The Triumph of Christianity (33 page)

It was only because Europeans believed in God as the Intelligent Designer of a rational universe that they pursued the secrets of creation. In the words of Johannes Kepler, “The chief aim of all investigations of the external world should be to discover the rational order and harmony imposed on it by God and which he revealed to us in the language of mathematics.”
²⁹
In similar fashion, in his last will and testament, the great chemist Robert Boyle (1627–1691) wrote to the members of the Royal Society of London, wishing them continuing success in “their laudable attempts to discover the true Nature of the Works of God.”
³⁰

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect to the rise of science is that the early scientists not only searched for natural laws, confident that they existed, but
they found them
! It thus could be said that the proposition that the universe had an Intelligent Designer is the most fundamental of all scientific theories and that it has been successfully put to empirical tests again and again. For, as Albert Einstein (1879–1955) once remarked, the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible: “
a priori
one should expect a chaotic world which cannot be grasped by the mind in any way.... That is the ‘miracle’ which is constantly being reinforced as our knowledge expands.”
³¹
And that is the “miracle” that testifies to a creation guided by intention and rationality.

That Christianity was essential to the rise of science was manifest not only in the philosophical sense, but is evident in the biographies of the men who achieved it—overwhelmingly they were very religious men. Elsewhere
³²
I drew up a roster of the fifty-two major scientific stars during the era beginning with the publication of Copernicus’s work in 1543 and stopping with persons born after 1680. Of these, thirty-two (or 62 percent) were very religious men. Newton, for example, devoted far more effort to theology than to physics, predicting the date of the Second Coming as 1948.
³³
Of the remaining twenty, nineteen were quite religious and only one, Edmund Halley, could be called a skeptic. So much, then, for tales about the inherent conflict between religion and science.

Of course, the rise of science did engender some conflicts with the Catholic Church, as well as with the early Protestants. That in no way diminishes the essential role of the Christian conception of God in justifying and motivating science. It merely reflects that many Christian leaders failed to grasp the important differences between science and theology as to domain and evidence. That is, Christian theologians attempt to deduce God’s nature and intentions from scripture; scientists attempt to discover the nature of God’s creation by empirical means. In principle, the two efforts do not overlap, but in practice theologians have sometimes felt that a scientific position was an attack on faith (and some modern scientists have in fact attacked religion, albeit on spurious grounds). In early days, a major dispute took place because both Catholic and Protestant theologians were reluctant to accept that the earth was not the center of the universe, let alone not the center of solar system. Both Luther and the pope were opposed to the Copernican claim, and both attempted to defeat it, but their efforts had little impact and were never very vigorous. Unfortunately, this modest conflict has been blown into a monumental event by those determined to show that religion is the bitter enemy of science by turning Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) into a heroic martyr to blind faith. As Voltaire reported: “the great Galileo, at the age of fourscore, groaned away his days in the dungeons of the Inquisition, because he had demonstrated by irrefutable proofs the motion of the earth.”
³⁴
The Italian gadfly Giuseppe Baretti (1719–1789) added that Galileo was “put to the torture, for saying that
the earth moved
.”
³⁵

What About Galileo?

I
T IS TRUE THAT
Galileo was called before the Roman Inquisition and charged with the heretical teaching that the earth moves—around the sun or otherwise. And he was forced to recant. But he was neither imprisoned nor tortured; he was sentenced to a comfortable house arrest during which he died at age seventy-eight. More important, what got Galileo in trouble with the church were not his scientific convictions nearly as much as his arrogant duplicity. It happened this way.

Long before he became Pope Urban VIII (served 1623 to 1644), while still a cardinal, Matteo Barberini knew and liked Galileo. In 1623 when he published
Assayer,
Galileo dedicated the book to Barberini (the Barberini family crest appeared on the title page of the book), and the new pope was said to have been delighted by the many nasty insults it directed against various Jesuit scholars.
Assayer
was mainly an ill-conceived attack on Orazio Grassi, a Jesuit mathematician who had published a study that correctly identified comets as small heavenly bodies; Galileo ridiculed this claim, arguing wrongly that comets were but reflections on vapors arising from the earth.
³⁶
In any event,
Assayer
prompted Pope Urban VIII to write an adulatory poem on the glory of astronomy. So, what went wrong?

It is important to put the Galileo affair in historical context. At this time, the Reformation stood defiant in northern Europe, the Thirty Years’ War raged, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation was in full bloom. Partly in response to Protestant charges that the Catholic Church was not faithful to the Bible, the limits of acceptable theology were being narrowed. This led to increasing church interference in scholarly and scientific discussions. However, Urban VIII and other leading officials were not ready to clamp down on scientists, but proposed ways to avoid any conflicts between science and theology by separating their domains. Thus, Friar Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), the brilliant French mathematician, advised his network of leading scientific correspondents to defend their studies on grounds that God was free to place the earth anywhere he liked, and it was the duty of scientists to find out where he had put it.
³⁷
More cautious early scientists adopted the tactic of identifying scientific conclusions as hypothetical or mathematical, hence being without direct theological implications. And that was what the pope asked Galileo to do, to acknowledge in his publications that “definitive conclusions could not be reached in the natural sciences. God in his omnipotence could produce a natural phenomenon in any number of ways and it therefore was presumptuous for any philosopher to claim that he had determined a unique solution.”
³⁸
That seemed an easy evasion. And, given Galileo’s propensity to claim false credit for inventions made by others, such as the telescope, and his claim to have conducted empirical research he probably did not really perform, such as dropping weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, it would not seem to have stretched his ethical standards to have gone along with the pope. But to defy the pope in a rather offensive way was quite consistent with Galileo’s ego.

