Chapter 1, Enemies or Helpmates?

Currently many proponents of science and religion are doing battle. On one side are the extreme pronouncements of atheistic scientists that everything discovered about the universe can be explained without resorting to a concept of God. On the other side is the extreme insistence by Creationists that God took a literal “six” of our days to create the cosmos, resting on the seventh. This chapter describes that conflict and by presenting some of the extreme pronouncements demonstrates that the opponents can’t possibly hear each other, when it is clear to me that both areas of our knowledge have much to offer each other. There have been suggestions that science and theology should be kept completely separate. I disagree.  What is reasonable is to study a middle ground suggesting that scientific discoveries actually support religious belief.

The battle between science and religion started about 500 years ago when scientists began to explain our universe and their findings did not fit the authorized version presented by the Catholic Church. Although the Bible does not describe any such arrangement as the Earth set centrally located in the Universe, the early Catholic Church insisted it had to be so. This anthropocentric mistake comes from a presumption by theologians that if the Bible said God created us, we must be most important to the Universe, and therefore central in location with everything revolving around us. This is a prime example of mistaken theology and philosophy, springing from the self-centered thoughts of human beings, attempting to read the true intentions of God. It took a courageous beginning by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) who first described the Earth revolving around the sun near the center of the Universe, to set in motion a scientific revolution that overturned the Church’s doctrines. “Courageous” because the Church’s power could be life threatening.  Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) advanced the new science by developing laws of planetary motion and immensely irritated the Church by describing elliptical orbits, when proper theology demanded perfect circles. Simultaneously Galileo (1564-1642) developed the telescope enlarging the science of astronomy with his discoveries, as one example, the four largest moons of Jupiter.