Darwin's Gift To Mankind (2)

Christianity lost its credibility as an arbiter over scientific research two hundred years before Charles Darwin sailed on the Beagle. It got its nose bloodied—as so many of us do—by getting involved in a very old controversy that it didn’t need to mix into.
Since long before the Christianity existed, scientists had argued over whether the earth moves around the sun or the sun moves around the earth. Ancient Greek scientists (Aristotle 300BC and Ptolemy AD150) had argued for a stable earth and a moving sun. Ancient scientists from India, Greece (Aristarcus of Samos 230BC) and later Muslim scientists had insisted that the earth moves around the sun.
Then a trio of Hollanders came along and invented the telescope (AD 1608). This meant you could actually look up and see what might or might not be moving up there. Galileo did. He improved the telescope so you could see even more, and he decided to weigh in on the controversy by backing a Polish (or German? No one knows) scientist named Copernicus.
Copernicus had the luck of living far from Rome in Poland. His uncle and protector was a powerful prince of the Church. He had the good sense not to publish his findings until after he was dead. But a lot of people read his interpretation of the theory that the sun is the center of our solar system.
Galileo took it and ran with it. He even used his new telescope to prove it. He made the horrendous mistake of living near Rome. And he was living in a time when the Catholic Church was feeling very pugnacious about Protestants and even Catholics who disagreed with official church positions.
Immediately people from the Holy Office (Rome’s official censors) started pointing to passages in the Bible that talk about “ends of the earth” or the “sun rising and setting”, or even the sun “crossing the heavens”. There was very little tolerance for the notion that the Bible might on occasion use poetic language or language that matched the common understanding of its time—having been written, conservatively, between 2000BC and AD95.
No. People who got promoted to the Holy Office tended to be literalists. There is no evidence they ever had any use for poetry—or that they gave much attention to verses like the one in Proverbs that says “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing and the glory of kings (scientists) to find it out”. There’ll be no “finding out” around here.
Galileo was summoned before church authorities in 1633 and made to recant. He had to get down on his knees and promise that he believed, had always believed and would always believe that the earth does not move. Faced with a nasty death as the alternative, he did so.
There are those who suggest he muttered, “Yes it does” as he walked out. But the church had the victory. The notion, adopted from Aristotle, that the earth is stationary won the day. Until, of course, hundreds, then thousands and finally millions of scientists proved it wrong.
The Church had made the mistake that many experts do. It had stepped out of its sphere of expertise. (John Calvin pointed out, a century before Galileo, that the Bible does not pretend to be a scientific text.) Christianity had egg all over its face.
But it hadn’t yet learned its lesson when Darwin published “On the Origins of Species” in 1859. This time it would be English Protestant divines who led the charge. “There is no reference in scripture that species change!” “Everything was begun and done six thousand years ago”.
Darwin, who had actually written nothing to refute Christian doctrine, was deemed to have struck at the foundations of Christianity. The good divines brought their Biblical texts to the fight; Darwin’s supporters brought their volumes of physical observation and evidence.
The playbook read like it had been plagiarized from the trial of Galileo. Except this time the Church lost its fight right on the spot. Scientists made fools of conservative clerics—and this time there were no flaming faggots and stakes to back up churchly claims to scientific infallibility.
The truly tragic thing—from a Christian point of view, which is mine—is that the clerics had misread their own Bible. One of things they clung to most avidly is the notion that the entire universe was made in six days. They get this from Genesis one. They should have asked a knowledgeable rabbi—it’s their book.
Rabbis have known for centuries that there is a TIME GAP of undetermined length between Genesis 1:1 “In the Beginning God created the heavens and the earth” AND Genesis 1:2 “The Earth was without form and void. …” There is no definition of that gap—it could easily be billions of years.
From Genesis 1:2 on the writer is talking about the preparation (recreation, if you will) of a post cataclysmic earth in preparation for humans made in God’s likeness (with an unkillable, everlasting spirit). Unlike the pre-humans found all over the planet, the Genesis 1 and 2 humans are essentially spirit beings who inhabit a body. (That’s basic Judeo-Christian theology Genesis 2:6.)
So if scientists find reasonable proof that the earth has been around for five or eight billion years, that doesn’t affect Christianity at all—any more than finding out that the earth spins around the sun.
A second problem Christians had with Darwin was the merest hint that the physique of man may have been adapted (evolved?) from earlier, more apelike forms. The Bible doesn’t say one way or the other—its primary concern is God’s relationship with mankind.
It leaves us with a tantalizing hint in Genesis 4. Cain, after murdering his brother, moved “east of Eden”—far away from Adam and Eve and married a wife. Where did he find her? Among the Neanderthals? And who was he afraid might kill him if he wandered far from home?
Darwinism has no real affect on the message of the Bible—that God is reaching out to man. All the angst over scientific interpretations of how long the planet has been around serve only to act as red herrings, obscuring that message.
Christians should give amoral Darwinian science as much latitude as it affords amoral capitalism or amoral politics. It really has little to do with their main business. The distractions caused by trying to refute Galileo or Darwin have done more to damage the credibility of Christianity—in all areas—than any other single thing in history.
Next time, let’s look at some of Darwin’s most important apostles.