Ancient Christian Witness

This is from the podcast Speaking the Truth in Love by Fr. Thomas Hopko

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I view cessationism as a form of semi-atheism.

Cessationism is only one of the factors I saw which led to my speculation of modern Atheism coming from particular former christian circles. When you add Cessationism with alot of other things, then you can see how Atheism and Secularism in general eventually took over the western World.

There were alot of events one can look at in time that helped secularism become what it is now. Charlse Darwin's book.......the origin of species.....being one of them, for most christians around that time were Old Earth Creationists......including a number of Darwin's college professors. After he wrote that book however, you start to see a number of Old Earthers switch to Theistic Evolution, while a number of others lost faith and became either Agnostic or Atheistic evolutionists. YEC (Young Earth Creationism) came back in style around the 1960's, but that book(the origin of species) single handedly took science out of the hands of christianity, and completely into the hands of secularism. And so that played a role as well. And so you gotta add alot of things together in order to see a fuller picture.


http://ancientchristiandefender.blog...m-atheism.html/

Quote:

Quote:
"It is my view that Calvinism is semi-Atheistic. Especially those Calvinists that are "cessationists" I point the finger at the Zwingli/Calvin Compromise. This compromise was one of the reasons why the Reformed churches couldn't unite with the Lutherian churches.

But I would like to quote a few things by Alister Mcgrath to show that I wasn't wrong for speculating this.

He says on page 146 of his book "Christianity's Dangerous idea: The protestant revolution-a history from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first":



"The appeal of the Enlightenment proved greatest within Reformed circles. For
reasons that remain unclear, rationalism gained acceptance in many former
Calvinist strongholds. Geneva and Edinburgh, both international centers of
Calvinism in the late sixteenth century, were noted as epicenters of European
rationalism in the late eighteenth century. John Calvin and John Knox gave way
to the very different worldviews of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and David Hume. In
marked contrast, the Enlightenment had relatively little impact on Catholicism
during the eighteenth century-unless, of course, the French Revolution (1789) is
seen as a political extension of the ideas of the Enlightenment."[1]


He mentions this again in passing on page 264 while talking about the stripping away of the "sacred/supernatural" and the rise of the Atheistic worldview.


"While most Elizabethan Protestants were happy to follow continental ideas,
especially those of Calvin, their Jacobean and Stuart successors were
increasingly aware of the need to symbolize the interaction and interpenetration
of the sacred and secular. The poetry of George Herbert can be seen as an
attempt to retain an essentially Calvinist theology of the Sacraments, while
developing its capacity to promote the Church's social and confessional
cohesion.
This decoupling of the sacred from the quotidian, characteristic
of certain types of Protestantism, accelerated the rise of a functionally
atheist worldview in which God was not regarded as an active participant in the
worldview. It is no accident that two sixteenth-century European centers of
Calvinism-Geneva and Edinburgh-had became centers of rationalism two centuries
later.
We shall have more to say about this development later. Yet it is
important to appreciate here that one of the most fundamental characteristics of
Pentecostalism is its insistence that the divine may be encountered in the
secular realm. Its astonishing success points to the reversal of this trend and
the emergence of a new form of Protestantism characterized by its expectation of
the direct experience of the spiritual within the mundane."[2]



I am not the onlyone who sees a connection between Calvinistic theology with the rise of Atheism. I'm not gonna say all, but alot of Calvinists tend to disregard any idea of "mystery" for the sake of "rationalism"/logic.


Also, if you watch the 3rd video in the BBC documentary of how modern Secularism owes alot to the Reformed sector of the
Protestant Reformation, then you will see what I mean by "semi-Atheism"


A Reformation of the Mind

The eventual slide into Atheism / modern secularism is also seen by this book, which charts some of the changes of ideas and methods which also caused a change of worldviews.







