put forth a theory on the formation of planetary bodies. The theory met with some resistance, including from some clergy. There were also clergy that embraced it. Since this is still debated, this could hardly be considered a science vs. religion battle.
v Early estimates of the size of the universe were wildly under estimated. Part of the problem is that stars are so far away, their positions can’t be triangulated without finely tuned instruments. The first to measure a stellar parallax was Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel in 1838.
Those size estimates continued to be debated for over 100 years. It was not until 1923 that Edwin Hubble observed the first galaxy outside of our the Milky Way. Suddenly, we realized just how small we are compared to the entire universe.
It is difficult to imagine just how big the universe is. And it is still expanding at speeds that are also difficult to comprehend. It is easier for people who had some introduction to it in grade school, but imagine someone contemplating all those points of light in the sky, thinking that they are like our like our sun but very far away, and then discovering that some of them are actually groups of stars, just as many stars as the ones they were contemplating, but even further away, much further away.
As Douglas Adams put it at the beginning of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy "The Universe is Big. Really big. It may seem like a long way to the corner chemist, but compared to the Universe, that's peanuts."
v As all this was happening, in the world of biology, with sailing ships circling the globe on a regular basis, single cultures could began to chronicle a wide variety of species of animals. This led to Charles Darwin publishing the Origin of Species in 1859.
This is an important enough event that deserves a little more attention.
At
Paley did not have a good explanation of the fossils of
animals that were being discovered that did not match known creatures. He also
did not have much of an answer for the brutality of the animal kingdom.
Nevertheless, even after publishing The
Origin of the Species,
As most scientific theories do, it met with some objections. One well known critic was William Wilberforce. He argued against the theory in The Quarterly Review of July 1860. Among other things he noted that there was an absence of evidence for the theory in the fossil record. At the time, this was true. It is no longer true, but Wilberforce or Darwin could have not known that the evidence would be found. To argue otherwise at the time would have been unscientific.
In response to the article,
Something else that
Born November 7, 1832 Died November 4, 1918. His education career began at the University of Michigan in 1858. In 1863 he was elected to the New York State Senate. At the time, they were debating what to do with a large amount of land grant funds. Some advocated for distributing it to existing universities, but White lobbed to use the funds to start a new university that would not be associated with a church. He announced that it would be “an asylum for Science.”
On April 27, 1865 a bill creating Cornell University as New York’s Land Gran institution was signed by Gov. Rueben E. Fenton. White continued to speak and write on the importance of science. He also spoke against religion and took liberties with the facts of history.
In December 1869 he gave a lecture titled The Battle-Fields of Science. It was printed in the New York Daily Tribune. 1896 he published a two volume History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. The ideas he expressed were very influential into the middle of the next century when better historical scholarship began to dissect the works and find some of the claims completely unsubstantiated (see the section on Fact Checking).
Born 1811 Died 1882. He was a Professor of Chemistry and Botany at New York University in 1837. His research in photochemistry made photography possible. In 1874 he published History of the Conflict between Religion and Science.
The extent of the effect on the American Christian community of the rise of science would be difficult to measure. What can be said is, at this time churches were splintering, often creating new denominations. Smaller churches formed in an attempt to purify their faith or to incorporate new ways of thinking about Christianity. The new and radical denominations, Mormon and Christian Science were also perceived as a threat. They created completely new scripture and doctrines requiring a new response.
With new work in archaeology and new ways of studying history came new ways of looking at ancient scripture. Literary and textual criticism, sometimes lumped under the banner of Higher Criticism were seen as a threat by some Christians and welcomed by others. In response, some churches began to examine what it means to be fundamentally Christian.
One famous list to come out of these discussions was “The Five Point Deliverance” of the Northern Presbyterians, ruled on by the 1910 Presbyterian General Assembly. Here is a simplified list of the beliefs:
§ Inerrancy of the Bible
§ The virgin birth
§ Substitutionary atonement of Christ
§ Bodily resurrection of Christ
§ The biblical miracles as history
A much larger work was done by A.C. Dixon and later edited and expanded by Reuben Archer Torrey called The Fundamentals: A Testimony To The Truth. Published by the Bible Institute of Los Angeles first in 1910, it consisted of 12 volumes. Copies continued to be published through 1915. In a massive marketing campaign, these were sent free to ministries around the country.
