Galileo redivivus?
I posted yesterday on the bizarre silencing of Richard Colling for actually trying to teach science in a science class. It’s apparently not biblical. Over at Northstate Science Christopher O’Brien has the text of an email he’s received from Dr Colling (you need to scroll down a bit for it).
This is the key quote:
I truly feel that I can empathize with Galileo of 1633 when the Catholic church placed restrictions on him. I suppose it was inevitable that it would someday come to this: The battle fought against the scientifically naive religious authority and won by Galileo (albeit it took 400 years for vindication) was in the physical sciences. (The earth is NOT the center of the universe.) In contrast, regarding the emancipation of evolution (biological sciences) from the self-appointed religious authorities has not yet occurred in the United States. Perhaps it is time.
I believe that it is a matter of when, not if, the evolutionary paradigm WILL be integrated into the evangelical Christian theology. If not, the Christian faith will be relegated to cultural obsolescence. With the genetic data derived from the human genome project and other sources, the evolutionary connectedness of life on earth can no longer be denied. Therefore to build the foundation of the Christian faith on opposition to evolution is not only silly, it is suicide for the long-term viability and credibility of the faith.
September 14th, 2007 at 5:08 pm
The difference is that Galileo was a true scientific pioneer, whereas Dr Colling seems only to be teaching the science which every scientist has accepted for the last century or so. But the principle is the same.