The Day of The Dead in 1613, by Scott Shirley

In 1613, on All Soul's Day (a Christian holiday sometimes known as The Day of The Dead that immediately follows All Hallows Day, from which we get our Halloween) a Dominican friar and professor of ecclesiastical history in Florence, Italy, named Father Lorini delivered a sermon to his congregation meant to emphasize the widely held orthodox beliefs about the cosmology of the period.


Lorini's sermon was directed at newly released letters from Galileo Galilei who championed Copernicus' view that the Sun stood still while the earth and other planets revolved around it. To Lorini, and the rest of orthodox Christianity, Copernican doctrine violated Scripture, which clearly places Earth, and not the Sun at the center of the universe. What, if Copernicus were right, would be the sense of Joshua 10:13 which says, "So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven" or Isaiah 40:22 that speaks of "the heavens stretched out as a curtain" above "the circle of the earth"?  Pressured later to apologize for his attack, Lorini later said that he "said a couple of words to the effect that the doctrine of Ipernicus, or whatever his name is, was against Holy Scripture."

While I will not take the time to lay out the passages the Church used to support their conclusion, suffice it to say that a compelling case can be made... unless, of course, you are convinced that the planets revolve around the sun.  In that case, the verses in the Bible that seem to suggest a moving Sun and a motionless Earth will be interpreted, from our modern viewpoint, like non-literal poetic language.  But isn't it likely the case that the ONLY reason we interpret these passages poetically or metaphorically is because science has proven they cannot be literal?  Would we have interpreted these same passages poetically had we been around in the 1600s when nobody else did?  Doubtful.

The Church and its adherents are always slow in accepting a scientific theory if it contradicts a biblical position.  But we should bear in mind that any biblical position is necessarily the result of the same human reasoning and intellect that produces scientific theories.  Our God-given intellect is our only means of understanding scripture and/or the world around us.  We would do well to keep that in mind whenever we dogmatically assume that our conclusions interpreted from scripture should always and forever trump our conclusions interpreted from nature.  We can be right or wrong about our theologies as easy as we can our science.   

The war between Christianity and science has raged for so long and been so bitter that even 100 years ago, Andrew White, a former president of Cornell University, was able to write a huge two-volume history of the conflict entitled The Warfare Of Science With Theology.  Exhaustively covering hundreds of historical cases, he was able to demonstrate that the Church generally repeats the same three-step process whenever confronted by a threatening scientific discovery:

• First, the Church tries to crush the "heretical" view, often through censorship and persecution of the scientist.
• But as the evidence supporting the scientific viewpoint inevitably grows, the Church struggles to find a compromise position that incorporates both viewpoints.
• Eventually, the scientific victory is complete, and the Church is left to indulge in apologetics, a field of study that explains away and defends the Church's actions. In this stage, it is common for apologists to claim that there is not, and never was, any conflict between the Church and science.

Even today the battle between science and religion rages on when a truce should have long since been appended.  Creationism and Evolution are constantly at the forefront of today's battle but there are other issues being discussed and more waiting around the corner.  So what is a Christian to do?  Are we supposed to take a scriptural position on any scientific matter we deem a province of scripture?  If so, what do we do when our biblical "position" turns out to be the scriptural equivalent of a flat earth or moving Sun? Are we okay with repeating the 3-pronged pattern outlined above by White or is there another way?

Galileo remarked to his accusers a prophetic statement we would do well to remember today...

"Take note, theologians, that in your desire to make matters of faith out of arguments relating to the fixity of sun and earth you run the risk of eventually having to condemn as heretics those who would declare the earth to stand still and the sun to change position--eventually, I say, at such a time as it might be physically or logically proved that the earth moves and the sun stands still."

Is it possible to be a faithful Christian without believing scientific theories are always taking aim at scriptural faithfulness?  Can't a person embrace the findings of science and hold in tension his or her beliefs about the "science" of the Bible without being deemed a heretic?  Maybe we have made the mistake of making a Halloween disguise for our holy scriptures.  If so, it is high time we remove the biology-textbook-costume we so often wrap around our Bibles.