Abstract:
This work analyzes the historical relations between the Christian religion and science, with special emphasis on evangelical Protestantism and its troubled relationship with Charles Darwin’s evolutionary biology. In the first part we make a historical survey of the relationship between science and religion from the scientific revolution to the publication of "The Origin of Species", highlighting its locus in the context of English Natural Theology and its reception among evangelicals at the time. In the second part, we characterize the evangelical movement in regard to its distinctive attributes and historical emphases, especially highlighting its philosophical and epistemological assumptions in Baconian inductive empiricism and in Scottish Common Sense Realism. We then trace a historical overview of its relationship with the fundamentalist movement and its attempt of renewal through Fuller Seminary’s lead, until its configuration in Latin America. The third part analyzes the creationist movement as a synthesis of the evangelical way of reading and interpreting the Bible, anchored in its foundationalist epistemology based on the Doctrine of the Inerrancy of Scripture. From here, we point out the problems of the popular formulation of inerrancy, proposing a reformulation of the principle through contemporary examples that echo the example of the architect of the concept in the 19th Century: B.B. Warfield (1851-1921). This reformulation is anchored in the Doctrine of the Incarnation, which we claim to provide a fully satisfactory structure for a solid Doctrine of Scripture and for better evangelical relationships with the historical-critical method of interpretation of the Bible, and consequently with evolutionary science.
