Monseigneur Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître |
I love history, as far as I'm concerned history is the easiest subject because it's already written, there's nothing new to discover... but there's a lot of old stuff to discover. J History is something that makes the bible interesting, God could have made His word a text book full of dry equations and rules, but He didn't, He made it an epic masterful piece of literature that spans all of history, from the very beginning, climaxing with Christ's resurrection at the height of the Roman empire, then continuing on to the very end of the world as we know it.
For years archaeologists used the bible as a reference when starting their digs, with great success. In more recent times archaeologists have been digging to disprove the bible, with great failure. The same pattern is being seen in the other sciences too - once God was used at great success to lead to scientific discovery, now it seems like science is being used in a never ending failed attempt to disprove God.
My favorite part is when those tired old atheist fallacies get dragged out to support modern atheist 'sensibilities' in an attempt to make God and His loved look stupid. It's unfortunate that our 'best and brightest' scientists are better at proving that they failed history than that they passed physics. Recently Neil deGrasse Tyson whom I used to admire took to the airwaves and used his new show Cosmos as vehicle for his personal vendetta against God. deGrasse mourned the fate of Giordano Bruno, imprisoned and burned at the stake in 1600 for preaching Copernicus' heliocentric solar system and daring to mention an infinate universe filled with suns orbited by planets. Unfortunately for Giordano Bruno almost everything that Neil deGrasse Tyson said about him was false.
Giordano Bruno was imprisoned and burned by the Roman Catholic church, that bit is true, and he did did believe in a plurality of worlds, but he was by no means an astronomer, nor even scientist. He was a mystic charlatan, he conned kings and ambassadors, engaged in bitter arguments that had nothing to do with the charges that Neil deGrasse Tyson made up for him. What Bruno was charged with was denying the divinity of Jesus, denying the virgin birth, denying
transubstantiation, practicing magic, and believing that animals and
objects (including the Earth) possessed souls. Did he deserve to be burned at the stake? No, and neither does he deserve to be paraded around as a martyr for science. At best he's a martyr for pagan snake oil sales.
Of course if you argue with Neil deGrasse Tyson on anything that borders the theological he will brand you an anti-science flat earther, as he did in his recent meltdown on CNN. Had deGrasse passed history he would know that the 'flat earth' myth was made up in the 19th century as an insult against Jews and bible believing Christians. Why? Because the bible is an old book and ancient Hebrews thought the earth was flat. News flash: ALL ancient pre-Greece societies thought the world to be flat even when the bible itself says that the earth is not. Isaiah 40:22 the word used is translated to round but the original Hebrew was chuwg which is also means sphere. Early Church fathers such as St. Augustine recognized that the Earth was spherical.
Eventually science apologists get weepy when they talk about the treatment that Galileo Galilei received at the hands of the Roman Catholic church. Galileo did get a raw deal from the church, and you'll never find me defending any pope, especially Pope Urban VIII, but the science apologists never mention that the arguments used against Galileo and his theory of heliocentricism was penned by the all time leading advocate of geocentricism: Aristotle. Nor do the apologists ever mention that Galileo's main objectors was not the church but his peers. (A situation which has never changed, look at the peer driven ridicule directed at any modern scientist who fails to yield to the party line when it comes to Global Warming... Cooling... Climate Change... what ever the current faddish name is)
Our children are learning a simplified version of history, they still get the fairy tale that algebra is an Arab invention. Just because an obscure ottoman invented the root of the word algebra (Al Jabr, and we still don't know exactly what it actually means) that doesn't mean said obscure ottoman invented that branch of mathematics. Algebra was merely more advanced type of basic arithmetic until the end of the 16th century with the work of François Viète who actually developed what we now know as the branch of mathematics called algebra, and François was definitely not an Arab.
I've actually heard the Roman empire being used in arguments in an attempt to prove that Christianity stifles science, that their grasp of science made Rome a world power until Christianity took over. Rome didn't become a world power due to their math skills. What kind of person could do MDCCCLVII + XXMMLVIII = XXMMMCMXV in their heads let alone on a wooden plank covered with bees wax? (yes, that's what they wrote on)
Rome's two main strong points were Basic Engineering (very basic, they couldn't even survey a curve in a road) and Negotiation (which consisted of a hob nailed sandal on the chest, a sword point at the throat, and a cheery "Wanna negotiate?") And while many atheists such as Gibbon claim that Rome was a society based on religious tolerance, there's really no evidence to back that up, while evidence to back the opposite reality of intolerance abounds.
Modern atheists have a big problem realizing that the concept of devout believers is not a new thing that started with Christianity. Ancient Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, and Persians didn't look at their pantheons of gods with a smirk, nor did they giggle at the myths. These were real and living Gods to them, Gods who would strike them dead with a single blow for j-walking should any god desire. Entire populations worshiped Jupiter and Zeus with a fervor that makes the Billy Graham crusades look like an agnostic lunch break.
It wasn't until western society crawled out of the dark ages and began reading the bible that science began to flourish, unfortunately for eastern world, that same relaxation and freedom has yet to be experienced. Once unleashed, science was never the sole purview of the atheist: Tycho Brahe, John Napier, Francis Bacon, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Laurentius Gothus, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, John Wallis, Isaac Newton, Alessandro Volta, John Dalton, Michael Faraday, Heinrich Hertz, Louis Pasteur, Guglielmo Marconi, George Washington Carver, Victor Francis Hess, Wernher von Braun, and many many many more professing Christians were/are highly active in the fields of science, medicine, and mathematics.
Oh, and Mr. Atheist Scientist Fan - that Big Bang theory you like? It came to us not from Edwin Hubble, but from Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaîtr a Catholic Priest.
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