Yesterday I was talking to someone about Christianity and science. Incidentally, he was on the topic of apologetics and the bible school he was going through had someone lecturing against Darwinism, as a defense of Christianity.
A strong believer in science, I was of course grappling with the two seemingly antipodal beliefs ever since my secondary school days. Without much thinking, I blurted out, “I believe in Darwinism.”
Suddenly I had many eyes on me. To add weight to my sentence, I mentioned a book, The Science of God, which I had read some 6 years back.
The Science of God by Gerald Schroeder is a book that attempts to reconcile both. It is, in my opinion, rather successful. Biblical facts that were explained and still remained fairly strong in my head are the creation of the universe in 6 days using some relativity and some frame of reference reasoning. Another one was evolution, but I can’t quite remember the explanation.
In any case, I still believe in evolution, but that doesn’t mean that I’m denying God. You don’t have to interpret the Bible literally, in fact, the Bible cannot be interpreted literally. Remember that the Bible is a book written more than four thousand years ago and meant for an audience who cannot explain gravity and thinks that the Earth is flat. We couldn’t have expected God to detail his Universe creation process in detail and still expect believers to swallow it down. The Bible is not meant to be a science text book.
The Bible is surprisingly lacking in detail about Creation, and perhaps it was well-intended. I believe that God had meant it for us Man to find out, and any theory should be debated, reasoned and supported with evidence. Perhaps we’ll never find a satisfactory answer, but that doesn’t mean that we should stop in the search or deny any theory as excellent as Darwin’s “The Origin of Species”. Denial of science and blind adoption of any religious text will only serve to retard human civilisation and enlarge the divide between science and God.
Convergence is the only way.
***still in draft status***
March 28th, 2005 at 11:59 pm
Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind. — Albert Einstein
March 29th, 2005 at 12:04 am
By the way, I googled on Albert Einstein’s quote on Science without religion is lame. Religion without science is blind
April 3rd, 2006 at 12:58 am
Hi, just a passerby with thought to offer.
Gen 1:21 - And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that [it was] good.
“after its kind” tells us that the creatures God created would not change kind (species). Granted, human beings “evolve” through the ages in terms of physical appearance (afro’s hands bigger, chinese small eyes…) but a believer of the Bible would find it contradicting the phrase “after its kind” when he/she wants to believe we can change from monkeys to man.
evolution - happened over many years. so before man come to being there are creations which died? If that’s the case, that contradicts the Bible again. The Bible says that death came when adam and eve (man) sinned, not before that. So evolution, which gives a timespan wide enough for death, would contradict the Bible’s main doctrine of the wages of sin.
By the way i’m not one who denies science for religion. God made all things and all things are for us to discover. But I do not subscribe to evolution for the above reasons and just want to let you know. just as a food for thought.
Sandiego
:)