The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science
Quote:

Quote:
"Product Description
Peter Harrison examines the role played by the Bible in the emergence of natural science. He shows how both the contents of the Bible, and more particularly the way it was interpreted, had a profound influence on conceptions of nature from the third century to the seventeenth. The rise of modern science is linked to the Protestant approach to texts, an approach that spelled an end to the symbolic world of the Middle Ages, and established the conditions for the scientific investigation and technological exploitation of nature.


Also, when you look at the early apologetical wars about Scripture, error, ......etc. between Protestants....mainly puritans, and Roman Catholics, then you will also see that a century or so later, Liberal Protestants started to use those very same tools, and methods more consistantly in attacking the very scriptures that Protestants believe in.


Quote:

Quote:
"quote:
"Appeals to supposed errors in the Deuterocanon have long peppered
Protestant/Catholic debates and rendered it far uglier than it needed to be.
Because Catholicism was its target, few had the forethought that this method
could be used against the rest of the Bible. As the Reformed scholar Edward
Ruess noted, "The scoffs thrown at the little fish of Tobit will sooner or later
destroy Jonah's wale." Ruess prophetic words have been fulfilled by the
extravagances of higher criticism.

After the Apocrypha controversy had subsided,
critics turned the same weapons against, not only the Prophet Jonah, but also
the rest of the books of scripture. So-called errors and absurdities were
quickly expunged from the Protocanon of the Old and New Testaments. Whole books
were labeled (or libeled) as myths and fables. The end result is a bible where
only a few passages are worthy of belief. Anti-Catholic polemicists have
unwittingly opened a Pandora's box.

They assumed no one would ever dare charge
the rest of scripture with errors and absurdities, yet the advent of liberal
Protestantism brought with it individuals who did not fear to apply these
arguments consistently throughout the entire Bible. The problem at the heart of
this line of argumentation is one of pride. It places the intellect in the role
of judge, allowing it to sit in judgement upon the word of God. [3]"

In the Roman Catholic world, we can see Atheism forming in France from Jansenism. Jansenism is very similar to Calvinism in many ways, and I find it interesting that some would link French Atheism with the Jansenism, as seen here:

Quote:
"Since Jansenism had originated in Holland, the Dutch bishops were suspect; and in 1670 the Archbishop of Utrecht was summoned to Rome to answer a charge of heresy. He returned uncondemned, but in 1710 the Archbishop-elect, selected by the chapter, was excommunicated for protesting against a summons to appear before a papal nuncio at Colegne, After thirteen years' limbo, however, on 15 October 1724, Cornelius Steenoven was consecrated Archbishop, in due line of Apostolic succession, by Bishop of Babylon, whereupon the Old Catholic Church of Holland began a separate existence, one which still continues. Jansenism also survived in France but almost entirely politically and without its original idealism. The conflict it caused has, in fact, led to the accusation that it formented the spirit of atheism and the anti-religion which helped to bring about the French Revolution.. [4]"

Both Calvinism and Jansenism are hardcore forms or mutations of ruff deterministic Augustinianism, and so Augustinianism can be seen as playing a role in all this.





A good movie to watch for Atheists, as well as for semi-Atheists would be the The Exorcism Of Emily Rose
This movie was based on a true story, and it shows the conflict between modern secularism/Atheism/Naturalism and the spiritual world.












ICXC NIKA

[1], and [2] by Dr. Alister Mcgrath, from the book Christianity's Dangerous idea: The Protestant Revolution-A history from the sixteenth Century to the twenty-First. Published by HarperOne. Copyright 2007


[3] pages 322 & 323 from the book "Why Catholic Bibles are Bigger: The
untold story of the lost books of the Protestant Bible" by Gary G. Michuta
(copyright) 2007

[4] pages 171-174 from the book "A history of Heresy" by David Christie-Murray

Dr. Mcgrath is a Theistic Evolutionist, and so he will be looking at this whole thing from that bias.


Alister McGrath - Dawkins' God part 1




Alister McGrath - Dawkins God part 2




Alister McGrath - Dawkins' God part 3



Alister McGrath - Dawkins' God part 4



Alister McGrath - Dawkins' God part 5




Alister McGrath - Dawkins' God part 6









ICXC NIKA

This was originally an answer to this question:

Quote:

""Why are there people so
sure that evolution is the truth
and that there is no way God is
real?""

