On Sat, 23 Sep 1995 00:57:41 -0400 Glenn wrote:
GM>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...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..
GM>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)
GM>That book really depressed and discouraged me. I don't see
>Christians dealing with evolution any differently.
No doubt it would be possible to select quotes from various "pre-
Renaissance Christians" to prove that the Church once believed wrong
things about the world and therefore it is still believing wrong
things now. This is part of the naturalist propagandist
stock-in-trade, which Glenn appears to accept uncritically.
Two can play this parallels game. Most of these wrong things that
"pre-Renaissance Christians" believed were based on secular
philosophical thought (eg. Aristotle), rather than the Bible. I can
imagine that if Darwinian evolution is eventually disproved, then
future scholars will draw a parallel between the medieval Church
scholars accepting Aristotelian philosophy uncritically and 20th
century scholars accepting Darwinian evolutionary philosophy
uncritically! :-)
Just three things:
1. Acts 1:8 actually says there is someone at "the uttermost part of
the earth". If he got this simple thing wrong, one wonders about the
accuracy of the rest of White's scholarship?
2. If the pre-Renaissance Church was so wrong in its view of the
world, why didn't it enshrine its allegedly wrong views in any of the
great Christian creeds?
3. If the medieval Church believed that there was no-one at the
antipodies, where is the evidence of a great crisis in the Church when
it found out that there was?
God bless.
Stephen
-----------------------------------------------------------------
| Stephen Jones | ,--_|\ | sjones@iinet.net.au |
| 3 Hawker Ave | / Oz \ | sjones@odyssey.apana.org.au |
| Warwick 6024 |->*_,--\_/ | http://www.iinet.net.au/~sjones/ |
| Perth, Australia | v | phone +61 9 448 7439 |
----------------------------------------------------------------