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***