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Originally Posted by Sargeman
In what ways has science proven the bible wrong? This is something that I have read on other boards and the best most can come up with is "theoretically" science has proven the bible wrong.
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It's all a matter of perspective. Many people - especially those who tend to reject religion - can tend to forget that the people who believe in taking the Bible literally and who believe in Cerationism are an extremely small minority of Christian believers.
It's very true that many/most of the best scientific minds before the 20th century were religious scholars. Isaac Newton has said everything he did he did for the church, and he was probably an ordained minister at the time of his death. The difference now is the vocal minority fundamentalists. Religious scientists have never proven the Bible "wrong" per se - there has nearly always been the concept of the "two books" - nature and the Bible - neither of which can contradict each other. So, when science "proves" the Bible wrong, all it means is that it's time to go back to the interpretive table regarding what the Bible says.
All this changes, however, in the fundamentalist perspective. In that mindset, the Bible is ALL there is and anything that contradicts it is a temptation from the devil. This, I believfe, comes from an arrogant viewpoint and unwillingness to change and accept the idea they may be wrong. This is not as prevalent as one would think however - even the Catholic Church in its decision that birth control was wrong made it very clear that it was NOT an infallible decision and was not presupposed to be the final word for all time. In fact, most decisions by the Catholic Church and many other churches are made with this understanding, that they are based on what is known at the time and the current climate, but that new revelations and knowledge may always come and change the understanding to some degree.
In America the issue seems far more present than it really is. I believe this is a side-effect of the US being a primarily WASP country. There is a much higher instance of fundamentalists here than anywhere else as far as I can see.
Religion requiers humility, and if one cannot be constantly reassessing their thoughts and stances in regards to religion, then they are not approaching religion from a mature standpoint.