| I see. Well, how about this formulation?: at some point, say around the end of the 17th century or beginning of the 18th, the churches generally made more of an effort to avoid conflict with the emerging sciences. Certainly by the 19th century, the Catholic Church went out of its way to avoid a direct confrontation with evolution, holding the view that the story in Genesis was not literal, but contained substantial theological truths, and that as long as one believed that God guided the process, and that the human soul was a direct creation of God, it was allowable to hold with evolutionary doctrine. Other mainstream denominations tended to follow Rome's lead. However, the fundamentalist churches, which obstinately held to a doctrine of literal inerrancy, staunchly opposed evolution. They were a minority in the Christian world, however, and are not a reliable guide to the changes in the relationship of the church and science which had occurred since the time of Galileo......... |
