General Synod heard that public figures such as Professor Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, use a “crude caricature” of faith to depict worshippers as “blind” and “irrational”.
Clergy and lay members of the Church said it was perfectly possible to believe in God and Darwin’s theory of evolution, and said that religion can explain areas of existence that science cannot.
[blockquote]However he conceded that Christians have sometimes been “caught†on the wrong side of arguments by doubting scientific evidence, such as the fact that the Earth is not flat and revolves around the Sun.[/blockquote]
I wish Christians would show some respect to their forbears and stop saying stuff like this. After all, the first claim is wildly inaccurate and the second is highly problematic – to the point of being flat wrong. I suppose it would be an overstatement to say that no one ever thought that the earth is flat – you could probably dig around and find traces of evidence for that particular canard if you search the right fever swamps – sort of like Boswell did with regard to homosexuality. The reality is that pretty stinkin’ near nobody ever thought the earth was flat. Such a notion has never been seriously defended by any responsible churchman in or out of the Middle Ages.
As to geocentricity, there was nothing inherently superior in Copernicus’ model (Heraclides of Pontus had said the same thing in the 4th century BC, as had John Buriden in the 13th C, noting that Aristotle had been pretty much wrong on every question of physics – indeed as David Bently Hart is at pains to point out, it was medieval Christianity’s turn against Aristotle – greatly aided by the Bishop of Paris’ purpertedly close-minded condemnation of Aristotelianism in 1277 – that made possible the scientific revolution) to Ptolemy’s. Both assumed circular orbits and so required a complex set of equants, eccentrics, and epicycles-on-a-deferent in order to predict planetary motion. Kepler recognized the extent to which the model is simplified if circular motion is replaced by elliptical. But Kepler kept the earth at the center with everything else revolving around the sun but the sun going around the earth. Galileo both respected and belittled Kepler, particularly when the latter argued that the gravitational pull of the moon caused the tides (like most pre-Newtonian natural philosophers, Galileo held that long-distance interactions were impossible). Galileo went to his deathbed arguing that the tides proved his theory that the earth moved – clever but wrong (and he had reason to know it was wrong). In fact, proof of the earth ‘s motion was unavailable until some optics experiments provided it in 1735, almost a century after Galileo’s death. The Church is not recorded as fighting against this discovery – at least when it was actually made and not just claimed based on highly questionable (and in the case of Galileo’s tide argument, dead wrong) argumentation.
I dunno, maybe Christians have to say stuff like this in order to sound humble. But I somehow think that there’s something wrong with bearing false witness, particularly about people who aren’t around to defend themselves. I can’t help but think it would be better to correct the record and let people know that atheist propaganda is as wrong about the Church’s supposed scientific errors as it is about everything else.
I would commend “Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies,’ by David Bentley Taylor. It is a demanding read by this Orthodox scholar, but is well worth the effort for it uses the whole breadth of Christian learning and history to challenge the learning as well as the world view behind it of those who have used the so-called scientific mindset to belittle the Christian faith.
I would second the recommendation of David Bentley Hart’s book, along with David Lindberg’s [i]The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450[/i] and [i]When Science and Christianity Meet[/i], and Ronald Numbers’ [i]Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion[/i]. All are accessible, well-written and devastating to the pro-atheist cause. Hart tends to wear his opinions on his sleeve, which makes for highly entertaining reading (I certainly share his outrage at the anti-Christian cause), but the agnostic Lindberg and Numbers are in some ways more compelling as they so obviously have no axe to grind.