Science Versus Religion

Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Western civilization held to a strong belief in the existence of one Supreme God, and the fabric of life was woven of this faith. With the advent of the Age of Reason, however, the credibility of Christianity was severely tested in the crucible of scientific scrutiny. Although many Christians saw in the discovery of scientific laws new revelations of God's glory, probing scientific criticism of the explanations of the creation given in the Bible undermined the traditional authority of Christian doctrine.

The literal Biblical description of man's origin was given its severest test in 1859, when Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, a treatise which was designed to prove the gradual evolution of man from lower forms of life. Until Darwin's time, Church doctrine was expressed by such authorities as Archbishop Ussher, who specified that the world was created at "9:00 a.m., October 23, 4004 B.C." This date was calculated from the Biblical record by tracing history back to Adam and Eve and then to the cosmic creation. But Church spokesmen found it difficult to refute Darwin's all-encompassing explanations. After some initial resistance, most advocates of the Biblical version of evolution realized the tide of the times and began to praise Darwin for showing how intelligently God had arranged the evolution of species from lower life forms up to the human form. Darwin himself, however, avoided mention of God in his writings. Privately he admitted, "I look upon all human feeling as traceable to some germ in the animal."

By the late 19th century, fundamentalists could no longer hold the scientists at bay with their literal interpretations of the Bible, and Church authorities tried to adjust Christian theology to scientific change. An increasingly materialistic community of scientists saw that the time was ripe to attack man's faith in God and establish science as the new Deity with themselves as its priests. For example, in 1893 Ernst Mach said, "The theological conception of things gave way to a more rigid conception; and this was accompanied with a considerable gain in enlightenment…The physical philosophy of theology is a fruitless achievement, a reversion to a lower state of scientific culture."

Today, the ideas of Darwin play an integral role in much scientific research. Modern geneticists and biochemists, for example, have expanded Darwinism by producing a theory of existence in which God has become extraneous. By promising life from the laboratory and immortality within the fleshly body, they have convinced the public that the origin of human life is a molecular accident and that man himself is nothing more than a complex combination of chemicals.

But if we examine Darwin's methods, we will find his conclusions to be less "scientific" than the certainty with which he states them would suggest. In theorizing that all life forms have developed from one remote ancestor, Darwin decided that some unknown force must have combined with the time factor to cause the evolution of the different species we see today. He thought that the final stage of this process was the development of man from the monkey. In the writings of Thomas Malthus (An Essay on Population) Darwin found the mechanism that seemingly gave evolution its conclusive rationale. Malthus said that animals and man reproduce in geometric progression, whereas the supply of food in the world increases only arithmetically. He argued that if even one species of life reproduced without any check, it would soon overrun the world. (Fish and insects lay many thousands of eggs.) Malthus described a constant struggle for existence in which the population of living organisms is trimmed, thus keeping an equilibrium in nature. Darwin suggested that the struggle for existence would favor certain varieties of life, and that the fittest of those would survive, fitness being measured in terms of the capability of an organism to gather food, defend itself, and reproduce. He called this the process of "natural selection," which supposedly was the mechanism nature provided to guide the changing species along the path of evolution. Later, the genetic theories of Gregor Mendel and others provided explanations for the occurrence of mutations.

In his diary, Darwin admits "a constant tendency to fill up the wide gaps of knowledge by inaccurate and superficial hypotheses." This suggests that Darwin's theory, however well it may explain his collected data, rests merely on circumstantial evidence. Neither Darwin nor anyone since has directly observed a transition from one species to another. No one has ever seen a parent from one species give birth to an offspring initiating a new species. The best Darwin could do was claim that such an event must have happened in the past. He felt this was the only way to explain his observations.