Post by merkavah12 on Jul 7, 2010 1:13:44 GMT
An interesting piece by Krista Tippett:
www.huffingtonpost.com/krista-tippett/reconciling-science-and-r_b_634395.html
I especially took notice of this,
www.huffingtonpost.com/krista-tippett/reconciling-science-and-r_b_634395.html
I especially took notice of this,
As both John Polkinghorne and the Darwin biographer James Moore describe in these pages, Genesis is in fact a compelling example of how treating sacred text seriously, reading it respectfully on its own terms, is the surest, strongest antidote to our polarized religio-cultural debates. This is a text infused with purpose, but that purpose was not to narrow our pursuit of understanding the natural world. For centuries, until the medieval period and the Reformation, great Christian theologians knew this and honored it. To treat Genesis as a commentary on science is to ignore its cogency as text and teaching, just as to read a poem as prose is to miss the point. It is more complicated than that, but it is also that simple.
And just as a more three-dimensional approach to the Bible can provide new starting points for an old conversation, so can a more three-dimensional look at the history of science. Even when they struggled against bitter religious resistance to their ideas, the likes of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton believed that their discoveries would and should widen human comprehension of the nature of God. The more we could understand about the world around us in all its intricacy, their reasoning went, the better we would understand the mind of its maker.
Charles Darwin belonged to that lineage. The Origin of Species was not the first text to break from religion, as our cultural narrative has come to assume. It was the last classic scientific text to engage theology directly. James Moore lays this out forcefully. And for the religious scientists in these pages, no intellectual compromise is needed to embrace evolution as ingenious--to understand creation as an ongoing, inborn capacity of a world endowed with independence rather than as the one-act invention of a puppet-master God. James Moore also makes the compelling suggestion that in documenting the freedom of the world to define its own fruitfulness in and through chaos and struggle, Darwin liberated humanity from belief in a God who preordained every cancerous cell and shifting tectonic plate, every social and physical injustice. Even the creationists of our time have been liberated-in part by Darwin--from belief in this kind of God.
And just as a more three-dimensional approach to the Bible can provide new starting points for an old conversation, so can a more three-dimensional look at the history of science. Even when they struggled against bitter religious resistance to their ideas, the likes of Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton believed that their discoveries would and should widen human comprehension of the nature of God. The more we could understand about the world around us in all its intricacy, their reasoning went, the better we would understand the mind of its maker.
Charles Darwin belonged to that lineage. The Origin of Species was not the first text to break from religion, as our cultural narrative has come to assume. It was the last classic scientific text to engage theology directly. James Moore lays this out forcefully. And for the religious scientists in these pages, no intellectual compromise is needed to embrace evolution as ingenious--to understand creation as an ongoing, inborn capacity of a world endowed with independence rather than as the one-act invention of a puppet-master God. James Moore also makes the compelling suggestion that in documenting the freedom of the world to define its own fruitfulness in and through chaos and struggle, Darwin liberated humanity from belief in a God who preordained every cancerous cell and shifting tectonic plate, every social and physical injustice. Even the creationists of our time have been liberated-in part by Darwin--from belief in this kind of God.