New Page Turned in Centuries-Old Conflict
By Dan Hurley
The relationship of science, religion and politics has never been obvious or simple, and with the opening next month of the new Creation Museum in Boone County, Ky., Greater Cincinnati finds itself at the center of a very old struggle.
Americans embrace the fruits of science and technology. We expect scientists to discover alternative fuels to solve the growing scarcity of oil and to manipulate nano materials to make computers work faster. News magazines love to run richly illustrated stories about the new worlds that scientists expose with jaw-dropping photos from the Hubble Space Telescope or maps of the DNA double helix and the human genome.
Despite our love for technological gadgets and the lip service we pay to the importance of science, an increasing number of Americans don’t want their children exposed to science. A 2005 Gallup poll found that while 35 percent of Americans think evolution is “a scientific theory supported by data,” nearly 45 percent believe that the world was created in six days as described in the Bible.
Since the 1980s, a powerful confluence of evangelical fundamentalist Christianity and right-wing politics has focused on challenging science education in the schools and via informal educational institutions like science museums. The influence of this uniquely American alliance was noted in a November 2005 article in the London Times, which pointed out that the new $25 million Creation Museum, which presents creationism as a science, had attracted over $7 million in corporate donations. At the same time, the exhibit on Charles Darwin at the American Museum of Natural History in New York could not raise a single corporate dollar because of fear of offending evangelical Christians and conservative politicians.
Although evolution was not the focus, the interaction of science, religion and politics was in the forefront of the mind of former President John Quincy Adams when he visited Cincinnati in November 1843. At 76 years old, Adams literally risked his life to travel over 2,000 miles round trip by canal boat, lake boat, river packet and stage coach to lay the cornerstone for a new observatory in Cincinnati in an attempt to turn a “transient gust of enthusiasm for the science of astronomy in Cincinnati into a permanent and persevering national pursuit.”
In his first annual address as president 18 years earlier, Adams bemoaned the fact that American government had done nothing to press the frontiers of astronomy, the cutting edge of science in the early modern period. While European powers supported 130 astronomical observatories, what he called “lighthouses in the sky,” not one existed in America.
The day after laying the cornerstone here, Adams delivered an oration in Wesley Chapel on Fifth Street, downtown. For almost two and a half hours Adams reviewed the history of astronomy from the ancients to his own day. By focusing on the contributions of Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, Galileo and Newton, Adams detailed the destruction of the ancient cosmology reflected in the Bible that placed the Earth at the center of the universe, and replaced it with an understanding that the Earth is one of several planets that revolve around the sun in elliptical orbits that can be charted mathematically and explained by natural forces.
Thematically, Adams organized this sweeping narrative around the struggle between science and the religious establishment. For Adams, Galileo was not only one of the “master spirits” of the ages, but also a martyr. Using new technology, a telescope, Galileo peered deeper into the skies than anyone before him and, more importantly, reconciled conflicting data with a new paradigm. For championing this scientific, non-biblical view of the universe, Galileo was denounced, suppressed, silenced and imprisoned by the Pope and the Inquisition.
Two years before Adams spoke, the Society of Jesus (Jesuits), the intellectual vanguard and protectors of orthodoxy in Roman Catholicism, assumed control of St. Francis Xavier College on Sycamore Street, downtown. Adams could not resist comparing Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, to Galileo. Although he thought the two shared many great qualities and abilities, he believed that the influence of religious fanaticism led Ignatius to invent “an engine of despotic power, a rod of iron, and puts it into the hands of frail, mortal man, already invested by the infatuation of the age, with imputed infallibility.”
Whether in 1843 or 2007, the scientific method — that questions assumptions, poses hypotheses, tests those hypotheses empirically, and either modifies the hypotheses or shifts the paradigm to generate new questions — threatens the established order. But if we allow the combination of evangelical fundamentalism and right-wing politics to undermine science in the schools and museums, Americans will end up dependent on scientists from other societies. Not only will our flow of gadgets be threatened, but also things like the development of prescription drugs to protect us from the threat of a mutated H5N1 virus. Today, bird flu threatens millions of fowl, but it could threaten millions of humans, and the only way to understand that threat is within the context of evolutionary change on the molecular level.
Dan Hurley is the president of Applied History Associates. He also serves as the staff historian for Channel 12 news and is the executive producer of Local 12 Newsmakers. Contact him at dhurley@fuse.net.
(c) 2007 Cincinnati Post. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.