Ever since the end of the Middle Ages (which coincides with the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in the early 16th century), some Christians have had problems accepting the teachings of science. The origins of modern scientific thought go back to the Renaissance, when people rediscovered the teachings, art, and thought of the ancient Greeks and, of equal importance, began to see the importance of thinking for themselves, outside the restrictions of external authority structures.
The first major figure whose scientific views conflicted with the official position of the church was Nicolaus Copernicus, who published an anonymous work claiming that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the solar system. (The traditional, earth-centered view was associated with a second-century Egyptian natural philosopher named Ptolemy.) Copernicus died (1543) before his work was widely enough known, or widely enough associated with him, to cause him personal problems. However, his book On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres was added to the Index of Forbidden Books maintained by the Roman Catholic Church, and Christians were forbidden to read it.
Galileo Galilei built telescopes and began looking through them at the heavens. He was familiar with the work of Copernicus, and his own studies confirmed the heliocentric (sun-centered) view of the solar system. However, in 1616 he was forbidden from teaching the truth of the Copernican view, though he was allowed to teach it as a hypothesis. In 1632 Galileo published a book called Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems (i.e., those of Ptolemy and Copernicus). Although the title of the book made it sound as though the two views would be treated as having equal validity, it is clear that Galileo favored the Copernican view. Galileo was forced by the church to recant his beliefs, and his Dialogue was added to the Index. Galileo himself remained under house arrest until his death eight years later, but he nevertheless maintained his views in private.
Both Copernicus and Galileo considered themselves to be Christians, yet they knew that their beliefs conflicted with the official teachings of the church on matters of science. Almost everyone today, Christian and non-Christian alike, accepts the scientific validity of the theories of Copernicus and Galileo (but see http://www.geocentricity.com for a contemporary Christian "scientist" who disputes this!). Biblical passages that at one time were interpreted as proving that the earth was stationary (Ps 75:3) or that the sun revolved around the earth (i.e., it rose and set) (Ps 50:1) were reinterpreted by Christians, explaining the language of the Bible as figurative rather than literal. The problem, Christians began to see, was not with science, nor with the Bible, but with improper interpretations of the Bible, for example, forcing it to be literal when it should have been taken figuratively or phenomenologically (i.e., describing events as they appear from a human perspective, like the "rising" of the sun).
Slowly but surely, the Christian acceptance of modern science attracted more and more adherents. Some scientists, like Isaac Newton and Blaise Pascal, dabbled in theology as well as science. Most others remained loyal to the church. Even though the church itself failed to remove Copernicus's and Galileo's books from the Index for centuries, the opinion of most Christians, including those in positions of authority within both Catholic and Protestant churches, was that science and the Bible were fully compatible.
A second crisis between science and Christianity
arose in the mid-19th century, when Charles Darwin published his book The
Origin of Species. In his earlier life
Reaction to The Origin of Species was
mixed. Most scientists, including devout Christians, had long been convinced
from a study of the increasingly large fossil record that evolution was a fact,
but they had been unable to explain it satisfactorily.
Advances in knowledge in many scientific fields
over the next 150 years--genetics, paleontology, molecular biology, subatomic
particle physics--have generally confirmed both the age of the earth (put by
scientists at about 4.5 billion years) and
“Today, almost half a century after the publication of the encyclical [Humani Generis], new knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more than a hypothesis. It is indeed remarkable that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge. The convergence, neither sought nor fabricated, of the results of work that was conducted independently is in itself a significant argument in favor of this theory.”
Most scientists who identify
themselves as Protestants also accept
Prior to the rise of the modern sciences of astronomy
and geology, most Christians believed that the earth was created about 4,000
years before the birth of Christ. For example, the Venerable Bede dated the
creation of the world to 3952 B.C.E., Joseph Scaliger dated it to 3949 B.C.E.,
and Archbishop Ussher dated it to 4004 B.C.E. (or, to be more exact, 9 a.m.,
Oct 3, 4004 B.C.E.). These dates were based on tracking genealogical material
in the Bible. Other people, who relied on observations of the world around
them, believed that the earth was much older. The 18th century Russian
naturalist Mikhail Lomonosov thought that the earth
was several hundred thousand years old. A contemporary French scientist, Comte
du Buffon, estimated the age of the earth at 75,000 years, based on the rate of
cooling that he had measured. British naturalists William Smith and John
Phillips observed the deposition of fossils in regular strata throughout
While geologists were looking down at the earth, astronomers were looking up at the heavens. Improvements in optics after the time of Galileo made possible stronger and stronger telescopes, and scientists began observing the universe more closely than was possible at an earlier time. Through careful observations and measurements, they were able to determine that the universe was expanding, and measurements of the red-shift in the visible spectrum of stars at the edge of the visible universe eventually led scientists to estimate the age of the universe as between 13 and 15 billion years. Subsequent measurements of other types, for example, based on observations of the relative frequency of radioactive elements with extremely long half-lives, generally support this date.
