When Galileo showed that the earth was but one body orbiting the sun, they had a chance to say, “Wow! There is so much to creation than we thought! Whole other worlds! God is far greater than we expected!”
Instead they charged him with heresy and kept him under house arrest until he died.
When Newton worked out that Gravity and his own laws of motion were able to explain the movements of the planets instead of a god moving them, Newton even wrote how God could still fit into it. That in the absence of a material explanation for gravity, God may be responsible for it as well as sometimes, “resetting” the solar system to address a small instability issue he could not resolve at the time. The church could of thought, “What an amazing system! god has made the heavens predictable for us!”
But because this system did not rely on direct divine intervention, debate over this continued until the time of Napoleon.
Today, we have evolution. An explanation for the diversity of life and why it seems so well suited for all the environments and niches it fills. Based on the brilliant hypothesis of natural selection confirmed again and again not just by predictions of what would be seen in nature, but countless experiments on populations we select for traits in. Something that faces virtually no controversy among biologists.
To it’s credit, the church of old, the Catholic church has already bowed out of this battle. They are largely happy to accept evolution. And for good reason! Its elegance is undeniable. The way it connects us to all other life. The way our forms are a reflection of the more than three billion years of history our ancestors went through. It has so much more beauty than the idea that all life came into existence as it is now. Surely it would be a greater demonstration of the brilliance and creativity of a god than, “He breathed life into dirt.”
Yet about half the citizenry of the nation I live in deny it. What is important is not to discover how the world they believe God designed works. To uncover and understand all its elegance and how that could glorify God. What is important to them is that Genesis can be taken literally.
These were all discoveries Christianity could have embraced and used to become something more incredible. These were all missed opportunities for them. Why let these slip by?
Categorized | Affiliate Marketing 101
Why Does Christianity Have A Tradition Of Denying Science Instead Of Growing By It?
Posted on January 3, 2013.
brainwashing overpowers logic and science. Its sad but true
Quite the contrary. The pioneers of modern science -such as Copernicus, a Polish priest; Rene Descartes; Isaac Newton; Roger Bacon; Gottfried Leibniz; George LeMaitre, who proposed the Big Bang; etc etc- were all Christians of one brand or another.
Even today some of our leading biologists are devout Christians.
I guess it’s much easier to say “god did it”, then saying it naturally formed. And I guess accepting the concept of a god particle is going way over their heads.
Science hasn’t proved anything. They give you only theories and you run with them.
As a Christian I wont deny my faith in the Bible and my belief in how God created the universe and all life in it. I don’t reject science, but science is flawed and will never have all the answers. As for how the Church reacted to science in the past it’s regrettable, but I say let science be science and religion be religion and keep them separate.
“those who thought the sun revolved around the earth”…… The first attacks on Galileo came from Colombe who was the leader of the Aristotelian League. Simply put…. he was just another scientist who was jealous of Galileo. It wasnt the catholic church (which again, is not Christianity). “But there existed a powerful body of men whose hostility to Galileo never abated: the Aristotelians at the Universities” (A. Koestler….A History of Man’s Changing Vision)……..it was this threat…. not from the catholic church, that cowed Galileo into silence. but he happened to be a catholic.again Catholicism is not christianity.
You’ve just been brainwashed by the liberal media.
Christian Scientist :
Physics: Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Kelvin
Chemistry: Boyle, Dalton, Ramsay
Biology: Ray, Linnaeus, Mendel …….Pasteur….. Virchow, Agassiz
Geology: Steno, Woodward, Brewster, Buckland, Cuvier
Astronomy: Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Herschel, Maunder
Mathematics: Pascal, Leibnitz, Euler
Evolution is historical science (which is extremely affected by bias) and is not experimental science (which is science that can be proven). The idea that dead material (rocks) can generate life all by itself is not consistent with scientific observation.
Um, not all Christians live by that. My two friends are Christian and they are the most logical people and brilliant people I have ever known. Also, their Father is a man of God but is also a physics and math genius.
This is what keeps on happening. Just because of the general outlook on people does not mean all who belong to that community are the same….
They use to believe the world was flat and the sun spun around the earth. If you said otherwise you were going to hell
As Skeptic shows, you have NOT done your home work, and point 2 is, you are confusing ALL Christians with ONE certain *Church*, that tried to control the world at that time…
Sorry dude, keep trying though….
Child of God – X atheist
Because of literalism and ignorance.
Because modern christianity is an evolution of the original christianity. Christians do not like to think about it but the fact of the matter is that the modern christians did not exist prior to the 1800s. After Rome converted, the cult of Paul vanished from existence. The catholic church was the ONLY christian denomination except for perhaps various “orthodox” sects. They were/are similar to catholics in many ways. There is zero evidence of the cult Paul existing in any significant number after the Romanization of that cult. It was not until the days of Martin Luther that people tried to revive the Cult of Paul. This caused a violent and bloody war between protestants and catholics. They only differ in that protestants do not have all the rituals and they pray only to god rather than also to saints. They were both burning witches, slaughtering natives, and killing each other. With this mentality came ignorance,. Science is power and the church did not want to lose that power. NONE of them did. Protestants were the power in America after the revolutionary war. Fortunately christianity evolved and eventually lost power in the west. The pope is just a sunday prop along with his pedophile priests and the church is just a money machine for parasitic theologians to ensnare ten percent of your hard earned cash. The odd few christians who really do care about the world are more worried about Israel than America. We live in a Zionist owned world my friends. That is the truth. Anything that empowers YOU due to YOU relying on YOU or anything other that the jewish sky god/Allah/whatever you want to call “yahweh” is considered a sin.
After only reading your initial question, because the religious people that accepted science became atheist.
It’s easier to read one book than a bunch of hard ones.
Galileo was religious, he just disagreed with the Catholic Church.
Isaac Newton was also religious. In fact he was extremely religious because he believed that he was ‘chosen by god’.
The Catholic church did all of the horrible things you mentioned. So why are you blaming us, the other Christians? We left the Catholic church for a reason and many protestants are at the forefront of science.
Very blithely ignores the big push from the Church into ethical stem cell research. Well, why let facts get in the way of your stupid rant.