Did Darwin Kill God Page #3
- Year:
- 2009
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The Reformation saw
some Christians reject the authority
of the Catholic Church in Rome,
embracing instead the Bible
as the ultimate source of authority.
Scripture, not the Pope,
was now their master.
The decision of Luther and Calvin
opened the floodgates for anyone
to read the Bible as they wished.
Hundreds of years
before the Reformation,
Saint Augustine had warned
against using the Bible
to deduce the exact way in which
the earth was formed, but in 1650,
one Irish archbishop did just that,
Archbishop James Ussher.
Ussher believed the Bible held the
information as to how the world began.
He worked like a detective...
unravelling all the clues
that were hidden in the Bible.
He noted down
every date that was mentioned,
and he calculated all the periods of
time covered in the numerous genealogies.
Taking this information
into account,
Ussher was able to determine the
exact moment God created the earth.
It was on the evening
of the 22nd of October, 4004 BC.
Ussher's calculation would have remained, at
best, an interesting, if eccentric, speculation
were it not for the fact that it made it
into every page of the King James Bible,
the most widely read edition
of the Bible for the next 300 years.
But, despite this,
traditional Christianity prevailed.
The book of Genesis
was not to be read literally.
And by the time
we get to the 19th century,
Victorian Christians were unearthing
evidence which would stop them
from making the same mistake
as Ussher.
In the first half of the 19th century,
every fashionable member of society
would have had a souvenir that directly
contradicted the biblical age of earth -
a fossil.
Advances in the understanding of
fossils and the formation of rocks
led geologists to propose that the earth was
formed over a series of millions of years.
It was unquestionably much older
than the age suggested by Ussher.
And there was another discovery which flew
in the face of a literal reading of Genesis.
It destroyed the idea that God had
made all the creatures on the same day.
Victorian scientists were
unearthing the fossils of dinosaurs,
millions of years older
than the oldest-known human remains.
And what did the Church
think of this?
as the geologists who were proposing these ideas
were Anglican clergymen. They were men of God.
For most of the 19th century,
science was almost
a branch of religion, with Anglican clerics
holding the top jobs at Oxford and Cambridge.
I've arranged to meet historian
Pietro Corsi to understand
the relationship between religion
and science in the 19th century.
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"Did Darwin Kill God" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 28 Mar. 2024. <https://www.scripts.com/script/did_darwin_kill_god_6893>.
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