Modern scientists can point to many examples that demonstrate that the ages of both the earth and the universe are much older than the 6,000 or so years that one would derive from a literal reading of the Bible. These examples include:
Much Christian opposition to the theory of evolution
is based on either a faulty understanding of science or a questionable
interpretation of scripture. For example, some Christians oppose the theory of
evolution on the grounds that it is just a theory. This comment betrays
a fundamental lack of understanding of the nature of modern science. Unlike
math, which allows theorems to be proven logically, "proof" in
science is based on testing hypotheses and, ultimately, creating theories.
So-called "laws," like the Law of Gravity or the Laws of Motion, are
really just theories that have been supported repeatedly by experiment. In this
sense, the theory of evolution may also be called a law, because repeated
experiments have confirmed various aspects of it, while also modifying or
building on aspects of
Christian opposition to evolution based on the idea of a young earth is both a misinterpretation of scripture and a willful rejection of compelling scientific evidence. The young earth view is based on a literal reading of Genesis 1, where God creates the earth in six days. Young-earthers interpret these as six 24-hour days. However, it is perfectly possible to read this material in a figurative or poetic sense, thus allowing creation to occur over a much longer period of time. Various methods of using radioisotopes have been developed over the past few decades, for example, Carbon-14, Uranium-238, Uranium-235, Thorium-232, Potassium-Argon, Rubidium-Strontium, and Argon-Argon dating. All of these dating methods, as well as other scientific data (see above), such as measuring the most distant visible objects in the universe by measuring the Doppler shift in their emission of electromagnetic waves, confirm the ancient age of the earth and the universe. Given the overwhelming scientific evidence, it is clear that Genesis 1 must be interpreted in some way other than literally. If Genesis 1 is read as a literary-theological work whose purpose is to portray the order and beauty of God's creation, all difficulties with a 4.5 billion year old earth and a 14 billion year old universe disappear.
Many Christian opponents of evolution try to poke holes in the theory in one way or another. One of the most common attacks is based on the fossil record, which by its nature is incomplete. Opponents often cite the absence of intermediate forms as evidence against the validity of evolution. Aside from the logical weakness of an argument from silence, the fact of the matter is that with every new discovery, more and more of the fossil record is filled in. To give one illustration of this phenomenon, anti-evolutionists twenty or thirty years ago railed against the possibility of whales evolving from land mammals that returned to the sea, because no fossil evidence of species intermediate between the ancestral land mammal and modern whales had been found. In the last twenty-five years, however, numerous fossil finds have filled in the gaps in the fossil record, and the lineage from Pakicetus through several species to the toothed and baleen whales of today is now well documented. In addition, DNA analysis shows that whales' closest living non-marine relative is the hippopotamus, and scientists now classify whales, hippos, and their kind as a single order: Cetartiodactyla.
In fact, many independent lines of evidence support the theory of evolution, including the following:
Much attention is currently being paid to a concept that is called by its proponents the Intelligent Design (ID) Theory. The most basic summary of ID is that biological organisms are so complex that they cannot have developed by chance, so they must have had a designer. Although advocates of teaching ID in the public school avoid saying so, it is clear that for the vast majority of them, that designer is the God of Christianity.
How should a Christian who is committed to both good theology and good science assess ID? First, it must be said that all Christians, both advocates and opponents of ID, believe in an intelligent designer. The question is not whether God is ultimately responsible for the design of the universe but whether ID, as presented by its proponents, offers a necessary or even reasonable alternative to evolution. In my estimation it does not, for the following reasons:
First, despite the fact that it is sometimes called Intelligent Design Theory, ID is not a scientific theory, for it has not been through the rigorous process of scientific testing that is required for a hypothesis to become a theory. In fact, since it does not offer testable hypotheses concerning its claims, it is not even a scientific hypothesis. Instead, it is a philosophically-based critique of evolution. Now, there is nothing wrong with critiquing existing scientific theories; advancements in science cannot be made without insightful critiques. However, many of ID's critiques of evolution are simply recycled creationist critiques from the 19th and 20th centuries that have failed to carry any weight with the scientific community in the past. Other critiques, such as pointing out the gaps in current knowledge that certainly exist, are inconsequential without a scientifically testable alternative, which ID does not provide.