Alot of christians found a harmony between Evolution & Christianity. And these christians would be labeled......even if they reject the label.......they would be labeled "Theistic Evolutionists". And most of them work in the mainstream scientific world. They existed shortly after the time Charles Darwin wrote his book "origin of species". Before that time, most people in the English speaking scientific world were Old Earth Creationists. Now the word" Creationism" is tricky for the term will differ depending on the one using the term. In the western English speaking world, most people will use the word "Creationist" when talking about Young Earth Creationism. This school of thought was brought back to life in the 1960's. I could be wrong about the exact date.........because I am shooting from the hip and not looking at anythinig. But the modern movement has it's beginning in the 20nth century.

But everyone who believes in God must believe in what is called in Latin "creatio ex-nihilo". This is probably spelled wrong, but I'm sure everyone knows what I am trying to get at.

Now as far as I know, and I could be wrong about this, but as far as I know, science first began in Egypt, and we know they were far from being Atheistic.....they were polytheists.

The greek philosopher Aristotle went to Egypt to study or gather info...and so in the western World, most of what we know about early science is normally pointed at him.

Eastern Christianity read and copied his works, and with the rise of Islam Eastern Christians not only translated his works from greek to Arabic, but they also were employed for their skills, so the glory educational days of Islam, really had alot to do with the help of Eastern Christians, and when the numbers of Eastern Christians dwindled and when radical Islam started to become more and more popular, that is when you see science in Islamic culture either stagnate or dwindle.

The Crusades brought the Arabic translations of Aristotle to the Western World, and they were later translated into latin. And this is where you get the rise of Scholasticism from as well as the later Renaissance movement.

And this is the context of where "MODERN SCIENCE" comes from. It has it's beginnings in Roman Catholic Scholasticism, only to be later developped by the Protestant Reformation, and to be honest.......it kepted on developing or changing. The Origins of species book by Charles Darwin is what took the Natural Sciences out of the exclusive hands of western christians......and it became "secular". During that time, the rise of Agnosticism and Atheism happened. Now Atheism didn't start at that time, but in the English speaking world......that is when it started to rise. The many Christians who were once Old Earth Creationists......either continued to stay Old Earthers or they became Theistic Evolutionists, Agnostic Evolutionists, or Atheistic Evolutionists.

And now the Atheists and Agnostics are the ones controling the "Natural Sciences". So they are the "PRESENT" gate keepers. For when the Old Christian Gate Keepers died......the new Atheistic and Agnostic ones took their places, and they pressure christians to either become Atheists or Agnostics......that's if you want to get far in Science......well that's what some of them may say.








ICXC NIKA

To me it doesn't matter if you are a young Earther, Old Earther, or Theistic Evolutionist, but check out this young Earther by the name of Dr. A.E. Wilder-Smith

He had 3 """REAL""" doctorates.....not the fake stuff.....but real ones. His critics get on him for an error that he made back in 1965, but most of what he had to say is very interesting.........even if you don't agree with it all.......you still gotta give dude his props. I don't agree with everything, but I can't deny his awsome wisdom.


(The Great Debate: Evolution or Creation Wilder-Smith)



(Time and Creation - A. E. Wilder-Smith)



(Is Man a Machine? A. E. Wilder-Smith)



(Design and Logos in Biology: A. E. Wilder Smith)



(Dr. A.E. Wilder-Smith - Logos in Language)



(The Origin of Life by Dr. A.E. Wilder-Smith)



(Dr. A.E. Wilder-Smith - Enviroment or Genetics)



(Dr. Wilder-Smith - How did the Cell Acquire the Keys?)















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Intelligent Design - Unlocking The Mysteries Of Life:




RC Sproul interviews Ben Stein about the movie Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed:










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Amazon.com




I don't have the book, but it was suggested by someone, who said it looks like a good read.