One of the best known confrontations between these two forces was the highly publicized trial of a biology teacher charged with illegally teaching the theory of evolution. The trial had many theatrics, opening with a look at the Book of Genesis. At one point Darrow was nearly held in contempt. The prosecuting lawyer, William Jennings Bryan, turned the questioning of a zoologist defense witness into an opportunity to make a speech mocking the theory of evolution.
Darrow later had a chance to counter him by actually calling
him as an expert witness, an expert in the Bible. During the questioning
Given the law as it was written and the simple facts of the
case, the trial did not last long. The decision to convict was pretty straight
forward. The defense tried to appeal but the Tennessee Supreme Court dismissed
the case. The defense did not expect to win but had the goal of taking the case
to as high a court as they could and get the law forbidding the teaching of
evolution declared unconstitutional. This goal was not attained until the case
of Epperson v.
For decades to come the perception of Bible believers being backwoods simpletons and the evolution believers being arrogant and argumentative stuck.
Before examining some of this closer, I need to discuss some methodology. Tools and practices for examining history have changed dramatically since all of these events unfolded. We no longer need to rely on a few experts to tell us how to interpret events of either the recent or distant past. However, we can’t all be expected to hold a degree in every discipline so we can judge everything from a corporation’s balance sheet to a celebrity’s improprieties.
This quote is sometimes attributed to Winston Churchill, sometimes to Alex Haley, and sometimes to others. Without knowing exactly who said it or why, we can’t be sure what was intended. Its meaning has changed as our perspectives on history have changed.
In the last few centuries, it has been possible to find more history written by the losers, or those who were on the sidelines. Before that, in large part because very few people were able to write anything at all, most of the documents that we use to understand the past were written by Kings, religious leaders, nobleman and their hired scribes and biographers.
It is doubtful that Eusebius, the Bishop of Caesarea in
An excellent example of history not written by the winners is The Diary of Anne Frank. Its popularity is a testimony to how rare it is that we get such a glimpse into the life of someone who lived under the oppression of a brutal dictator. More recent revolutions have shown us the power of being able to hear those voices as they fight back.
The simplest answer is, don’t take them on face value.
Documents that can be verified as authentic are valuable. Ideally, they are written close to the time the events they discuss actually happened. As we go further back in time, a document that is 20 or even 100 years after the fact can still provide insight. However, merely placing the document in the right time and the right place is not enough to also claim that the contents are accurate.
In Lies My Teacher Told Me,(2nd Edition, 2007 p. 360). James W. Loewn supplies five suggestions for how to engage in “historiography”. He says, “Whether dealing with bad textbooks, watching historical movies, or visiting museum exhibits, students – and the rest of us – must learn how to deal with sources. This process entails putting five questions to each work.
1. “First, when and why was it written (or painted, etc.)? Locate the intended audience in the social structure. Consider what that speaker was trying to accomplish with them.” This is sometimes called sociology of knowledge, contextualization or historiography.
2. “Second question, whose viewpoint is presented?”
3. “Third, is the account believable?”
4. “Fourth, is the account backed up by other sources?”
5. “Finally, after reading the words or seeing the image, how is one supposed to feel about [what is presented]?”
The term “source document” does not imply that you need to
visit the actual original document. You don’t need to go to the National
Archives in
For a somewhat more scholarly approach to historiography,
you may want to check out The
Sage Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods, Vol. 1 by Lisa M. Given
p.396-399 2008 SAGE Publications,
With all that in mind, I examine what I have covered so far.
Examinations of the historical accuracy of the Bible are not difficult to find. I will not present any final statements on it as a whole. I will ask if there is historical precedent for the five statements being fundamental to Christianity.
If you would like a start on examining this yourself there is a list of supposed contradictions at a website called Evil Bible. I find many of these to be obvious metaphors or plays on words and not really contradictions at all. Someone else has taken the time to respond to all of them.
