Hi *****,
(A friend sent me this article for thought: Augustine’s origin of the species http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/may/22.39.html)
Augustine is my favorite writer on this subject, and I’ve read McGrath on this extensively. Still, he misses a lot about Augustine’s understanding of these things. Sometimes McGrath seems to favor Augustine as presenting McGrath’s position more than letting Augustine be Augustine. 
For example, in the work “On the Literal meaning of Genesis” Augustine was patently accommodating his understanding of the scriptures to the scientific understanding of his day. He even gets into things as complicated as weather cycles and heliocentric theories of orbits. In the book in question Augustine says this plainly. None of this was new to the educated classes in the 4th century AD. That we might think it was caters the error of being later and so thinking that this makes our understanding more secure for the sake of our lateness. It is easy to know more and less. It is McGrath’s bias that all of this talk was “pre-scientific” that blurs his vision. They well understood the methods of observation, hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion; if we want to take that kind of thing as being the scientific method in the midst of the boiling arguments over what the scientific method actually is.
The battle even in Copernicus’ day was between two scientific views both straining to claim that theirs was reconcilable with scripture, or better, the view of Aristotle that had been adopted by the Roman Catholic establishment. It was a battle between Aristotle (the terracentrist adopted by Aquinas) and Plato (the heliocentrist adopted by Augustine) and not at all a battle between ’science’ and ‘religion’ and reading the primary texts bears this out. All of it was considered to be ’science’. All of it was considered to be ‘religion’. In that at least, they were right. There is no war between religion and science, only between truth and error.
Neiswonger
Neiswonger
Doug
Josh Hicks
Clay
