Religion and Science

Reading the works of Adams, Jefferson, and Paine leads us to reflect on the remarkable differences between the political narratives of today and the eighteenth century. One of the most vivid differences is the lack of a conflict between religion and politics. Winthrop—a man devoted to God as a minister—comfortably takes up the claims of another minister regarding the science of earthquakes. In the eighteenth century, Paine assumes that studying the stars is the same as knowing God. In the twenty-first century, Representative Paul Broun Republican-GA insists that evolution, embryology, and the Big Bang theory are “lies straight from the pit of hell.” Broun stridently declares that the earth is 9,000 years old, even though scientists have dated the oldest human fossil at 195,000 years old. Broun is a physician and member of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee. ¹ How did we move from an integration of God and best available science to the polarized rhetoric of today’s politics? Some answers lie in how Intelligent Design and evolution advocates describe the relationship between science and religion. But a more careful analysis of how religions approached Darwin in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demonstrates that this narrative should be rejected.