Religion, Not Science, Gives Us Our Moorings

There's a joke in the movie "Airplane II" in which a man attempts to explain the history of the world in a few sputtering sentences: "Well, let's see: First the earth cooled. And then the dinosaurs came, but they got too big and fat, so they all died, and they turned into oil. And then the Arabs came and they bought Mercedes Benzes. And Prince Charles started wearing all of Lady Di's clothes."

At the risk of reducing history to similarly broad strokes, and of seeming overly ponderous, I would like to shed a reflective light on Christianity's last thousand years. Of course, a person could go mad trying to sift through such strata, but I'd like to bring up a few choice signposts that point out the push and pull of religion and science.

On October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his "95 Theses" to the door of the All Saints Church in Wittenberg, Germany. Among other things, Luther's bold declaration railed against the church's practice of selling indulgences--of absolving sins in exchange for material goods. The pathway to authentic religious discovery, Luther insisted, came from within; the redemptive power of God could not be bought or curried with favor. Luther also elevated faith above reason, the spiritual world above the material one. His ideas were so pervasive that they gave rise to the Reformation.

In 1610, Galileo gazed through his telescope and saw Jupiter. From this simple sighting, he turned the Western world on its axis. Galileo mathematically reasoned that Jupiter, and by implication the earth, revolved around the sun. The major implication was that man was no longer the center of God's universe. The Catholic church chaffed at this discovery, ultimately forcing Galileo to recant it. But the damage was done. From this simple observation came the idea that our place in God's universe was not so well ordered. Quite the contrary, we were awash in an arbitrary tide of celestial events, and we were not the center of them.

This was a crushing blow to man's ego and perhaps the embryo of what we now refer to as the human condition. No longer the center of God's universe, man could be seen as frightfully alone in this cringing world, his hand further removed from God's touch, with science filling the space in between.

Continued on page 2: »