abu << To all of you out there who accept Evolutionism, let me ask you, what was “science” saying about our oirigins 200 years ago? what about 150 years ago? 50 years ago? The consensus today? >>
Let’s see, about 2000 years ago, everyone thought the
earth was flat: the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, and Israelites (which includes all the biblical authors):
“If asked about his physical surroundings or about the physical world at large, the typical Israelite would have given a reply very irritating to the modern mind. It is irritating to say the least to hear that the earth is a flat disk, the sky an inverted hard bowl, and that the two form a vast tent-like structure. Of course, other inhabitants of the ancient Near-East would have given similar answers…To be sure, much the same would have been done by a typical ancient Egyptian and Babylonian…The hardness of the sky, but especially the immobility of the earth, had to appear all the more a divinely ordained physical fact as, according to the Bible, a mere man, Joshua, could be authorized by God to stop the sun and the moon in their tracks and, apparently, for a whole day…Obviously, to modern eyes dazzled by space rockets cruising along ‘world lines’ set by Einstein’s four-dimensional cosmology nothing could seem more jarring than the Bible’s physical world, which is little more than a glorified tent. To that tent the Bible assigns the sky as its cover and the earth as its floor, though hardly in a consistent way. In Genesis 1 the sky is a firmament, that is, a hard metal bowl, whereas in Psalm 104 and Isaiah 45:24 it is more like a canvas that can be stretched out…Herein lies one of the non-trivially unscientific aspects of the world as described in the Bible…Well before the advent of modern science, and indeed of heliocentrism, the contrast between that biblical world-tent and the world of Aristotelian-Ptolemaic geocentrism had to appear enormous.” (Fr. Stanley Jaki,
Bible and Science, pages 19-25)
About 500 BC to Ptolemy (< 100 AD), the Greeks and others figured out the earth is a sphere, but that it didn’t move, and they thought it was the center of a small universe which included the stars and visible planets rotating around us. This stood for 1500 years.
Then in the 1500’s AD, Copernicus, and later Galileo, figured out, with the aid of telescopes and math (don’t ask me for details
) that the earth probably did move and revolved around the sun. I do have
On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres by Nicolaus Copernicus, edited with commentary by Stephen Hawking (Running Press, 2002) but am too dumb to understand it.
Back then people still thought the world was about 6000 years old however.
In the 1700s and 1800s, science (geology) figured out the earth and all living things on it (including us) were changing (this is simplistic but…) and in 1859 Charles Darwin, after studying this for 30 years, published his idea (see
What Is Darwinism?) about how “evolution” worked: by natural selection. It was accepted soon after because it made sense and the evidence since his time has only become stronger. In the 1920s and 1930s was the combo of biology and genetics which is the modern
neo-Darwinian synthesis.
Then with the rise of modern geology and paleontology, and later discovery (early 1900s) of radioactivity, science figured out many dead and extinct things lived many millions of years in the past, and the earth is in fact billions of years old. That was refined over a period of 50 years to an earth that is 4.5 billion years old. C.C. Patterson of the California Institute of Technology in 1953 is considered the first scientist to calculate the true age of the earth at c. 4.5 billion years (see Dalrymple’s
The Age of the Earth).
So in conclusion: science does change, but that is its strength, not a weakness. All the current data and observations science has collected don’t disappear. All of this must be explained by newer or better or improved hypotheses and theories when the evidence requires it.
That’s my summary off the top. Rossum, SteveAnderson, Ghosty, HECD (Alec), zian, Orogeny (Tim) and others can give more detailed answers.
Phil P
What I am “fishing for” I mentioned in Post 19. I guess, given the intensity of the arguments on the forum regarding creation, I was wondering if someone’s commitment to young-earth creation would override their acceptance of CC teaching. But as someone pointed out earlier, the CC is wise not to make this a binding matter, anyway.