In 1632 Galileo published his awaited
Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems.
Although the ostensible purpose of the book was to present an explanation of tidal phenomena, the two systems involved were Ptolemy’s, in which the sun circles the earth, and Copernicus’s wherein the earth circles the sun. The dialogue involves three speakers, two of them philosophers and the third a layman. It is the layman, Simplicio, who presents the traditional views in support of Ptolemy—the resemblance of the name to “simpleton” was obvious to all. This allowed Galileo to exploit the traditional “straw man” technique to ridicule his opponents. Although Galileo did include the disclaimer suggested by the pope, he put it in the mouth of Simplicio thereby disowning it.

The book caused an immense stir and, understandably, the pope felt betrayed—although Galileo never seemed to have grasped that fact and continued to blame the Jesuits and university professors for his troubles. Despite that, the pope used his power to protect Galileo from any serious punishment. Unfortunately, Galileo’s defiant action stimulated a general crackdown by the Counter-Reformation church on intellectual freedom which otherwise may never have occurred. Ironically, much that Galileo presented in the book as correct science was not; his theory of the tides, for example, was nonsense, as Albert Einstein pointed out in his foreword to a 1953 translation of Galileo’s notorious book.
³⁹
Equally ironic is the fact that the judgment against Galileo was partly motivated by efforts on the part of church leaders to suppress astrologers—some theologians mistakenly equating the claim that the earth moved with doctrines that fate was ruled by the motion of heavenly bodies.

So, what does the case of Galileo reveal? It surely demonstrates that powerful groups and organizations often will abuse their power to impose their beliefs, a shortcoming that certainly is not limited to religious organizations—the Communist regime in the Soviet Union outlawed Mendelian genetics on grounds that all variations within and across species are caused by the environment. But it also shows that Galileo was not some naive scholar who fell victim to a bunch of ignorant bigots—these same “bigots” ignored dozens of other prominent scientists, many of them resident in Italy! In any event, this celebrated case does nothing to alter the fact that the rise of science was rooted in Christian theology—indeed, for all his posturing, Galileo remained deeply religious. As William Shea noted, “Had Galileo been less devout, he could have refused to go to Rome [when summoned by the Inquisition]; Venice offered him asylum.”
⁴⁰
But he did not flee to Venice and often expressed his personal faith to his daughter and friends after his trial was over.

Of course, although Christianity was essential for the development of Western science, that dependency no longer exists. Once properly launched, science has been able to stand on its own, and the conviction that the secrets of nature will yield to prolonged inquiry is now as much a secular article of faith as it originally was Christian. The rise of an independent scientific establishment has given birth to new tensions between theology and science. If the church fathers were leery of the implications of science for theology, there now exists a militant group of atheists, only some of them actually scientists, who devote a great deal of effort to attacking religion as superstitious nonsense and to claiming that science refutes the existence of God and the possibility of miracles. They are greatly aided in these efforts by some religious leaders who attack scientific findings on the basis of their theological convictions.

Inerrancy and Divine Accommodation

I
T IS WELL-KNOWN THAT
some Christians believe that the Bible is to be understood literally and that it is without error, “including the historical and scientific parts.”
⁴¹
It is much less well-known that this is a quite modern development, probably prompted mainly in response to scientific contradictions of the creation as it is presented in
Genesis
. Indeed, as Richard J. Coleman explained in 1975, “only in the last two centuries can we legitimately speak of a formal doctrine of inerrancy.”
⁴²
The commitment to literal inerrancy has created a field day for atheist attacks on the Bible. That God created the universe and everything in it during a six-day spurt of energy is ridiculed on the basis of massive evidence that the universe is billions of years old. And the story of Adam and Eve is lampooned in light of overwhelming evidence in favor of a long and complicated evolution of life on earth. And these “triumphs” of science over religion continue to mislead many, especially since “liberal” Christian clergy too often deal with the problem by admitting that, of course, the Bible is not to be taken too seriously.

Not only is all of this unnecessary; it is theologically illiterate. From early days, the great Christian theologians knew better than to commit to literal inerrancy! Rather, they assumed that scripture required interpretation and must not be taken literally since, as St. Augustine warned, “diverse things may be understood under these words.”
⁴³
An even more definitive theological objection to inerrancy is that all scripture was revealed within the confines of human comprehension
at the time
. Here we confront one of the most fundamental, yet remarkably neglected, of all Judeo-Christian premises, that of
Divine Accommodation
. This premise holds that God’s revelations are always limited to the current capacity of humans to comprehend—that in order to communicate with humans God is forced to accommodate their incomprehension by resorting to the equivalent of “baby talk.” This view is, of course, firmly rooted in the Bible. In Exodus 6:2 (in the Torah), when God tells Moses that he had made himself known to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob not as Yahweh, but as El Shaddai,
⁴⁴
presumably this was because the patriarchs were not ready to be told more.
⁴⁵
Or, when asked by his disciples why he spoke to the multitudes in parables, Jesus replied that people differed greatly in what they could comprehend: “This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.”
⁴⁶

It was in this same spirit that Irenaeus (ca. 115–202) invoked the principle of divine accommodation to human limits in order to explain God’s tolerance of human failings. A generation later Origen (ca. 185–251) wrote in
On First Principles
that “we teach about God both what is true and what the multitude can understand.” Hence, “the written revelation in inspired scripture is a veil that must be penetrated. It is an accommodation to our present capacities... [that] will one day be superseded.”
⁴⁷