From Christianity Today online.
A thoughtful piece that challenges the hegemony of Enlightenment thinking and how it has created a false dichotomy in many people’s mind between theology and science. As Bishop Tom Wright has written elsewhere, science has failed to solve the problem of evil that is inherently part of its proponents’ arguments. The myth of inevitable progress fueled by scientific advancement is just that: a myth. Don’t believe me? Think 9/11. In fact, it was technology that allowed those murderers to kill as many as they did.
Don’t misunderstand. I do not wish to go back to pre-scientific revolution days and wholeheartedly support learning, education, and scientific advancement. Few things are more important than education if you want to enjoy a decent standard of living. But like Bishop Wright, I do challenge the twin notions that science has all the answers and that those of us who don’t see a dichotomy between science and theology are to be dismissed as backward thinking and narrow-minded. Science may have led to the development of airplanes but it cannot address the problem of evil men who want to fly airplanes into skyscrapers to kill people. Check it out and see what you think.
There is a particular analogy often invoked in current discussions about the relationship between Christian faith and science. Ours, we are told, is a “Galilean” moment: a critical time in history when new findings in the natural sciences threaten to topple fundamental Christian beliefs, just as Galileo’s proposed heliocentrism rocked the ecclesiastical establishment of his day. This parallel is usually invoked in the context of genetic, evolutionary, and archaeological evidence about human origins that challenges traditional Christian understandings.
Historical analogies like this are often particularly loaded because our age is characterized by chronological snobbery and a self-congratulatory sense of our maturity and progress. Since we now tend to look at the church’s response to Galileo as misguided, reactionary, and backward, this “Galilean” framing of contemporary discussions does two things—before any “evidence” is ever put on the table.
First, it casts scientists—and those Christian scholars who champion such science—as heroes and martyrs willing to embrace progress and enlightenment. Second, and as a result, this framing of the debate depicts those concerned with preserving Christian orthodoxy as backward, timid, and fundamentalist. With heads in flat-earth sand, any who voice hesitation or skepticism about the “assured/obvious” implications of evolutionary evidence are cast in the villainous role of Galileo’s putative persecutor, Cardinal Bellarmine.