Something isn’t right in the modern western world in the
interactions between Faith and Science.
We may not understand what the problem is, how it started, or how to
solve it, but the tension is palpable, we can feel it. Antagonism is the most visible interaction on
the part of Christians (and/or those claiming to be Christians) with science,
treating the two as mortal enemies, but we also see accommodation, a long-shot
hope of wedding the two peacefully, and finally we see rejection, an attempt to
pretend that science doesn’t exist or at least have anything useful to
say. This can’t be the way things are
supposed to be, but are they the way they have to be? Is there an option other than being enemies,
part of a one-sided arranged marriage, or strangers?
To
trace the history of the relationship between science and faith is a massive
undertaking, but one area in particular is a microcosm of the strange
interactions between the two: Creation.
How did we get here, when, and why are universal and fundamental
questions of humanity. They have been
asked and answered all over the globe since the beginning of recorded history
in innumerable ways. The people of
Israel were given a definitive answer to the question of why in the book of Genesis: to fulfill the good pleasure and
further the glory of God. God created
because God wanted to create, and beyond that, God created beings capable of
interacting with him because he desired both love and worship from them. As Christians, heirs to the
philosophy/worldview of Judaism, we know why
we are here. We have a purpose and a
direction given to us by faith. Do we
also know, from Holy Scripture, how and when?
It was
assumed that we did, that such questions had easy answers related to divine
fiat in the not too distant past. And
then science came into its maturity and threw those assumptions into
confusion. Astronomy, archaeology,
biology, chemistry, physics, and more have each taken a chunk out of the
assumption that God created the universe, as we see it today, a few thousand
years before the time of Abraham. What
then ought to be the response of faith to these assertions by science?
Denial
was the first response of the Church, beginning with Galileo and Copernicus,
and denial still has a prominent role in various Christian responses.
These responses range from saying that the
evidence proposed by scientists is
wrong (either a claim of ignorance on the part of scientists who don’t
understand their own fields, or a conspiracy theory by them to falsify their
findings), to saying that the evidence is indeed what it is, but that the
interpretation is wrong because the
evidence itself is a ruse, a type of red herring, placed there by either God or
the devil to lead non-believers astray.
In other words, the evidence is real that the universe is billions of
years old, but it should be ignored.
In
the discussion of Creation, a denial/aggression against science stance
typically involves an attempt to take the text of Genesis “literally” (a word
to be used with great caution in Biblical interpretation as it means different
things to different people and is often abused as a cudgel against those who
interpret a text differently), as in “literally six twenty-four-hour days”.
It also involves viewing the description of
the six days of creation as a how-to guide explaining what God did and the
order/time frame he did it in.
In this
view there is no room for an old universe, no room for a Big Bang, and
certainly no room for any type of evolutionary processes.
As Gordon Glover wrote in
Beyond the Firmament, Understanding Science and the Theology of Creation, “If we raise our children to believe that
supernatural explanations are in competition with natural ones, we are
basically entrusting their salvation to ignorance and incredulity.” (P. 32) If
Glover’s characterization of the various forms of denial offends you, keep
reading and keep thinking.
The second response of
portions of the Church to the advancements of science in relation to Creation
was accommodation. If science says that
the universe is billions of years old, the response is to find collaboration
for that finding in the text of Genesis.
Thus Gap Theory and Day-Age Theory attempt to postulate an alliance
between science and faith by molding the interpretation of Genesis to fit
scientific theory. So, rather than
insisting upon a Young Earth like those antagonistic to science, accommodation
allows for an old one, viewing either time gaps between various points in the
story, or the “days” of Creation as the equivalent of eons. Coupled with this interpretation are things
like Intelligent Design and Theistic Evolution which preserve a role for God,
behind the scenes as the architect, of the natural processes described by
science. Thus accommodation of Genesis
with science no longer takes the text “literally”, but allows for both a Big
Bang and Evolutionary processes, provided that God is the unseen force behind
it all. This might seem like a win-win
scenario, one in which the text of Scripture still has something to contribute
while science is not viewed as an enemy, provided that either Gap Theory or
Day-Age Theory is a viable interpretation of the text of Genesis, an important
caveat.