As seen from the Amazon website:
"Product Description
What are we missing when we look at the creation narratives of Genesis only or primarily through the lens of modern discourse about science and religion? Theologian Peter Bouteneff explores how first-millennium Christian understandings of creation can inform current thought in the church and in the public square. He reaches back into the earliest centuries of our era to recover the meanings that early Jewish and Christian writers found in the stories of the six days of creation and of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Readers will find that their forbears in the faith saw in the Genesis narrative not simply an account of origins but also a rich teaching about the righteousness of God, the saving mission of Christ, and the destiny of the human creature.

From the Back Cover
"This wonderfully researched and elegantly written book provides the reader with a compelling and trustworthy portrait of how the fathers of the church read the story of Adam and Eve. As Bouteneff tells that story we see that the tale of the fall is always contextualized within a narrative that celebrates the restoration and redemption of the human race."--Gary Anderson, professor of Old Testament, University of Notre Dame"










JNORM888

I could be wrong, but it seems as if the Roman Catholics of the 12th century believed in a type of theosis through the accumulation of the rational knowledge of not only the world, but also the universe. It was believed that Adam had perfect knowledge before the fall, and that he lost this knowledge when he fell, so the western christians of the 12th century used the methods of Aristotle to try and regain this lost knowledge.


Dr. Peter Harrison did research in this area and wrote about it in the book "The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science". From what I've seen in reviews of his latest book (The fall of man and the foundations of natural science), he goes into more detail about this very thing.


pages 56-63

" Restoring Lost Likeness
If the book of nature was to be read in conjunction with the book of scripture, it was no less true that the message to be read in the natural world was similar to that of scripture: nature provided knowledge of God and pointed the way to redemption. The possibility that God might be known through resemblances in the world was already familiar to readers of those Platonic works which had proved so influential in the twelfth century, all of which had stressed the world is 'a sensible God who is the image of the intellectual'. The Asclepius repeats this claim describing the cosmos as a god 'who can be seen and sensed'. Macrobius further extended this conception, describing the visible world as the temple of God:

In order to show, therefore, that the omnipotence of the Supreme God can hardly ever be comprehended and never witnessed, he called whatever is visible to our eyes the temple of that God who is apprehended only in the mind, so that those who worship these visible objects as temples might still owe the greatest reverence to the creator, and that whoever is inducted into the privileges of this temple might know that he had to live in the manner of a priest.

Twelfth-century writers, while wary of the dangers of pantheism, were nonetheless influenced by these conceptions and came to stress in an unprecedented way the possibility of knowing God through his creatures. Hildegard, for example, tirelessly reminds us that "all Creatures are an indication of God'm that 'it is God whom human beings know in every creature'. Whereever we look', agreed Grosseteste, 'we find vestiges of God.' Hugh of St Victor was similarly enthusiastic about the prospects of a knowledge of God through nature: 'Every nature tells of God; every nature teaches man; every nature reproduces its essential form, and nothing in the universe is infecund.' Indeed, of all twelfth century writers, it was Hugh of St Victor who most explicitly set out the connexion between the reading of the two books.

Hugh's Didascalicon, subtitled De studio legendi (On the study of reading), was the twelfth-century equivalent of Augustine's De doctrina christiana. In it Hugh advances familiar platonic arguments: on the hand, because the 'invisible things can only be known by visible things', the whole of theology must use visible demonstrations; on the other, 'worldly theology' never progressed beyond the appearances of things, was always marred by the 'stain of error'. Hugh like th emajority of his contemporaries, also endorsed Augustine's view that in scripture 'things as well as words are significant.' Hugh's advance on Augustine comes in his conclusion that the study of things must therefore be a significant source of truth in its own right. As it turned out, the curriculum of the medieval schools neatly matched this distinction between the study of words and things. The seven liberal arts were taught in order to serve the higher purpose of uncovering the meanings of the sacred page: the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic) illuminated the meanings of words; the Quadrivium (music arithmetic) illuminated the meanings of words; the quadrivium (music, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy), the meanings of the things referred to by the words. Again, the reading of things was controlled by the now standard categories of tropology and allegory: tropological interpretation of things led to virtue, allegorical interpretation led to truth. These two things, virtue and truth, together restore the divine likeness: 'Now there are two things which restore the divine likeness in man, namely the contemplation of truth and the practice of virtue. The contemplation of truth required knowledge of things of nature, and such knowledge was a means of restoring a lost divine likeness.

