Lutheran Church Quotes

The Creation Museum makes the Christian Fundamentalist Case for their alternative view of the creation of the earth and man. In the process, they make claims that are proven incorrect every day in science, like the earth is only about 6000 years old {641849} , and all the species on earth were then separately created in their immutable form with no evolutionary process. There are many deeply religious Christians who do not take the Bible literally and have no problem with evolution as the mechanism which God selected to create and develop life. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, does not maintain that the Bible is literally true and Evolution did not account for the development of life on earth. The major difference between most modern scientists, philosophers, and theologians, is that some believe that God of other Supreme Being had nothing to do with the evolution and development of life forms and those who believe that Evolution was the mechanism that God created and used. See {641848} for an example of the former.

In the middle of the 19th century, there was an Anglican English Bishop by the name of Usher who was the first person to perform this “Biblical” analysis. Even then the absurdity of this claim was demonstrated over and over again with the science of the time. Most religious fundamentalists believe that the word “day” was really an unspecified period of time which might have been billions of years. Other religious theologians argue that the entire Genesis story was a metaphor and not meant to be taken literally. Today we know that our universe is over 18 billion years old, and the overwhelming proportions of the different animals and other life forms that have existed are long since extinct, while a few, like horseshoe crabs, are many millions of years old. New species are being created constantly. Even man, one of the more recent life forms, was well developed, had communities, and had spread over the world more than 6,000 years ago. We have archeological evidence of human life that goes back 10s of thousands of years. None-the-less, there are a number of American citizens who actually believe the 6,000 year claim, and they are entitled to their opinion regardless of how absurd it may seem to others. That is the great strength of a liberal democracy. Absurd seeming beliefs must be protected and respected. However, views that are so variant from known scientific reality may not be allowed to interfere with the teaching and public education to advocate a particular theological view and especially under the rubric of science.

This quotation is noteworthy because although there are some scientists who are sympathetic to the religious fundamentalist view of the origin of the universe, they are almost always second class scientists. In this case, the scientist is a first class scientist, a Nobel Prize winner in Chemistry. So his quotation has more weight than of most others and is used more often by many fundamentalists who support the Biblical Genesis version of creation rather than the Big Bang scientific explanations and evolution. There are however many great scientists who also are people of faith in a God. They may be religious, but like most religious Americans, interpret the Bible metaphorically and symbolically rather than literally as the fundamentalists do.

His writings drew the ire of the British Clergy, the leading figures of which, taught the literal interpretation of the Old Testament. The political leadership was also hostile to his views and even refused to grant one of his books a copyright on the grounds that it undermined and corrupted the morals of the public.

Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York

Watchtower Bible and Tract Society of New York

In 1877 Wasburn was dropped from the List of Ministers by the Unitarian Church. He had become very critical of organized and orthodox religion of all kinds. He felt that literal interpretations of the Bible harmed religions as it made a mockery of God to claim His truths were the anachronistic and demonstrable falsehoods of the Book of Genesis. Today most Christians and Jews do not take the Old Testament Literally and in this sense Washburn was one of the early religious reformers of America. There is still a significant number of fundamentalist Christians and orthodox Jews who still believe in the literal truth of everything in the Bible.

The anti-intellectualism of many Protestant sects has its roots in this view of Martin Luther’s. The notion of reason as practiced by scientists as a hindrance to religion is not a new notion. Religious leaders have been trying to silence and discredit philosophers and scientists as long as there has been religion. Socrates was killed long before Christianity.

This is an interesting quotation as it shows that there were opponents of literal interpretation of the Bible in the 17th century, and that they were among the leading men of the day. The argument that the Bible has divine inspiration but was written by men and should not be taken literally, has been made since the Ancient Jews received the Bible.

Priests at the time were mostly uneducated. They would tend to make up their own Biblical stories that the people would prefer rather than the official church versions. The bishops wanted this practice stopped.

His concept of the devine however was quite different and much more abstract than the Rabbis, Priests and Imams of the time. Albert Einstein, was a religious Jew, but his view of God was that of Spinoza (See Quotation 631763) who had been excommunicated by the Jews. Spinoza’s ideas were considered so radical and dangerous that he was the only man in history who was excommunicated by the Catholics, the Jews and the Muslims. Spinoza did not believe in a kins of anthropromorphic God who fabricated the earth and the stars. He saw God in the devine nature of the earth and the heavens and the mathematical rules that govern everything. It was this abstraction that was Spinoza's God which made sense to Einstein. Got was in the order, physical laws and mathematics of the universe. Modern scientists who are religious have no difficulty with the probablsitic nature of much of the physics that governs the univrese. It was God who created or more abstractly, was the mathematical and physical laws that in turn allowed the universe to be created from nothing.