Mark Noll On a Christological Invitation for Science, Part 1 | The BioLogos Forum

Mark Noll On a Christological Invitation for Science, Part 1 | The BioLogos Forum.

This is the first from a BioLogos series of excerpts from Mark Noll’s new book Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind. Absolutely remarcable.

Here are a few quotes:

So long as Christian communities thought it was a straightforward task to harmonize what Scripture seemed to communicate about the natural world and what observing nature or reflecting on nature seemed to communicate, the discussion was contained.
This situation, with some exceptions, largely prevailed until the sixteenth century and the beginnings of the modern scientific era. Yet even in the centuries when challenges to a “literal” reading of Scripture were still relatively few, perceptive believers knew that considerable sophistication was necessary to bring together biblical interpretation and interpretations of nature.
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Saint Augustine noted that perceptive non-Christians really did know a great deal about “the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of the world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth.” Given such able observers, he held it was “a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics.” When this kind of nonsense proliferated, the great danger was that those outside the faith would believe that the Scriptures themselves (“our sacred writers”) taught the nonsense and so would be put off from the life-giving message of the Bible. Augustine expressed this danger in this way: “If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason?” His closing injunction was to chastise “reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture” who “defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements” by calling on “Holy Scripture for proof and even recit[ing] from memory many passages which they think support their position.”
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From the sixteenth century onward, the number of apparent problems accumulated. Hard-won conclusions in the natural sciences, gained through ever more intense and ever more sophisticated study of nature, seemed to contradict what the Scriptures taught. Thus, the earth was the center of neither the solar system nor the entire universe (as might be concluded from some biblical passages); the earth was billions of years old (not of recent vintage); the universe was unimaginably vast (not sized by human scale); animal “species” designated temporary way stations on continuously changing paths of evolutionary development (not permanently fixed entities); human beings were part of this evolutionary development (not a species distinct in every way from animals).