(This is my most recently published ChristianWeek column, focusing on stuff that religious people supposedly used to believe that no one ever believed (except maybe some gullible materialists). )
The ignorance and opposition to science of religious folk has been staple of antireligious tracts for centuries. Often, the tales remind me of bogus miracle stories – so good they can’t be false. Two recent examples are worth noting:
Religious folk, we have been told, opposed anesthesia in childbirth because women should suffer the Biblical curse of Eve (Gen 3:16). Medical historian A. D. Farr actually went to the trouble of methodically searching the literature from Britain in the 1840s and 1850s, when modern anesthesia during childbirth was first introduced. He found that religious opposition was a figment of later propaganda.
How did the idea get started, despite a lack of evidence? Well, now, that’s a story ….
For the rest, go here.
Also: So, at least some people are beginning to get the significance of Mike Behe’s Edge of Evolution?
Also: Is tenure a dull dog’s idea of heaven?
Students take religious studies to be better people, but profs want them to think more critically about faiths
Marvin Olasky on the current desperate atheist rage. A death rattle?
Does parallel processing in the brain show that there is no mind?