Wednesday, September 4, 2002

No attack on Christianity is more dangerous than the infinite size and depth of the heavens." "People give ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon ... This fool wishes to reverse the entire scheme of astronomy; but sacred scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the earth to stand still, not the sun."

So wrote Jerome Wolf and Martin Luther respectively about Nicolaus Copernicus and his theory that the earth was not actually at the center of the universe. Copernicus first advanced this theory by sending out some feelers in a paper called "Commentariolus," which stated among other things: "What appears to us as motions of the sun arise not from its motion but from the motion of the earth and our sphere, with which we revolve around the sun like any other planet."

He was right to send out feelers because Luther didn't like it. Calvin quoted from Psalm XCIII: "The world also is stabilized that it cannot be moved," and asked: "Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?"

Copernicus waited until his death to have his complete works published as "Narratio prima de libris revolutionum," which turned out to not be real popular with the Inquisition either. The rest as they say is history ... or is it?

You published a Cal Thomas article on your opinion page, so I can only assume that he expresses yours. Cal uses the debaters' formula for his attack on the teaching of evolutionary theory, by making some gross assumptions and painting the opposite side into a corner it then has to defend.

Cal first assumes that all people who teach or believe in evolution are atheists. He also assumes that evolution and creation are incompatible. Later, by quoting a couple of scientists, he declares that evolution is under attack and rapidly being discounted in the scientific community.

So let me start with my own attack. There exists no such discipline or academia known as "Creation Science" nor can such a thing exist. My reasoning here is quite simple.

Belief in a higher being is what we call "Faith." Martin Luther chose this as the centerpiece of Christianity, and even the ancient Church of Rome has acquiesced and agreed that a Christian is saved by her faith. This faith entails belief in a God that is both omniscient and omnipotent.

So I pose the question: How can we, in our puny human way, reason out, observe and test this all-seeing, all-powerful God? The obvious answer is we cannot.

Science is based on observation, hypothesis and testing, none of which we could hope to do with an entity that has the power we attribute, by faith, to this God.

Now Cal's "evidence" is just a little funny. He proposes that teachers present this balanced creationist science in the class, but doesn't say just what that might be. He quotes a 23-year-old Science Digest article which alleges that this creationist scientific field is growing rapidly (you'd think it would be pretty well established by now). He quotes Johannes (his real name) Kepler, who ironically smoothed out the mathematics in Copernican theory thereby cementing it in scientific thought.

Yes, Kepler believed in God, but I can assure Cal he never heard of Darwin or his theory, having died 250 years too early. Cal even quotes the pious Werner Von Braun, also the father of Peenemunde where untold thousands of forced slaves died of overwork, deprivation and starvation. I wonder if Von Braun thought about God's take on murder.

Lastly he pictures people who espouse the science of evolution as some sort of religious anti-Christ cult seeking to impose their beliefs on the poor put-upon Christians. Again this mingling of the scientific and religious brings strong, misleading and damaging assumptions to the fore, so let's not do it.

If you have faith, you don't need a mathematician or engineer to verify it. If you believe in logical, progressive science, those processes and beliefs cannot state any conclusions about an all-powerful God.

Timothy J. Parker

Peachtree City

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