The Church and most of its adherents used to express the exact same sentiments about planetary matters. Some people who have faith are afraid of science. In the past, that attitude has been counter-productive, to put it mildly.
It is reasonable to disagree on these matters. It is asinine to be certain in these matters, especially for a person of faith.
I suppose you are referring to Copernicus and Galileo whose chief opponents were in the scientific community of their day. The Church’s major mistake was to support the “consensus†of that community in apparent support of poetic scripture, not historic scripture. Galileo did not have proof and that was the objection to him teaching his theory as fact.
The historical distortions of the Church’s role in science are nothing more than secular myths to discredit and suppress any interpretation of evidence that may suggest the existence of God. People of faith are not afraid of science but have a healthy skepticism when beliefs pose as science. It was the Church that kept science alive during the Dark Ages and was certainly not counterproductive. If the Church erred, it was generally in support of the scientific consensus of the day, not very different than we see today with believers in evolution and global warming for example.
While I agree with you that it is reasonable to disagree, that does not extend to an agreement that I must believe subjective interpretations of observations to comply with a secular worldview.
>>>The Church and most of its adherents used to express the exact same sentiments about planetary matters.
Historically, that’s incorrect. The people who most blocked the progress of the modern scientific method (hypothesis + experimentation + revision of hypothesis) were the Aristotelians — the hardcore geocentrists — who dominated academia, not the Church. The Church simply sided with what the academics assured them must be the truth about planetary matters.
The phrase “planetary matters” is pretty vague. The fact is, there are still “planetary matters” that cannot be explained without reference to concepts such as “design”, “goal”, and “purpose.”
For example, that stars produce carbon — the essential chemical building block for life — by a double nuclear resonance process whose probability of occurring is close to zero, proved to an atheist astrophysicist (Sir Fred Hoyle, who discovered the process) that stars are intelligently designed objects. Hoyle eventually asserted that the entire structure of the universe appears to have been “deliberately monkeyed with” by a “super-intellect.”
Isaac Newton believed that almost everything about “planetary matters” had to be explained by reference to a designing intelligence, including universal gravitation.
Regarding biochemistry: Current research from the ENCODE project has shown that almost all DNA is functional (even though most of it has nothing to directly with coding for amino acids and protein synthesis), and statements from ENCODE researchers claim that they expect to find 100% of DNA to be functional, meaning the evolutionary hypothesis of “junk DNA” has to be thrown out. Additionally, a company called Agilent has successfully used the nucleotide sequences on DNA to represent, in the form of code, things other than amino acids — such as pixels to recreate JPEG images, or text to recreate the sonnets of Shakespeare. “DNA data storage” proves beyond any doubt that the molecule itself is simply the molecular equivalent of a hard-drive + operating system.
Hard-drives and operating systems, whether microscopic or macroscopic, do not appear in nature from incremental processes involving random changes over long periods of time. What happens over long periods of time is that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics always increases the entropy of a system: vinyl records become MORE scratched, not less; sturdy brick walls turn to rubble (piles of rubble never turn into sturdy brick walls by themselves); and chemicals always reach “equilibrium”, which is the opposite of what’s needed for life to occur.
>>>Some people who have faith are afraid of science. In the past, that attitude has been counter-productive, to put it mildly.
Ever since Karl Popper, we’ve been aware that science itself is founded on metaphysical assumptions about the universe that are held on the basis of pure faith; the assumptions themselves can never be scientifically proven.
Darwinian evolution is simply a creation myth in which matter, energy, randomness, long periods of time, and a mysterious “ratcheting-up” process called Natural Selection, miraculously defy the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics and the laws of probability. That’s why evolution has never been observed and never will be.
But, of course, it’s generally pointless to argue with someone else’s faith.
FYI:
Wernher von Braun, father of U.S. space and rocket program which put men on the moon, feels it is futile to look for God through a telescope
Von Braun said, "The evidences of a Creator are so overwhelming to me. I just can’t envision this whole universe’s coming into being without something like a divine will. I cannot envision the creation without the concept of a Creator."
Von Braun cited--the orbit the earth makes around the sun, and the orbit the moon makes around the earth, as examples of physical laws which are a part of creation.
"Prediction of solar eclipses, for instance, were made several hundred years ago with tremendous precision, and reproducibility of celestial motions has always inspired man greatly and made him marvel at the precision of the laws of nature."
"These laws are so precise that we have no difficulty building a spaceship to fly to the moon and can time it with the precision of a fraction of a second. The laws are there. These laws must have been laid down by Somebody." (Wernher von Braun, Baptist Press)
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Is von Braun asinine here?