THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



For an estimate of the attitude of the Middle Ages 

 towards science to have any sound basis we must 

 keep clearly in mind the postulates upon which the 

 body of thought of the times rested. The dominant 

 influence was undoubtedly the religious idea. Until 

 the Protestant Reformation, the interpretation and 

 direction of this idea was confined to a single homo- 

 geneous Church whose decisions did not rest on the 

 fallible opinions of man but on the absolute truth 

 as revealed by an omnipotent and omniscient God. 

 This body of truth consisted of the books of the Bible, 

 which had been accepted at the Council of Nice, and 

 on the later dogmas of the Church. The influence of 

 the Bible thus became enormous as a guide both to the 

 spiritual problems of life and to the interpretation of 

 natural phenomena. The men of science, with few 

 exceptions, strove to reconcile their observations and 

 laws with the Mosaic cosmogony so that natural 

 philosophy gradually came to be an exposition of this 

 primitive conception of the world glossed with the 

 philosophical principles of Aristotle and Plato which, 

 because of their emphasis on teleology, lent them- 

 selves to this conflation of Greek philosophy and 

 Christian ethics. For this reason, the early concep- 

 tions of the Jews brought a new element into thought, 

 and a people who were themselves singularly indif- 

 ferent to science became the arbiters of the scientific 

 method. The essence of Jewish thought, as shown in 

 the Bible, is to exemplify the existence of a personal 



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