Reconciling Science and Religion

I consider myself to be a religious person.  I don’t make it to church much anymore, but then again, I think I don’t think showing up is a good judge of what you actually believe.  I’m also a very scientifically minded person, and to many people out there that would seem to be a contradiction.  Then again maybe I just spend too much time on the internet, where any extremist can have a voice, and it’s the person who screams the loudest who gets heard.  Most people seem to think that only one, science or religion can be right, will then take a side, and dismiss everything that is said by someone who chose the other.

Let’s just get right to the big one that seems to be involved in most of these arguments.  Evolution, and the age of the earth/universe.  The Bible says that God created the universe in 6 days.  The first thing I want to ask you is what is a day and how long is it?  You may say that that’s simple, a day is a rotation of the Earth around its axis and it’s 24 hours long.  Well what if I told you that using highly accurate tools, people have measured that the Earth’s rotation is actually slowing down.  Each day is longer than the one before it.  The point I want to make here is that the length of a day isn’t a constant at all, it’s changing and so in the creation story when it says “day” it probably didn’t mean exactly twenty-four hours.

Important Interlude 1.  Language:  Whenever you read the Bible you also need to remember you’re not reading it in its original form.  It was written in Hebrew or Greek and then translated into Latin, and maybe even a couple other steps along the way.  Sometimes the best word to use in a translation doesn’t mean exactly the same thing as the other word, and sometimes meanings of words within a language can change over time.  Using “day” as an example, I bet people who didn’t know the Earth rotated at all didn’t think day meant a rotation around an axis, and yet that’s now what it means.  The counter argument to that then is the whole “God’s at work during translations making sure the translators get it right.”  In 1631 some people printing an edition of the King James Bible and they made a mistake, they left out a single word.  The word “not.”  It was supposed to be in between the words “thou shalt” and “commit adultery” which leads to some interesting repercussions if God actually makes sure people don’t make mistakes when printing the Bible.

Anyway back to evolution.  God created all the animals, first in the ocean, then on land then man.  It doesn’t say how he did this does it?  Imagine you’re a sculptor, you start out with a block of stone, or a lot of clay or something, and then you start working.  Your work doesn’t suddenly go from that block into the sculpture, it takes time, and as it goes through the process it becomes more and more like what it’s eventually going to be.  My argument here, is then quite simple.  Creating the universe also means creating all the laws of nature, and the way things work and interact with each other.  When asked why you never see direct acts of divine intervention a fundamentalist will tell you God acts subtly, yet the ideas for evolution here say that it could simply be a subtle tool used to create things.

I have another way of looking at these things too, but first I have another question for you regarding the whole creation in 6 days story.  The Bible does a good job talking about the different prophets and what God told them.  It has pretty much everything that Moses was apparently told written down in the Torah, and so I ask you, who was it that God told this story of creation to and why aren’t they an important figure?  It’s not like man was around to see these things happen in the first place, and this is slowly easing us into my next observation.

If a young child without a very good grasp of the world asks you “where did I come from?”  How likely are you to tell them the whole truth?  Have you ever asked them to guess how old you are?  or how much money a car costs?  I bet the answer you get isn’t very accurate, they haven’t learned these concepts well enough yet.  Now imagine asking questions about the way the universe works to a group of people who only recently learned how to farm, and who don’t have a method of communicating with each other without being in close physical proximity to each other.  Try explaining how stars work with fusion to people who wouldn’t figure out what hydrogen is (the most common element in the universe) for another five thousand years.  In all the history of mankind, it was only just over 300 years ago that someone noticed that if something is moving, it’s going to keep moving unless something happens to it.  We’ve been too immature as a species to be able to comprehend the truths of the universe.  Just like how when a small child asks you a question you don’t answer it perfectly, but come up with an answer that sort of works.

Anyway I think that’s going on long enough about this for now, I guess the important thing that I wanted to get across  here was this:  The Bible (at least the Old Testament part) was written thousands of years ago, aimed mostly at Jews who were living thousands of years ago.  That’s not to say there’s not important messages in it, but it was written in a way that they could understand it.  They had no idea what we were going to become and what we would know now.