"Well church, it’s your fault Flat Earthers exist.
We’ve raised a generation with such a hatred toward modern science that we’re reaping the fruits of it. People are beginning to not only question evolution and the Big Bang, but even that the earth moves and is spherical in shape, due to the complete and utter misrepresentation of the Bible and what it has to say.
Indeed, everyone is a compromiser on this subject. The flat earthers call the geocentrists compromisers, the geocentrists call the heliocentric anti-evolutionists compromisers, and the anti-evolutionists call evolutionary creationists compromisers. Every one is a compromiser.
Look, can’t we just take an honest look at Scripture and science and see the harmony rather than intentionally looking for discord? The Bible is not a book of science; if we want to learn about the shape of the earth, why not go out and actually look at it? On the other hand, the Bible won’t contradict what we find in nature. God has revealed himself in two ways: the book of His Words and the book of His Works (nature). When a man begins to doubt his senses because of a prior commitment to a certain interpretation of Scripture, I begin to wonder."
I think it no longer qualifies as a “rant” if you ask whether or not you are correct at the end of it --not if you are really asking at any rate!
Where you posted your “rant” on Facebook … is it where a lot of YEC family and friends will see it? You’ll have to let us know what sort of response rants you may have provoked.
I like the two-books model too, as long as we remember that both have layers of fallible interpretation involved whether that is acknowledged or not.
So, I guess the trick is to know when to get off the “compromise” train, then?
I’m not sure I’d go so far as to say the Church bears the lion’s share of responsibility here. Do groups of largely secular friends agree on everything scientific? For example, the personality traits of a Pitbull? Or, the amount of police violence occurring in African-American communities compared to white communities? My guess is that significant disagreement can and does exist. I would hazard to say that the sheer amount of information accessible to essentially everybody is a larger culprit than the Church. Especially given the wide range of views within the entire Christian body.
The re-make of the COSMOS series touches on the role of the church in the history of science. There was quite a bit of attention paid to Bruno … and how the Catholic Church executed him.
But there was an important transition that didn’t get much treatment in the series…
The transition involved the Catholic Church ACCEPTING science … even Evolution … because its position was that divine truth could not POSSIBLY contradict the truth of REALITY visible to every Christian.
And so the role of CHURCH against SCIENCE migrated to the fundamentalist evangelical denominations of the world…
I have come to admire the postiion of the Catholic Church.
It’s pretty telling that Bruno is the best (and only example!) that the “church kills scientists” people can come up with for their poster child. It sort of reminds me of another situation where the best somebody’s antagonists can accuse them of is mixing up their business and personal emails.
It goes without saying that the Catholic Church miscalculated. Since he was charged with multiple causes, some of them theological, and some of them more scientific, who is to say which beliefs were key?
The point is that despite the various conflicts with science that the Catholic Church may have engaged in, they ultimately arrived at the praiseworthy position that the Truth of the Bible could never ultimately be in conflict with the Truth of Nature according to the scientific witness of devoted Christians.
