Ever since the Roman Catholic Church excommunicated Galileo for proposing a heliocentric planetary system and disproving Ptolemy’s geocentric universe, some may believe that science and religion are always at odds. This is not the case.
The Roman Catholic church did not excommunicate Galileo for religious or biblical reasons. There is nothing in the Scriptures that say the earth is at the center of the universe.
Ptolemy, a second century Egyptian mathematician and astronomer, no doubt viewed the heavens and with the naked eye and based on the appearance at that time believed everything in the universe revolved around the earth. That had been scientific dogma for about fifteen centuries and had been sanctioned by the church when Galileo came along.
Galileo had something Ptolemy did not have, a telescope. The Roman Catholic Church at that time failed to investigate Galileo’s claim relying instead on 15 centuries of settled science. The church did not make a biblical mistake, it made a scientific mistake. They trusted the wrong ‘science’ without seriously considering Galileo’s findings.
True faith and true science do not contradict. As a Christian I do not have a problem with the discoveries of science through observation because such discoveries never contradict the Scriptures; what troubles me are scientific theories without observed corroboration.
The whole scientific community is not in possession of a single observed fact about the beginning of the universe and life just to name two. So it follows that science without faith leads to godless theories and faith without science is blind. I am fairly open-minded about theories, but I am not so open-minded I let my brains fall out.
A “National Geographic” article published on October 22, 2018, titled “There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It’s a Made-Up Label,” carried a subtitle that said, race has “been used to define and separate people for millennia. But the concept of race is not grounded in genetics.”
The article claimed, “Craig Venter, a pioneer of DNA sequencing, observed, ‘The concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.’” It went on to say, “all humans are closely related—more closely related than all chimps, even though there are many more humans around today.”
The science here regarding racism agrees with what Paul said in his Athens sermon on the Areopagus, God “made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth,” Acts 17:26, and what I have said; there is only one race, the human race.
We are all related and in this thing we call life together. So, we need to abandon the supposed racism and prejudice that divides us and learn to resolve our issues in love and a spirit of brotherhood.
The article also said, “To the victims of racism, it’s small consolation to say that the category has no scientific basis.” It seems those who wish to perpetuate the concept of racism do so because they hope to benefit from it in some way. I do recognize there have been past injustices related to the idea of race, but I know of no fair way to resolve them at this remove.
This is why believers reject Critical Race Theory, it is a theory not based on scientific fact or the Scriptures, and only hopes to divide us rather than unite us.
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