Did the fundamentalist church learn nothing from the Galileo affair? 

Four hundred years ago, almost to the day, factions within the Catholic church hierachy took on Galileo in a debate which ultimately led to Galileo being accused and found guilty of heresy - and subsequently put under house arrest.

On one side of the debate, Galileo and a number of fellow scientists, many themselves religious, were arguing that the growing weight of scientific evidence was pointing to a heliocentric view of the universe (where the Earth rotates around the Sun) rather than the prevailing geocentric view which saw the Earth at the centre with the Sun , stars and planets orbiting around it.

On the other side were members of the church hierachy - entrenched in a view informed by tradition, earlier scientific thinking and their fundamental literalist interpretation of scripture (eg 1 Chronicles 16:30, Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, Psalm 104:5, Ecclesiastes 1:5, Joshua 10:13) - and refusing to accept this new scientific evidence.

We all know how the debate ended; the scientific evidence continued to mount until it was unassailable and eventually the church was compelled to adopt the new perspective on the cosmos. Even so it was not until 1758 - some 150 years later - that the church lifted the ban on books teaching heliocentricity. More than 200 years then passed before the Catholic church vindicated Galileo (in 1992) and formally apologised (in 2000).

Is it time for all religions to accept evolution as fact?

Fast forward 400 years and almost a carbon copy of the Galileo affair is taking place again, this time between scientists, many of whom are still religious, and the Christian right who are holding on to a doctrine that scripture is to be taken absolutely literally despite mounting evidence to the contrary. This time the debate is about Darwinism, evolution and the process of natural selection. And it's becoming very cantankerous...

In current society the debate rages across the globe, across all religions and across all forms of media. As I write this, the latest contribution to the discussion has just aired on the BBC programme The Big Questions but it was similar to a debate transmitted last year and will probably be followed by another on the same subject in a year's time.

No doubt this debate will also take decades to unwind but the end result seems inevitable. Barring a revolutionary discovery which turns the whole of modern science on its head, the mounting cosmological, paleontological, geological and microbiological evidence will almost certainly lead to a common acceptance of evolutionary theory. There will still be pockets of resistance (there are still those who hold to a geocentric view of the universe) but the rest of us will move on.

For those wishing to engage with this issue, I would suggest reading Creation or Evolution: Do we have to choose? by Dr Denis Alexander, a Christian biochemist and Director of the Faraday Institute which provides many other resources to help people grapple with the full range of science and religious debate. 

Assessing the damage to the church

While history records that the church ultimately gave in to Galileo's evidence the truth of the matter is possibly more complex as this article from the Catholic Education Resource Center suggests. The point is that all these nuances are lost to history and the popular version of the events has been passed on as a straight forward tussle between a scientist with an enquiring mind and a narrow-minded, ignorant and stubborn church - and the church ends up defeated!

This is a tragedy. If certain factions of the church insist on promoting what are clearly naive falsehoods about areas of science of which they are ignorant, however well intentioned, then those onlookers, who ultimately see the science prevail and the church humiliated, will inevitably be turned off engaging with the church. After all, if the church can't get something as simple as the creation story right then why should anyone accept their teachings on anything else?

The real battle is between bible interpretation and evidence: if the evidence clearly points to another explanation - and it becomes unassailable - then we must re-examine our interpretation of the relevant bible passages and think again. Are they meant to be taken literally or are they - like so many other passages - divinely inspired poetry?

And the tragedy is compounded because the whole debate detracts from what the church is there for. Taking on scientists with a fool's errand is stopping the church from being heard in vastly more important areas where it genuinely has a valuable contribution to make.

Let's learn to stop taking on blind faith the suspect teachings of our forbears and learn to examine both the bible and the science for ourselves. Such an exercise can only make our understanding greater and our faith stronger.