Why an Atheist Thinks the Shroud of Turin is the Real Deal

The Chasm Between Science and Religion

To some historians, the turn of the century from the nineteenth to the twentieth seems to have been the nadir of a seemingly huge chasm between science and religion in the wake of Darwin’s Origin of Species, which he published in 1859.  It is an exaggeration. Many of the clergy, particularly in the Church of England, found no difficulty with evolution. Many of the leading scientists, particularly geologists and biologists were also ordained clergyman or people very much involved in the church. The list of clergy who received the famed Copley Medal of the Royal Society is impressive.

Biblical literalism may have been the norm among an uncritical population at large throughout the course of Christianity, but it was not in any way universal among intellectuals and scholars. We need only look at Augustine of Hippo or Origen of Alexandria who wrote:  

And who is so foolish as to suppose that God, after the manner of a husbandman, planted a paradise in Eden, towards the east, and placed in it a tree of life, visible and palpable, so that one tasting of the fruit by the bodily teeth obtained life? And again, that one was a partaker of good and evil by masticating what was taken from the tree? And if God is said to walk in the paradise in the evening, and Adam to hide himself under a tree, I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indi­cate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance, and not literally. (De Principiis IV, 3, 1 [6])