Official Christian Stances on the Conflict
In this lecture, professor Evans talked about Chirianity’s official stance towards knowledge that is produced by religion and science. He further breaks it down to Catholicism and Protestantism. While Catholicism takes a somewhat official stance towards knowledge, Protestantism does not. For instance, every Pope since the 1930s has come out to affirm the validity of science alongside religion. The Catholic church holds to its doctrine of two truths; that scientific and religious knowledge must coexist together as they have both come to us from the same source. However, these official stances are flexible in the sense that they are based mainly on the prevailing opinions within these groups, and opinions always change and expand over time. In fact, Pope John II went even further to clarify that “Science can purify religion from error and superstition: religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes.” I think it’s interesting how far the church has come from the days of the inquisition when those who believed anything outside of their narrow interpretation of the bible were persecuted, tortured, and often executed.
On the other hand, the professor said something that I thought was extremely interesting, “Catholicism believes in all sorts of fact claims that do not make sense with contemporary science, such as the idea that Jesus rose from the dead. The best way to put this is that Catholicism is not in conflict with any fact claim that any scientist actually cares about. The resurrection does not matter to contemporary science.” I never thought about it from this angle before. As I’ve mentioned previously, though I am not a Christian, many if not most of my extended family members are. Therefore, I have been to church and I have been exposed to many Christian discussions/debates and sermons. The resurrection of Christ is one of the key tenets of the Christian faith and I remember when I was younger asking my aunt and grandmother how they knew for certain that Jesus rose from the dead. My grandmother was pretty scandalized that I was even questioning it but my aunt explained that it was her faith that gave her certainty. This was too much for me to grapple with when I was eight, and to be honest, it’s still something I question to this day and have no answer for (which is one reason these lectures interest me so much).
But to continue… the other religious group that this lecture focuses on are the conservative Protestants. Roughly 25% of the American population fit into this category — evangelicals, and fundamentalists. In the UK, this group of conservative Protestants is called Conservative Evangelical. The link between all of these groups lies in their belief that the bible represents the truth about the natural world. For instance, in their interpretation of the bible, God created man distinct from animals so they cannot give credence to the Darwinian evolution theory which claims that man is the evolutionary product of primates. As their faith in the bible is absolute, in their mind, science must therefore be unquestionably wrong. The more liberal-minded of this group don’t outright refute science. Instead, they take the more open view that God created the world, the animals, and Adam and Eve. Unlike their more literal-minded members, they think that the creation time frame of seven days is too narrow an interpretation. Thus, by looking beyond the desire to neatly fit in God’s creation time frame within our own concept of a 24 hour day and time, this allows for the possibility of science, evolution, and God to exist without all the conflict. My own family inclines towards this more open and less literal interpretation of the bible. I guess this is why they don’t have any problems taking both the bible and science as fact.
Another group the professor discussed are liberal Protestants or mainline Protestant. In Britain, many Anglicans would fall under this category. This group accepts each scientific discovery and theory as they emerge and then proceeds to modify their theology to make the two disciplines merge seamlessly together. The liberal Protestant would look at Genesis and say that the mystery and scope of God’s creation is the key point that we should be taking from the bible rather than an actual literal belief that deals with how much actual time it took for creation to happen.
In the 19th century, there was more division among the religious factions over biblical knowledge. As theology and the idea of observation and reason (introduced during the Age of Enlightenment) developed, more interpretations were offered as debates opened over the particular meaning of the original Hebrew and whether the bible should even be subject to individual reasoning through observation. These differences fractured the factions even more as no resolution was reached and the debate over the bible began to bleed into the debate over science. The result is that Evangelicalism emerged for those who shied away from the hard-line fundamentalists but were also dissatisfied with the insipid liberals. Evangelicalism suited the American cultural temperature at the time and thus, emerged as the strongest and most powerful religious group till now.