The question here regards whether this should be considered fundamental to Christianity. Does the Bible make this claim or did early Christians make it? For a theological perspective, I recommend Rodger Cragun’s The Ulitmate Heresy. Rodger examines all of the relevant passages, such as Timothy 3:16 and discusses the Hellenistic influences on them. As the title suggests, he makes a case that the Bible is not intended to be inerrant, and any claims that it is should be considered heresy.
Timothy 3:16 states the Bible is “God breathed”. This could be consistent with an inerrant view, or with those who claim that God inspired the authors of the Bible. Some of this depends on the interpretations of Greek, which are beyond my scope. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus declares he came to fulfill the law, not abolish it. Again this depends on some Greek and seems to contradict other statements such as Romans 13:8-10. The apostles Peter and Paul have several disagreements. Paul accuses Peter of being “wrong” in Galatians 2. If both are breathing the word of God, how can one be wrong?
The statement itself can’t be made without also saying which Bible. Apart from the many language interpretations, there are versions that do not contain the same books. There is no single agreed upon method of how these decisions to include which books and use which interpretations have been made. The Bible has changed over history and the versions have multiplied.
The earliest records indicate that there was disagreement on inerrancy from the beginning, with no clear decision on the matter. The first to make it a decree was First Helvetic Confession of the Reformed Church Swiss in 1536. In 1646, The Westminster Confession of Faith opened with a statement regarding inerrancy. But these are merely statements, not proofs.
The Westminster Confession stood as a proxy for other Protestant faiths and was rarely challenged or argued during the next few centuries. When the forms of Biblical criticism mentioned earlier began to come not from outside the faith, but from the faithful, those who did not want to open up these questions felt a need to respond. Many denominations do include this belief as a requirement for membership.
I will say something more about miracles in a moment, but first, a cursory review of the history around and before the birth of Christ will uncover many claims of virgin births. Kings who wanted to set themselves above their subjects would make this claim. This is not to be taken to mean that the story of Jesus is just another “dying and rising” god story in the genre of gods that were worshipped to help bring the Spring rains each year. There are several popular authors who have attempted to make this claim. They are much more easily refuted than 2,000 years of Christianity. If you find one of those interesting, a good response was written by Tim Callahan for Skeptics Magazine on February 25th, 2009. The title was “The Greatest Story Ever Garbled”.
Checking the Bible, the virgin birth is mentioned in only 2 of the 4 gospels. There are no lessons in these narratives and they seem rather superfluous to the Christian doctrine. The earliest written Gospel, Mark, leaves it out, which is an indication to some that it was added on later for political reasons. That is, to put Jesus in the royal blood line of the Bible he needs to be born in the City of David. There are many sources for delving in to this history.
There is no mention of the celebration of Christ’s birth in the early church. However this belief is included in the Nicene Creed, an important statement of faith written in 381 A.D.
The idea of returning to God is a central part of many religions. Accepting Christ as your savior, as the path back to God is a more universally accepted definition of Christian. You could be an admirer of the teachings of Christ, or study Jesus and other prophets but still not be Christian. Even the Qu’ran acknowledges Christ as a great prophet. However, the details of how to follow the path to God have been debated from the beginning.
Clearly, in the gospel of John Chapter 14 Verse 6, Jesus says “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”. But then he goes on to explain he is the Father, or at least “in” the Father and whoever believes in him will “do the works I have been doing.” Not every denomination or every priest or pastor gives the same answer on the mechanism for the substitutionary atonement.
The book of Romans also makes several statements on faith but James has quite a bit to say about “works”:
14 What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them? 15 Suppose a brother or a sister is without clothes and daily food. 16 If one of you says to them, “Go in peace; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about their physical needs, what good is it? 17 In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. 18 But someone will say, “You have faith; I have deeds.” Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by my deeds. 19 You believe that there is one God. Good! Even the demons believe that—and shudder. 20 You foolish person, do you want evidence that faith without deeds is useless? 21 Was not our father Abraham considered righteous for what he did when he offered his son Isaac on the altar? 22 You see that his faith and his actions were working together, and his faith was made complete by what he did. (Book of James 2:14-22 New International Version, 2011)
In Matthew 25, Jesus himself makes it quite clear that feeding the hungry and visiting the sick are necessary or you “will go away to eternal punishment.” This is a matter that has caused many of the splits in Protestantism and is one that is hardly settled. Its inclusion in the list is understandable, but its meaning less understandable.