To know the world, then, is not merely to come to know God, it is to become like God: it is to restore a likeness which had been lost. For all

that medieval thinkers were to place the human race at the very centre of the cosmos, theirs was no shallow optimism. They had read beyond the Idyll in Eden, to the fall, the first homicide, and the sordid events which brought on the Deluge. Whatever pride might have resulted from the vision of man as a microcosm of the universe was thus muted by the sober recognition that human beings were fallen creatures, and that when the crown of creation had fallen, his dominions had fallen with him. The lustre of the luminous signs of divinity which had once shone out in the material world had now dimmed through that first human misadventure. Those similitudes which originally had borne witness to the spiritual origins of the world were now reduced to what Augustine and Grosseteste both termed 'vestiges'. Other created things, too, lost their obvious similitude to those divine ideas which had been their original cause. Indeed, for those scholled in Platonism, the whole physical world become a place of dissimilitude, for as Plato had observed in The Statesman, when creatures fall away from God, they enter 'the bottomless abyss of unlikeness.' Plotinus had reiterated this sentiment, describing the fate of human souls in these terms: 'We are become dwellers in the Place of unlikeness, where, fallen from all our resemblance to the Divine, we lie in gloom and mud.' The idea that this fallen creation was a 'region of dissimilitude' (regio dissimilitudis) was adopted by Augustine, and like so many of his borrowing from Platonism, found its way into medieval thought. Yet, whereas for Augustine the solution to our plight lay in retreat from this earthly region of dissimilitude to the more ordered world of the mind, for those progressive spirits of the twelfth century the lost similitudes of things could be re-established, and while such an ordering process was ultimately still to take place in the mind, it began with a knowledge of the sensory world. Empirical nature was to be re-ordered by human knowledge, and thus the human conception of the world, of 'nature', would be that same conception which had been in the mind of the Creature. In this manner the human mind would come to resemble the mind of God, and the human likeness to god would by this means be restored. Human beings stood in need of redemtion, and indeed it is this necessity for their redemption, and the redemtion of the world, which transformed what in antiquity had tended to be a static and sterile representation of their relation to the whole, into a dynamic programme. god's creatures must now embark upon that path which would result in the restoration of their former dignity, and that path would lead them to the attempt to know and master the world. Through knowledge, the world would be reunited, and both knower and known would be redeemed. The human being was to 'comprehend' all things in both ontological and epistemological senses of that term. The turn to the natural world was in some sense a turning away from the sacred page, but it could hardly be said that it was motivated by a secular, or non-theological impulse. On the contrary, acquisition of knowledge of the order of nature was enjoined on mankind as an integral part of the procees of human redemption, and more specifically, a reversal of the losses incurred at the Fall.

In the emerging recognition that the goal of human life was to do with knowledge, mastery, and the regaining of an original perfection through a re-ordering of similitudes, there are again unmistakeable achoes of Plato. In the closing lines of the Timaeus Plato informs us that 'learning the harmonies and revolutions of the universe, should coorect the courses of the head which were corrupted at our birth, and should assimilate the thinking being to the thought, renewing his original nature, so that having assimilated them he may attain to that best life which the gods have set before mankind. Knowledge of the harmonies and revolutions of the universe thus leads to a renewal of corrupted human nature. The study of nature was thus an essentially religious process. Similar themes can be found in the Hermetic writings: 'learning the arts and sciences and using them preserves this earthly part of the world: god willed it that the world would be incomplete with out them. In a more elaborate passage, the reader is given this counsel:

so you must think of god in this way, as having everything- the cosmos, himself, the universe-like thoughts within himself. Thus, unless you make yourself equal to god, you cannot understand god; like is understood by like.....Having conceived that nothing is impossible to you, consider yourself immortal and able to understand everything, all art, all learning, the temper of every living thing. Go higher than every height and lower than every depth. Collect in yourself all the sensations of what has been made, of fire and water, dry and wet; be everywhere at once, on land, in the sea, in heaven; be not yet born, be in the womb be young, old, beyond, death. And when you have understood all these at once- times, places, things, qualities, quantities- then you can understand god."

