If you want to read what I found to be a very depressing work on how
Christianity has miss to boat on a lot of scientific issues, read Andrew
White's _A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology_. It is a 1895
book, reprinted in 1955. It is available over Internet (sans references).
He goes into issues which I never heard of and in my view, this guy really
doesn't view the Bible very highly. But his book is well documented..
Apparently the pre-Renaissance Christians believed that no body lived at the
antipodes (the opposite side of the earth) of the earth. It seems that
Acts?? said that the Gospel had gone into the entire world. Since they knew
that no one had gone to the antipodes of the earth the conclusion was that
no one lived there. Magellan's voyage disproved that doctrine as well as
disproving the Ptolemaic system. White goes into the views Christians once
held of lightning, comets, vaccinations, Newtonian Mechanics (Spanish
Universities did not teach Newtonian Mechanics until the middle of the last
century. God moved the planets directly and didn't need Newton). Extinction
was once considered not to be possible because a perfect God would not create
something that was so imperfect as to be unable to survive. This was one of
the big arguments when geology and paleontology was forming. Some people did
not believe that fossils were the bones of formerly living (now extinct
species).
That book really depressed and discouraged me. I don't see Christians
dealing with evolution any differently.
glenn