#dnaEdit: Faithless duel

Pope John Paul II came to terms with Galileo and Pope Francis   has now accepted the implications of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, including natural selection. In the last 400 years or so, the Roman Catholic Church got entangled in an intellectual battle that it was bound to lose. In the case of Galileo and the heliocentric theory, the Church was fighting on behalf of Aristotle, who had propounded the geocentric universe based on the information available to him. Sometime in the 13th century of the Common Era, the Church adopted Aristotle’s views as its own under the influence of St Thomas Aquinas, the angelic doctor. When Galileo following Copernicus said that the earth moves, the elders in the 17th century misunderstood him and condemned him for being anti-church, and, therefore, anti-religious. Of course, it was bungling of the first order and it took a few centuries for the sensible folk in the church to realise that the best endorsement of the divine principle is  the working of Nature. So the Polish cardinal-turned-pope, who has seen enough of the nature of the world under Communist rule made the right move ever so gently and reconciled church dogma and science theory. 

Pope Francis has taken forward the reconciliation between reason and faith a step forward by bringing in evolution into church dogmatics. The theory of evolution is still being debated and it is evolving as well. The theoretical underpinnings that Darwin had provided hold good generally, but there has been enough tweaking to make it compatible with the barrage of new facts coming to light about the emergence of life as we know it on earth. This should have been done a long time ago. Generations of pious Roman Catholics and a lot many other Christians are torn between the evidence of science and the assertions of the church. The good Christian folks are sensible enough to accept empirical truth but the church has prevented them from doing so.

Unfortunately, the conflict between faith and reason, between religion and science has been a false dichotomy that has resulted from the specific facts of western European history, and the power equations between the dominant Roman Catholic Church and the political chiefs of that part of the continent. The rivalry between the spiritual and temporal heads that is Roman Catholic Church’s pope and the Holy Roman Empire’s emperor to begin with has spilled over into other spheres as well. Imitating Western Europe and Western Christianity, some of the blockheads in other religions like Hinduism and Islam too adopted a belligerent attitude towards science, considering it to be some sort of an evil-incarnate. This is one battle that has been conjured up out of nothing and precious time, energy and lives have been destroyed fighting it in the second half the last millennium. We know that history is full of false turns and dead-ends. The confrontation and conflict between religion and science is one such pseudo-battle, which ignorant and preening prelates of the Roman Catholic Church and other fiery proponents of other Protestant sects in Europe spawned. The best minds in Europe on both sides of the divide fought a futile war over this non-issue. Europe has been responsible for many of the evils of the modern world, and this is one of them. It is greatest intellectual disservice that Europe has done to the world, a heinous intellectual crime. The church and European intellectuals should tender an apology to the world for this most unethical shadow-boxing of all.