The human, according to the Corpus Hermeticum, was created 'to be a working witness to nature; to increase the number of mankind; to master all things under heaven.......and to discover every means of working skillfully with things that are good.'

This analysis of the human quest as one involving the restoration of original similitudes is also a New Testament theme. St Paul wrote: 'And because for us there is no veil over the face, we all reflect as in a mirror the splendour of the Lord; thus we are transformed into his likeness.' Elsewhere, he was to speak of Christian life as being a new life 'which is being constantly renewed in the image of its creator.' The means by which twelfth-century thinkers proposed this redemption take place however, was quite new, for the process of the restoration of the divine similitude in man required the similitude between all created things to be restored. This was to take place in two ways: first, by knowing the world, the human mind would restore things to the original unity which they had possessed in the divine mind; second, by controlling and subduing the world, human beings would be restored to their original position as God's viceroy on earth, and harmony would be restored between those creatures wiyhin their constituency. The restoration of a lost likeness to God was thus to take place through imitation of God: of his power, by manipulating the world; of his wisdom, through coming to know it. To know God, to become like God, to possess the knowledge of the mind of God, these were synonyms for the process of redemption Redemption, in short, did not entail as it did for Augstine, flight from the material world, a mastery of the beasts within, and a mystical absorption into divine reality, but rather an ordered knowledge of the natural world.

The restoration to the human race of a lost similitude to God was thus seen to entail a restoration to creatures of their proper relations-relations which were to be established on the basis f similitude. For the human mind again to be godlike, it had to recapture the vision of nature as an ordered whole. The accumulation and systematisation of information about animals and plants was an ordering process, a rehearsal of that event in Eden, in which God had paraded the animals before Adam to be named- and event which, according to a long exegetical tradition, indicated Adam's perfect knowledge of the natural world. This knowledge had been lost as a result of the human Fall. Adam had penetrated to the true nature of things with the eye of reason, we now are forced back on sensory experience and grope our way' towards knowledge. 'Through [the organs of sense' man looks upon all the creatures', wrote Hildegard, 'knowing them for what they are, distinguishing them, separating them, naming them'. The Fall was the occasion of the loss of direct access to the spiritual world. Thereafter, knowledge of spiritual truths was mediated through material things.


