which comes first
Good article about the interaction of religion and science:
And the LORD God spoke unto Moses, “Write this: 16.3 billion years ago, I set the gravitational constant at 6.673 10-11 m3 kg-1 s-2. Then I inserted an infinitely compressed drop of energy into a multidimensional time space continuum to make a Big Bang - Moses, why aren’t you writing this down?” And Moses spoke thusly unto the LORD God, “God, how many zeroes are there in 16.3 billion?” And the LORD God spoke unto Moses, “OK, just write this: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
I remember a conversation with a (non-Christian) friend who asked me how I could believe such mental stuff about the creation of the world like it says in the bible. I responded that I believed in the bible, but that I didn’t believe that the creation story was intended to describe the science of creation, and that I had no objection to the theory of evolution by natural selection. She responded that I was “cheating”. I wish I could have explained my position as eloquently as this:
What does Genesis actually say? God created the world and the world was good. God created humans and put them in a garden where they didn’t have to work and where they felt no shame. They were told to procreate and govern the earth. But then humans learned what good and evil were. Humans disobeyed God and broke off the relationship between God and mankind. And the consequence of this was that we could no longer live in the garden, but that by the sweat of our brow we would eat our food, that sexual discrimination would pollute our relationships, and that every day of our lives we would march inexorably towards death. Sound familiar? Science never really has answered the big questions, because all the big questions start with Why and science is only good at How questions. Keep science in the science class, but if Genesis can outline our problem and why we have a problem, let’s hope somewhere later in the Bible God provided an answer as well.
I don’t have any beef with people who believe in a young earth creation story. However, it just seems that it creates an image in the minds of people like that friend who understand that being a Christian means rejecting science. And frankly, the idea of a centuries-long conspiracy of anti-theistic scientists hell bent on advancing a false theory simply because it writes God out of the equation is a little far fetched.
I find it contradictory to embrace the conclusions of the best minds of science for help with our medicine, our engineering, our chemistry and physics while simultaneously saying “hey guys, in this one whole area, you couldn’t be more wrong.”
I also think that it prevents us from having a legitimate dialogue about the boundaries and ethics of science in a century where the scientist has been treated as infallible, where scientific results are seen to support conclusions about meanings and morality, and where research and innovation has lost its independence in the face of commercial funding.