This one is central to the doctrine and is also included in
the Nicene Creed. The death of Jesus, preceded just a few years earlier by the
death of John the Baptist, was a shock to this community. Their source of hope
was gone. The conquering and oppressing
There had to be meaning for his death. In searching for that meaning, they searched their traditions, their Jewish roots, and found this story to be a continuation and a fulfillment of those prophecies. I don’t think the story would have continued to be told if that were all there was to it. It is the story of a god who didn’t just move freely from heaven to earth like so many earlier Egyptian, Greek and Roman gods but a much richer story of god who became fully human and taught lessons of compassion. It is the story of a man who said to love your enemies and even when faced with death, refused to take up arms against them. He offered them forgiveness with his last breath.
These aspects of the story set Christianity apart and make it enduring. Terry Eagleton explores this further in Reason, Faith, and Revolution – Reflections on the God Debate. But did these events occur as they are depicted? I will address that in the 5th point.
Miracles can be a problem for the modern reader of the Bible. By definition, they go against science. The best references we have are the scriptures themselves. As historical documents go, these are not too bad. We have more than one source for copies and in the case of the gospels, were written with decades of the events.
Claims that they are equal to an eyewitness account of a modern event or that many sources attest to them outside of the Bible are less acceptable. There are 6 known references in history outside of the Bible mentioning Christianity or Christ, and they are very brief. Verifications of the Moses story are even fewer. This is not to say none of the events occurred or that these communities did not play important pivotal roles in history. It does say that using a modern definition of “historically accurate” is a stretch.
We have some documents that are fairly near to the events and well preserved. Relative to other important figures and events of that time, these documents could be said to be quite good. However they come from a very small community that was oppressed and sometimes on the run. Important people in these documents have only minimal references from other sources. The details of the events and words have no outside verification and some of the events can be shown to be false. As for the miracles, these are extraordinary claims and should require extraordinary evidence. To decide to believe them is a matter of faith. Some Protestant faiths specifically state that belief in all of them is not a requirement for membership.
Rather than repeat them, I will direct you to short articles that cover the two important authors mentioned in the science section above. Draper’s work did not include footnotes and in the light of new data can be seen as a polemic. White’s work did include footnotes, but any attempts to verify where he found some of those references have come up wanting. With so many questionable facts I am left also questioning their conclusions.
If science did not begin with Galileo and was not constantly struggling against religious domination, then where did it come from?
In the painting The
School of Athens, we find Aristotle and Plato at the center surrounded by
great minds throughout history. As always we are faced with the question of who
their influences were, but I will make the non-controversial statement that
Plato and Aristotle are the beginning of science. Unfortunately we cannot draw
straight lines back to their teachings. Their writings were lost and rediscovered
more than once through time. In the early centuries C.E. they were studying
Plato, but what was being taught departs enough that modern scholars now refer
to it as Neo-Platonism. When
The next Empire to rise was that of Islam. They moved
opposite of
They had the works of Aristotle and Plato in their possession and the ability to translate them into Arabic. In their attempts to make use of them, they realized that Aristotle lacked a method for testing and proving his discoveries. Although no one person can be said to have invented it, the first clear instances of experimentation and quantification used to distinguish between competing theories came out of these scholars in The Islamic Golden Age.
The first example is most likely Book of Optics written by Ibn al-Haytham also known as Alhazen in
1021. The earliest medical peer review process is found in Ethics of the Physician by Ibn al-Rahwi (854-931) in
Just to their East, there was another group of warring
factions. Genghis Kahn had managed to unite
It was his sons who succeeded him and in 1258 they overran
European Christians had been meeting Muslims in the battles
over
This is only a brief overview of a small part of what was going in the world at that time. To see a broader picture, that shows what was happening in China and South America and every else at the same time, take a look at this site: HyperHistory.
This essay is on hold for the moment. I found some weaknesses in the sources I was using for the Enlightenment period.
07/19/2011