A Five-Part Series
Part Four: Whatever Happened to Theistic Science?
The 1633 trial of Galileo occurred right in the middle of the Thirty Years religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, which lasted from 1618 to 1648. The causes of the wars were complex, but they started when Ferdinand II, the future Holy Roman Emperor, attempted to enforce Catholic orthodoxy on Protestant Bohemia. The wars then proceeded with complex and shifting sets of alliances. Eventually, Europe was exhausted after decades of sectarian conflict, and was receptive to new ways of ordering relations among the state, the church, and religious minorities. Partly in reaction against efforts to impose religious orthodoxy by the use of force, there arose in the 17th and 18th centuries an intellectual movement which became known, somewhat ironically, as “the Age of Enlightenment.” The intellectuals of that era thought they could end such strife by finding a source of moral authority independent of the Bible, and they thought they had found it in the power of human reason.
Human reason did not prove equal to the task. Scholars were enticed into a number of intellectual blunders which set the stage for the embrace of Darwinism and the eventual outright rejection of the former synthesis based on the biblical doctrine of Creation, wherein a rational God had created man a rational being in God’s own image, capable of comprehending an ordered cosmos.
Continue reading “Science and religion: Exploding the Myth of Conflict”
Joshualetter 