This idea-that the accumulation of knowledge about the natural world would in some measure restore to man what had been lost at the Fall-is most commonly associated with Francis Bacon and the rise of modern science. Yet we can now see that the roots of this conception go back much further. The imperative element which is incipient in the vision of man as the unique locus of two images becomes increasingly obvious in the writings of the twelfth century. Hugh of St Victor(1142) suggested that the chief depredation suffered by man at the fall was a loss of knowledge. Through study, the soul could rediscover the divine truths hidden behind the veil of the creatures and theliteral words of scripture, and thereby be restored to its original dignity. In his Didascalicon Hugh explains that the aim of study is 'to restore within us the divine likeness' so that 'we are conformed to the divine nature' and 'there begins to shine forth again in us what has forever existed in the divine Idea or Pattern, coming and going in us but standing changeless in God. Similar ideas are expressed by Honorius Augustodunensis. Despite the Fall and the ills it brought upon the world, terrestrial reality remains the sphere of 'multiple divine appearances'. Man is the celestrial animal in which God willed all things to be re-united. the idea that man was a microcosm was thus at once indicative and imperative. All creatures were in a sense to be found in man, and in another were to be re-united in him through an orderly knowledge of the natural world. In the thirteenth century, Bonaventure again stressed the role which the visible world was to play in the redemption of mankind. Man, 'in the state of innocence possessed knowledge of created things and was raised through their representation to God and to his praise, reverence, and love'. While this knowledge was lost through the misadventures of our first parents, its re-acquisition is still 'the goal of the creatures and the way in which they are led back to God'. To accumulate systematic knowledge of created things was both to restore the knowledge of Adam, and approach knowledge of the very mind of God. Through the acquisition of knowledge came also the redemption of the world, for knowledge was assimilated or incorporated in the human mind, and thus redeemed along with it." The twelfth and thirteenth centuries witness the end of the religious indifference, or even hostility, to the physical world which had been fostered by the Fathers. Augustine had believed that a person might be deficient in knowledge of nature, and yet have a robust faith. There is no shame in being 'ignorant of the position and nature of a physical creature', he wrote, provided that one 'does not believe something unworthy of you, Lord'. Now the pendulum was beginning to swing back, and an ordered knowledge of this world could not be so easily divorced from the knowledge of the other. Adelard of Barth observed that 'if anyone born or educated in the residence of this world neglects learning the plan underlying its marvellous beauty, upon attaining the age of discretion he is unworthy and, were it possible, deserves to be cast our of it.' William of Conches likewise expressed contempt for those who would perpetuate the Augustinian indifference to science: 'Ignorant themselves of the forces of nature and wanting to have company in their ignorance, they don't want people to look into anything; they want us to believe like peasants and not ask the reason behind things.' With those who habitually invoked the direct activity of God in physical explanations he was equally impatient: 'You poor fools, God can make a cow out of a tree, but has he ever done so? Therefore show some reason why a thing is so. or cease to hold that it is so.' This period thus witnessess the beginnings of the transformation of the study of nature into a thoroughly theological enterprise. Thereafter, in the schools natural philosophy was increasingly intergrated into the Christian scholarly endeavour. In the renaissance of the twelfth century we see a religiously-motivated indifference to the natural world transformed into a religiously-motivated quest for knowledge. Alongside the words inscribed by God upon the human heart and on the sacred page of scripture, stands the book of nature. The search for truth reguired the diligent study of both books." [1]


Later, the rise of Protestantism and their rejection of multiple interpretations of the text of scripture would soon cause for the rejection of the symbolism of nature. So just as scripture would only have "one" meaning, "nature" too would only have "one" interpretation, and that would be "philosophical naturalism". Some centuries after the protestant reformation, this "hermenutic" would backfire, and would cause not only the rise of protestant liberalism and the rejection of the supernatural in scripture, but also the secularization and independance of the natural sciences from western christianity.

As seen from the preface of the book:

"In this book Dr Harrison examines the role played by the Bible in the emergence of natural science. He shows how both the contents of the Bible, and more particularly the way it was interpreted, had a profound influence on conceptions of nature from the third century to the seventeenth. The rise of the modern science is linked to the Protestant approach to texts, an approach which spelt an end to the symbolic world of the middle ages and established the conditions for the scientific investigation and technological exploitation of nature." [2]







JNORM888

[1] pages 56-63, [2] preface, from the book “The Bible Protestantism and the rise of natural science” by Dr. Peter Harrison

As seen from ANSA.it:
"(ANSA) - Vatican City,February 10 - The Vatican is preparing to re-evaluate 19th century British naturalist Charles Darwin 200 years after his birth and 150 years since the publication of his landmark work, On the Origin of Species.

As opposed to the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church never condemned Darwin's work and next month will examine his theory of evolution in depth from the point of view of Christian faith.

This will be done at a March 3-7 conference sponsored by the Pontifical Council for Culture to be attended by a host of international scholars and theologians.

''Now more than ever it is necessary to scientifically discuss the various scientific aspects of the theory of evolution, a theory which has been at the center of the history of science for Catholic and non-Catholic scholars,'' said Father March Leclerc, a professor of philosophy at the Gregorian University here who has organised the five-day debate.

