This is how science lost God: Atheism, evolution and the road to Dawkins’ latest Twitter controversy
Last edited Sun Jan 17, 2016, 04:08 PM - Edit history (1)
The roots of today's battles over atheism, science, religion and climate change actually date back centuries
Sunday, Jan 17, 2016 12:00 PM EST
Bill Mesler and H. James Cleaves II
Excerpted from "A Brief History of Creation: Science and the Search for the Origin of Life"
In the seventeenth century, most natural philosophers believed that every type of living organism on the face of the Earth had always existed, from the very beginning of the Earth’s creation. Every organism—every dog, every bird, every human being, and every worm—had been created by God in the form of something called “germs.” These germs were like the seeds of plants, scattered at the dawn of creation by God over the face of the planet, like a gardener would scatter a future crop. Germs were tiny, far too small to be seen even with the aid of a microscope. And each such germ contained even tinier germs, the germs of every successive generation that any creature would ever spawn. They were all stacked inside each other, like Russian nesting dolls. The infinite nature of the theory was the one thing that people had a hard time coming to grips with, but one of the theory’s most influential proponents, the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche, would point out that it was no harder to believe in germs than in the life cycles of plants. “One can say that in a single apple pit,” he said, “there would be apple trees, apples, and the seeds of apples for infinite or almost infinite centuries."
contained in male semen. Others saw them in the female’s egg. In France, the theory was called “embodiment”; in England, “preformation” or “preexistence.” It wasn’t just conjecture. Proponents of preformation could see the evidence all around them in the natural world. The transformation of caterpillars into butterflies was taken as a sign of God’s blueprint unfolding. The bulb of a tulip with its endless unfolding layers seemed a clue to the infinite layers of tulips that would spring forth, one after another. In the tiny eggs of frogs, microscopists thought they could see future generations of frogs waiting to be born. Those who believed in preformation were never short of evidence.
http://www.salon.com/2016/01/17/this_is_how_science_lost_god_atheism_evolution_and_the_long_road_to_richard_dawkins_latest_twitter_controversy/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/book-review-a-brief-history-of-creation/
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