There’s a series of popular myths out there that science has slowly, piece by piece, overturned Christian beliefs about science, the earth, and the universe. Two of the most common myths are:
1.) “Christians thought the earth was at the center of everything, so that the structure of the universe pointed to the significance of humanity. This Christian belief was proven false by the scientific discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo.”
2.) “Christians thought the biological uniqueness of the human form was a sign of its significance as being created ‘in the image of God,’ but most scientists now believe that Darwinian evolution has disproved any such biological significance in being human.”
The trouble with this narrative is that it just isn’t true:
1.) The central position of earth in the universe was never a tenet of Christian doctrine.
- You won’t find it anywhere in the Bible—nothing more than poetic descriptions of the sun and moon circling the earth, which was not a scientific claim, but an observable phenomenon of the way we perceive day and night.
- While most ancient and medieval people did believe that the sun, moon, and stars revolved around the earth, our planet was not seen as being especially significant because of that fact. Rather, the earth was seen as a kind of unglamorous base level of reality, and it was the heavens that were seen as perfect and as containing the ultimate meaning and destiny of all creation.
- So while Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo (all Christians, by the way) did reset the cosmological assumptions of their age, there was no principle of Christian doctrine that was ever affected by not having the earth at the center of the universe.
- Rather, the discovery that the universe is actually unthinkably vast compared to the earth is what you would expect to find, given what the Bible really says on the topic, and Christian theologians were predicting a universe that was infinite in scope before any of those astronomers came around (Nicholas of Cusa, 15th century).
2.) There are a lot of open questions about the validity of a purely naturalistic form of Darwinism, but to start with, the very premise of Argument #2 above is flawed: whether or not one were to accept evolution, it’s simply not the case that Christianity ever hinged the significance of human beings to their biological form.
- To be made ‘in the image of God’ (and God, remember, is spirit, not a biological entity) does not simply refer to our body, but probably rather to the spiritual characteristics he has bestowed on us—rationality, morality, creativity, etc.
- Even the earliest Christians often noted how similar we were in bodily form to the rest of animal creation. Basil of Caesarea (4th century) liked to point out this biological kinship, underscoring the point that according to Genesis 1, humans are created by God as part of the day of land-animal creation.
- The Bible clearly points to our significance being our spiritual likeness to God, made in his image, endowed with “spiritual life” (zoe) and not just biological life (bios), and because we are the objects of his love—but not to any matters of biological form.
In fact, classical Christian doctrines have actually made several startling predictions about the universe that have been proven true by scientific measurement just within the past century.
1.) The universe had a beginning, and that beginning was a moment of “creation ex nihilo”
2.) Time itself came into being at the moment of creation
3.) The universe contains a fundamental openness to “free will”
4.) Every level of reality will display order, beauty, and complex design
Each of these used to be viewed with incredulous skepticism by most scientists, from the ancient Greeks up to the 20th century, but the overwhelming majority of scientists now accept them all.
- Most scientists who were skeptical of Christian doctrine thought it was a ridiculous idea to say that the universe had a beginning. It seemed much more natural to assume that it had always been there, in one form of another. But with the growing acceptance of the “big bang” theory, scientists became convinced that the Christian doctrine actually had the right sort of idea all along. (It’s worth pointing out that many Christian thinkers do not accept major portions of “big bang” cosmology, such as the long time frame postulated since its occurrence, but even so, there’s a certain irony in the fact that it destroyed scientists’ previous assumptions by suggesting that there was a moment when creation suddenly burst into existence, almost as if by the will of a Maker.) Cosmologists also now largely agree that the universe’s beginning came out of a “singularity” of some kind—a point occupying no space, but of infinite density, such that it becomes essentially a “creation out of nothing.”
- Scientists also now tend to believe the mind-bending realization that time did not exist before the universe’s beginning. Rather, following Einstein’s theories, space and time are bound up together in a single framework, and both sprang into existence together. Saint Augustine postulated this idea, taken from the Bible’s teaching about God’s eternal nature as being outside of time, all the way back in the 4th century.
- Most scientists used to think that nature was essentially deterministic—that is, that it was governed completely by irrevocable laws that predicted with exactitude where every particle in the universe would be and how they would interact. Thus, there could be no “free will.” However, after the discovery of quantum mechanics, scientists now concede that indeterminacy is built into the fabric of the universe, to the point where now some even refer to the smallest particles as appearing to have “free will.”
- After Darwin’s theory came out, scientific researchers expected to find that complex order was an emergent property, developing out of simpler and simpler levels of order the further down you went, until, at the base level, you could prove that it emerged out of the chaos of pure random chance. But what they’ve actually discovered in the past century and a half turns out to be the opposite: the further down you go, you find more order built into the system, at just as high a level of complexity (this is true of genetics, molecular biology, particle physics, quantum physics, and every other discipline studying small-scale, underlying scientific realities).
Scientific theories are judged based on their predictive abilities. Given these four radically counterintuitive predictions (as well as the earlier-mentioned prediction of a vast universe rather than a small one), all of which are now generally agreed to be true, classic Christian doctrine as a scientific model has performed remarkably well.