The conference was illustrated in Rome on Tuesday by Father Leclerc who said it will begin with discussions on scientific aspects of Darwin's theories and then review its philosophic ramifications.

The seminar will wind up with a theological debate on ''evolution from the point of view of Christian faith, starting with a correct explanation of the Bible's teachings on creation and then moving on to how the Church has viewed Darwin's theory,'' he added."

To read the rest, please visit the website.



I am very interested in what the outcome will be. I think being critical of Darwinism is a good thing. The hard thing is developing an alternative........which will be time consuming. I already made up my mind years ago, that there is something wrong with people being dogmatic about something that will change 5, 10, 20, 30 years in the future. And I blame this on predictions that are based on too many assumptions. Just like Scripture is able to be interpreted in many different ways......I have learned that the evidence of nature can be interpretated in more than one way......and depending on ones narrative, will determine the angle/spin of how one will interpret the evidence. The less assumptions we base our predictions/theories on, the more stable the prediction will be.



But looking at Darwins faith. He was raised as a Unitarian, but his father had him Baptized in the Anglican Church. His wife(also his first cousin) was a strong Unitarian believer. Later in Life, around 1828(give or take some years) he became an Anglican(I think, I am speculating here), after reading "Exposition of the Creed" by Pearson, he went to Christ Church College where he tried to be a Church of England clergyman. This is where he read a work called "Natural Theology: Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity" by William Paley. It was Charles Darwin's natural science professor John Stevens Henslow that tought Charles everything he knew about natural science. It also should be known that John Stevens Henslow was a Creationist! Another major influence on Darwin around this time was Adam Sedgwick (another Creationist). He was the professor of Geology around 1818. Henslow and Sedwick were both Catastrophists. I am also a Catastrophist. What changed Charles Darwin's mind back in the direction of his grandfather, was a book he was told not to read or not to accept certain views. And that book was Charles Lyell's "Principles of Geology".

Around 1831, Darwin traveled on his famous trip. And he read that book during that time. It was the millions and millions of years evolutionary view in geology that gave him the idea that one species could change into another over millions and millions of years. So what his grandfather didn't explain, his grandson was now able to put into words.

Charles Darwin attended church services until the death of his child Annie, that's when he swore off religion. After the death of his child, he stopped attending church. (around 1851 A.D.) It also should be known that both of Charles grandfathers were members of the "Lunatics Society", There were alot of Athiests in this group as well.

Erasmus Darwin(one of Charles Darwin's grandfathers) believed in the theory of evolution before Charles did. To be honest, this theory can be found in ancient pagan greek philosophy. But his granfather wrote a book called "Zoonomia" (the Laws of Organic life). Two years ago, I found this work online. I don't know if it is still up or not. but it was published around 1794.

His grandfather also wrote a Poem in 1802 called "The Temple of Nature". So Charles Darwin didn't create these views from a vacumme. These ideas were already tought by his grandfather. Now his grandfather never explained how one species turned into another, but decades later, his grandson did in his well known book.

But despite all this. I was told that Charlse Darwin himself advocated a form of Theistic evolution in a preface of one of the editions of "The Origin of species". If this is true, then he wasn't as Atheistic as some may think. He could of became an Agnostic after the death of his daughter, but I don't think he was an Atheist.


But it would be interesting to see the conclusion of what they have to say. I know that Darwin's former professors "Henslow & Sedgwick" were upset with him at first, when he came out with his book. but alot of christian intellectuals either lost their faith or slowly adapted to a theistic evolutionary modal. Now that the belief has been around for over 150 years. Creationism has enough history to look at in order to form a counter system. So there is no reason for christians or any religious group to loose faith over something like this.






JNORM888

Most of the details in dates & events from my responce came from the book "evolution's fatal fruit" by Tom Derosa.










JNORM888

This is held once every 5 years. 5 years ago they had it at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pa.

This year it will be in Pittsburgh Pa at a Hotel in Greentree on August 3 to the 7.

http://www.csfpittsburgh.org/



JNORM888