Did Darwin Kill God Page #3

Year:
2009
139 Views


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

to question Papal authority

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?

It could hardly oppose it,

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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Conor Cunningham

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Submitted on August 05, 2018

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