GOD, AND THE GREAT GOD CHANCE – Part III
In all honesty, in many ways I believe these atheists are correct. We also need to appeal to reason and science to deal with these questions. Why? Because in many ways, religion and its sacred texts and sacred spokesmen have been abject failures in the face of new knowledge uncovered by science and reason.
The stories of Galileo and Copernicus best illustrate the issues. Many church authorities would not look through Galileo’s telescope. He was tried, repudiated, forced to recant and placed under house arrest. Only in recent times has the Roman Catholic Church exonerated him of his crime of insisting the earth revolved around the sun.
Copernicus dared not publish his book, The Revolution of the Spheres, during his lifetime. A follower of Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, claimed space was boundless, that our solar system may be only one of similar systems, and that there may be other inhabited worlds with beings equal or superior to ourselves.
And how did the Roman Catholic religious authorities respond to those revolutionary claims? Bruno was tried before the Inquisition for blasphemy (because he had denied Biblical doctrine and Church teaching), was condemned and burned at the stake in 1600.
Now it may well be that as Protestants we might think our forefathers handled the absolutely revolutionary Copernican Revolution in a better way. Well, are there any Lutherans among us? Martin Luther criticized Copernicus on numerous occasions. Luther said Copernicus “wants to prove that the Earth goes round and not the heavens, the sun and the moon; just as if someone sitting in a moving wagon or ship were to suppose that he were at rest, and that the earth and trees were moving past him.”
Luther goes on to lament some people will say anything to get attention these days. He then adds, “But as Holy Writ (i.e. the Bible) declares, it was the Sun, not the Earth, which Joshua commanded to stand still.” (Joshua 10: 12 -13) There’s that Biblical literalism again that the atheists rightly disparage in the name of science and reason.
By the way, those of us from the Reformed branch of Protestant Reformation, namely Presbyterians, Dutch Reformed, German Reformed, French Huguenots, Congregationalists and Baptists, may think we came off better with our theological ancestor, John Calvin. However, Calvin, in strictly Trinitarian Geneva, authorized the burning at the stake of Servetus who dared to proclaim himself a Unitarian.
Nonetheless, here is Calvin’s reaction to Copernicus. He said, quoting Psalm 93 to be emphatic in his damnation, “The world is also established that it cannot be moved.” Calvin added indignantly from his literalist, Biblical perspective, “Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?” (who inerrantly inspired the Bible) Of course no one, except increasing numbers of scientists, and then clergymen and women, (some of them Calvinists). And today, of course, the popular new atheists who scoff at the so-called authority of the Bible, especially on matters of science and questions of origin.
In our pursuit of answers to the question where did we come from, we do seem to receive inadequate and sometimes ignorant, arrogant answers from the sacred texts and their interpreters.
So when an infallible church was dethroned as in the Protestant Reformation and when the Protestant infallible, inerrant Bible was dethroned as in the Enlightenment, in the findings of science and in the “higher criticism” of the Bible, where do we turn for authoritative answers to the age-old questions, especially the question or origins. Where did it all come from”
That’s easy, say the contemporary atheists Hitchens, Dawkins and Harris. We turn to science and reason, especially our understanding of science and reason.
(to be continued)
