A to Z in Greek

The only noticeable thing I can see (even after laboring through the Greek) is it has Delta Omega instead of Alpha Omega. And that jumped out before picking up my Greek NT. Am I right?

didn't you hear? Jesus is the original member of "Delta Force". He said as much while He was here. He was a subversive special forces dude sent by God to thwart the evil Holy Roman Empire or something like that.

Anyways, I'm reading Bertrand Russell's "Science and Religion" where he sets Science against Religion and documents many abuses that the Church committed against Scientists. Granted, I don't endorse a lot of what happened. Have you read the book?

I haven't read the book, but it sounds interesting. Much of the science vs. religion war story is inflamed by enlightenment rhetoric. Most of the early western scientists were religious people - and there is considerable work (Duhem, Jaki, recently JP Moreland) showing the connection of the Christian worldview to the flowering of science.

Nancy Pearcey and Charles Thaxton's The Soul of Science has an excellent chapter on the warfare rhetoric involved. Here is a brief exerpt from the chapter AN INVENTED INSTITUTION: Christianity and the Scientific Revolution

Images of War

Duhem’s work inspired other historians to probe the various ways Christianity provided an intellectual environment conducive to scientific endeavor. That such questions are even entertained indicates a dramatic turnaround in thinking about the relation between science and Christian faith. The image most of us grew up with was one of conflict and hostility. Phrases such as “the war between science and religion” are so familiar many people don’t even challenge them.

Yet this conception of warfare is actually a misconception, and one of recent lineage. Over some three centuries, the relationship between faith and science can best be described as an alliance. The scientist living between 1500 and the late 1800s inhabited a very different universe from that of the scientist living today. The earlier scientist was very likely to be a believer who did not think scientific inquiry and religious devotion incompatible. On the contrary, his motivation for studying the wonders of nature was a religious impulse to glorify the God who had created them. Indeed, though he studied the physical creation, he was unlikely to be a scientist per se (the term “scientist” was not coined until 1834) but a churchman. Especially in the English countryside, the parson-naturalist was a common figure.

As Colin Russell tells it in his book Cross-Currents: Interactions Between Science and Faith,4 the idea of a war between science and religion is a relatively recent invention—one carefully nurtured by those who hope the victor in the conflict will be science. In late nineteenth-century England, several small groups of scientists and scholars organized under the leadership of Thomas H. Huxley to overthrow the cultural dominance of Christianity—particularly the intellectual dominance of the Anglican church. Their goal was to secularize society, replacing the Christian worldview with scientific naturalism, a worldview that recognizes the existence of nature alone. Though secularists, they understood very well that they were replacing one religion by another, for they described their goal as the establishment of the “church scientific.” Huxley even referred to his scientific lectures as “lay sermons.”

It was during this period that a whole new literature emerged purporting to reveal the hostility religion has shown toward science throughout history. The most virulent were works by John William Draper (1811–1882) and Andrew Dickson White (1832–1918)—works regarded by most historians today as severely distorted because of the authors’ polemical purposes.

Draper’s History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science portrayed the history of science as “a narrative of the conflict of two contending powers, the expansive force of the human intellect on one side, and the compression arising from traditionary faith and human interests on the other.” The faith Draper has in mind is primarily that of the Catholic church, and he uses the language of “antagonism” and “struggle”—“a bitter, a mortal animosity.” He accuses the Catholic church of “ferociously suppressing by the stake and the sword every attempt at progress” and of having hands “steeped in blood!”5

Draper’s dramatic scenario of a great battle between theologians and scientists attracted a wide readership, but its anti-Catholicism eventually dated the book. White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology had a more lasting influence. As late as 1955, Harvard historian of science George Sarton was still praising White for writing “an instructive book.”6 In 1965, in an abridged edition of White’s book, historian Bruce Mazlish praised White for establishing his thesis “beyond any reasonable doubt.”7 And in 1991, a well-known science writer, on hearing that we were composing a book on the history of science and Christian faith, took the time to write us and recommend White’s book as an important treatment of the subject.

White states his central thesis in these words:
In all modern history, interference with science in the supposed interest of religion, no matter how conscientious such interference may have been, has resulted in the direst evils both to religion and to science.8

Heaping up quotation upon quotation, laced with heavy sarcasm and irony, White purported to prove the pernicious effects of Christianity upon the advance of science. White’s themes were picked up by several lesser writers, all telling the same story, etching into Western consciousness a mythology of fierce combat between science and Christian faith.

Even as the warfare image spread, however, it began to be challenged. Scientists and historians such as Alfred North Whitehead and Michael B. Foster became convinced that, far from impeding the progress of science, Christianity had actually encouraged it—that the Christian culture within which science arose was not a menace but a midwife to science.

Notes
1 Loren Eiseley, “Francis Bacon,” in The Horizon Book of Makers of Modern Thought, intro. Bruce Mazlish (New York: American Heritage Publishing, 1972), pp. 95–96, emphasis in original.
2 Loren Eiseley, Darwin’s Century (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958, Doubleday Anchor Books, 1961), p. 62.
3 David C. Lindberg, “Conceptions of the Scientific Revolution,” in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 14. Similarly, R. N. D. Martin says there is no evidence to show that Duhem’s historical work was motivated by a desire to defend scholasticism. See Pierre Duhem: Philosophy and History in the Work of a Believing Physicist (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1991).
4 Colin Russell, Cross-Currents: Interactions Between Science and Faith (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), pp. 190–96.
5 John William Draper, History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (New York: D. Appleton, 1875), pp. vi, xi, 364, 365.
6 The lesson of White’s book, Sarton says, is that theologians who “were indiscreet enough to interfere” with science always ended up supporting the wrong theories. “I wonder,” Sarton muses, “whether they were not the victims of a sly devil who wanted to make fun of them.” There’s no doubt that Sarton himself was making fun of them. He goes on to praise theologians who know better than to “tamper” with scientific controversies. George Sarton, “Introductory Essay,” in Science, Religion, and Reality, ed. Joseph Needham (New York: George Braziller, 1955), pp. 14–15.
7 Bruce Mazlish, preface to Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, abridged ed. (New York: Free Press, 1965), p. 13.
8 Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, 2 vols. (New York: Dover Publications, 1960, reprint of an 1896 edition), 1:viii.

You would like the book :) You can order it here

Oh yeah, I like Delta Force Jesus, but rather to subvert the present age and rescue captives for his Father. Jesus punches Satan, Sin and Death in the nose, takes back his sheep and then returns with a vengeance on "wrap up ops" - strike down his enemies and reverse the curse.

Joy to the World!

thanks for the heads-up on the book by Pearcey. I keep hearing her name so I suppose I'll have to consider her writings more.

in Science and Religion, Russell cites White often. In fact, it's one of the few references in the book! I don't know if the book is a collection of articles that have been published in peer-review journals, but there are few references in the work. The book comes across as more of a propaganda piece in that regard.

Right now, I'm reading his tripe about the soul. Basically, he says that man doesn't have one and that it's a concept that 'religion' uses to keep the interest of men. I really believe that if we lose the battle over the soul then we lose most everything. I'm probably wrong, though.