Finally, although ID criticizes the classical
theory of evolution for eliminating God from the equation, it is not true that
the theory of evolution eliminates the possibility of God. Although many
scientists do reject the idea of God outright, many others see no contradiction
between evolution and the idea of God. The book Bios, Cosmos, Theos, edited by Henry Margenau
and Roy Abraham Varghese, consists of a series of interviews with sixty leading
scientists, many of them Nobel laureates, about religion and science, and none
of the scientists represented in the book finds God incompatible with science.
Kenneth R. Miller, a professor of biology at
If Genesis 1 is read theologically rather than literally, many questions concerning both the age of the universe and the origin and development of life are resolved. One question that remains, however, involves the origin of humankind. Direct creation of a single man and woman, as a literal reading of Genesis 1 suggests, appears to be an easy solution, at least on the surface. Indeed, one could argue that God used natural processes to create the rest of the universe but created humans as an act of special creation at a certain point in the not-too-distant past. This solution, however, does not address many pertinent questions raised by science (not to mention the age-old question, where did Cain get his wife?!). Four important questions are:
Since the initial discoveries of ancient,
human-like skeletons in the
In 2003 the Human Genome Project completed its mapping of the complete human genome and published the results. In 2005 a similar mapping of the chimpanzee genome was released. Depending on how one calculates similarities and differences, the two genomes differed by only 1.2% to 2.7%. In other words, human and chimpanzee DNA are between 97.3% and 98.8% the same. Genetic similarity is used as a tool by molecular biologists to construct family trees of related species, a technique known as cladistics. What is the significance of the human-chimpanzee genome similarity from a theological perspective? Questions of origin aside, are there implications for humans' ethical treatment of chimpanzees or other genetically similar creatures?
Most special creation proposals posit a creation
sometime within the past 10,000 years, perhaps accompanied by a more recent
worldwide flood. However, archaeological evidence suggests that modern humans
have inhabited the continent of
Molecular biologists who study the mitochondrial
DNA (mtDNA) of humans have compared the mtDNA of thousands of subjects all over the world. Unlike
nuclear DNA, mtDNA is transmitted only from mothers
to children, without contribution from the father. These scientists' studies
strongly suggest that a common female ancestor, nicknamed "Mitochondrial
Eve," lived in
Science clearly raises a number of important and interesting questions that students of the Bible and theologians must consider thoughtfully. If Christians want the world to consider their ideas about religion seriously, they must themselves consider the evidence of science seriously. It is detrimental to the Christian cause for Christians to ignore science or, worse, to misrepresent it. It is far better to claim ignorance of a particular scientific topic than to repeat the claims of so-called experts without investigating the issue oneself. In regard to evolution in particular, the following facts are pertinent:
Avoiding these facts, ignoring them, or denying them only hurts the cause of Christianity among people who wonder if Christianity is relevant for today. These are facts that Christians must acknowledge and deal with from a Christian perspective, both for our own intellectual integrity and for the sake of our Christian witness.
Science is not the enemy of either Christianity or the Bible. As Christians, we have both reason and faith. The two need not be in conflict. The only aspect of the modern theories of origins of the universe and evolution, as they are sometimes portrayed, that is contrary to the Bible is the idea that either must have occurred in a universe without God. Nothing about either cosmology or evolution disproves the idea of God. In fact, one could argue that creating a universe and establishing its laws in such a way that evolution could occur requires a much more powerful and infinitely more intelligent God than one who simply created everything as it is today.
Many Christian scientists embrace both their Christian faith and scientific theories of cosmology and evolution. That is, they accept the factual, testable aspects of these theories, but they also acknowledge a real and tangible role for God in the process.
Many books that extol a positive relationship
between science and religion have been written in recent years. In addition to Cosmos,
Bios, Theos and Finding Darwin's God,
which have already been mentioned, Diarmuid O'Murchu, a priest and social psychologist, discusses the
implications of quantum theory on theology in Quantum Theology.
Granville C. Henry, in his book Christianity and the Images of Science,
looks at several different scientific issues, including evolution, Einstein's
theory of relativity, and quantum mechanics from a theological perspective.
Philosopher Phil Dowe, in Galileo,
In conclusion, it is instructive to remember the words of Pope John Paul II, a firm believer in the authority of scripture: "In order to delineate the field of their own study, the exegete and the theologian must keep informed about the results achieved by the natural sciences" (Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, October 22, 1996).
© Copyright 2005, Progressive Theology