Thoughts in a Haystack: What If They Held a War . . .

Sunday, January 08, 2006

What If They Held a War . . .

There is a nice confluence in the news today. First there is an Op-Ed piece in the Washington Post by Alan Cutler, a geologist and author of The Seashell on the Mountaintop about Nicolaus Steno, a scientific giant who is too little known today. As Cutler explains in the article:

Steno was primarily an anatomist, but he is best remembered for his pioneering studies in geology. In 1669 he published in Florence -- Galileo's old stomping grounds -- a startling proposal: that the fossils and rock layers of the earth, if studied scientifically, gave a chronicle of the earth's history at least as valid as the accepted version in the verses of Genesis.

If some accounts of the relationship between science and religion are credited, this should have sparked cries of "heretic" and caused the oiling of the instruments of torture and the kindling of fires. Instead,

There wasn't a peep of official complaint. Steno wasn't criticized, much less condemned. In fact, he was put on a fast track to priesthood and then a bishopric. To top it off, in 1988 he was beatified by Pope John Paul II.

The reason for this seeming disconnect is that the supposed ‘war between science and religion’ is largely a myth propagated by John William Draper, in his History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (1875) and Andrew Dickson White, in his A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), for reasons of their own.*

Meanwhile, we also have the story of the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the oldest Evangelical Lutheran Church seminary in the U.S., offering a course on the legal case over the Dover Area School District's attempt to inject intelligent design into its curriculum.

The seminary has been especially interested in the Dover story because the Rev. Warren Eshbach, a founder of Dover CARES and one of the most prominent critics of Dover's revoked intelligent design policy, is also an adjunct faculty member.

The seminary touts Eshbach's involvement in the Dover case as one of its most important issues of 2005.

Both Eshbach and Eric H. Crump, an associate professor of systematic theology, have also signed the Clergy Letter Project, in which more than 10,000 clergy signed a petition in support of the teaching of evolution.

Here is an excerpt from the Clergy Letter:

We the undersigned, Christian clergy from many different traditions, believe that the timeless truths of the Bible and the discoveries of modern science may comfortably coexist. We believe that the theory of evolution is a foundational scientific truth, one that has stood up to rigorous scrutiny and upon which much of human knowledge and achievement rests. To reject this truth or to treat it as "one theory among others" is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children. We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator.

None of this is to deny that practitioners of both science and religion have engaged in profound and bitter disputes. But Cutler sums it up well:

The historical relationship between science and religion has been as complex as any human relationship. There is no reason to think that this will change. The warfare thesis suits the polemical purposes of partisans in certain social and political debates. But it harms religion by portraying it as overly dogmatic and reactionary. It also harms science by portraying it as hostile or at least indifferent to the average person's spiritual needs.

Now if we can all just find a better place to be next time . . .

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* Draper’s book was a diatribe against the Roman Catholic Church’s then recent claim of infallibility of the Pope when speaking ex cathedra and its attempt to exert authority over public institutions’ instruction in science and literature. White wrote in response to criticisms of his charter for Cornell University as a nonsectarian institution, a controversial idea at the time.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 12:45 PM