Stanley P. Rosenberg - Finding Ourselves After Darwin: Conversations on the Image of God, Original Sin, and the Problem of Evil

Theology and Science in Apposition

Stanley P. Rosenberg

Walking south along Parks Road in Oxford, UK, one comes across a pair of buildings that set the stage for this book. These two important buildings in the Oxford landscape stand in apposition (but not opposition) across the road from each other. On the east side is the Oxford Museum of Natural History, built of stone and begun in 1855. debate about Darwins interpretation of evolution, which for the first time gave a cogent explanation of the mechanism of evolution (the general notion of evolution was not a novel or very contentious one in the nineteenth century). A compelling idea now had explanatory power but did not possess fully verifiable evidence, and it raised massive questions about our understanding of human origins and natural history. This was not the first time such a lag between inference and evidence had occurred. Scientific progress is replete with such stories: one of the most well known of these is Galileos inferences supporting Copernicus, which could not be proven until the early nineteenth century, when technological advancements finally achieved the ability to create sufficiently clear, powerful telescopes and verify the transit of Venus across the sun.

Oxfords Museum of Natural History offers an architectural style directly reminiscent of the great British Gothic cathedrals, with an entrance and windows in the Norman style. In addition, it has a monastic kitchen (from the abbots kitchen at Glastonbury) built alongside to represent chemistry, and its internal structure features a grand open space with columns and carvings like a Christian basilica and other Gothic buildings. The style was employed not to mock or replace the church but to be a testament to the enduring connection its designers found between the book of life and the book of nature. So, this buildingpresided over by an angel of God and in an architectural style emphasizing the spiritualoffered the stage for one of the oft-reported, and frequently mispresented, debates between science and religion. Or was it such a debate?