The
third response, ignoring what science has to say about the origins of the
cosmos and humanity, is a self-defeating retreat that will be, at best, a Pyrrhic
victory, like that of the Church over Galileo in 1633, a short-sighted decision
whose negative consequences the Church continues to reap.
But
what if there is another option, one that retains a faithful commitment to the
text of Holy Scripture and works within the framework of the plain meaning of
the text, that treats it as God’s Word given to mankind according to his
purposes (not ours), but that at the same time doesn’t promote an attitude of
hostility to science, nor attempt to force them to exist in the same space, and
also doesn’t resort to burying one’s head in the sand or yelling, “Not
listening! Not listening!” For that to be the way forward, we would need
to consider what the purpose of
Genesis 1-3 was when it was written, how it was received by its original audience, and which questions
it was intended to answer among our most common: How, when, and why. In the end, it is possible that we can be more faithful to the text of Scripture
by admitting that it answers everything we need to know about why (and who), but much less than we had assumed about how and when.
Perhaps
Genesis 1-3 is the story of how God gave the world its functions, taking it
from formlessness to usefulness, and setting it up for humanity with God as its
sovereign.
Instead of a how-to guide,
the text of Genesis 1-3 can be viewed as a Cosmic Temple Inauguration (see John
Walton’s
The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate), one in which God assigns
functions to things he had already created, assigns names to them, and then on
the Seventh Day takes his “rest” with the Cosmos as his temple and mankind as
his steward.
This viewpoint has the very
positive aspect of being compatible with the viewpoints of those living in the
Near East in the Ancient World, as most of the ancient accounts which still
exist from that area/period involve the ordering of chaos into purpose by a
god(s).
In that vein, the Genesis
account is not different from them except in its understood assumption that
only one God, the true God, is involved, and the clear lack of effort required
by that God to make the Cosmos orderly, mere commands suffice to accomplish it.
To the people of Israel being led by Moses
out of bondage, then, the story of Genesis would not be odd when compared to
those told by the Egyptians or Babylonians except for its monotheism and the
universal sovereignty claimed by God (as opposed to the typical local/shared
sovereignty of the pantheon of gods).
In
other words, perhaps God utilized a format for explaining humanity’s role/purpose
that made sense to the ancient people he was telling it to rather than a format
that would answer all of the questions asked of it by a naturalistic/materialistic
society 3,500 years later.
That might
seem like an easy point to arrive at, but human beings have a hard time setting
aside their own worldviews in order to see things from the perspective of
another culture or time period.
Modern
human beings are so immersed in the post-Enlightenment naturalistic worldview
of an ascendant science that we by default view ancient documents through our interpretive
lens without even knowing it.
Why
would God choose to focus upon the functionality of the Cosmos in the account
given to Moses rather than an explanation of the material origins of the
universe? Most importantly, it fit his
purpose, which was not to share with his people how he created the Cosmos, but
why. When Job asked God for an
explanation which his experience of injustice certainly seemed worthy of, he
wasn’t given one, in part because God told Job that he did not have the
capacity to understand the answers to his questions. The collective human wisdom of modern science
has scratched the surface of answering questions of how and when, and much
remains beyond our grasp; in what way would a materialistic/scientific
explanation be possible or even useful to those who lived 3,500 years ago? When God brought his people out of Egypt with
signs and wonders, he didn’t bother to explain to them how he turned Nile to
blood or where the plagues of locusts or gnats came from. How was immaterial, why was the key; they were
signs of God’s power and warnings to Pharaoh.
The purpose of being told
that God is responsible for an event in history (like Creation or the Plagues
upon Egypt) is so that humanity can recognize God’s power, submit to his
authority, and worship him. The purpose
is not to satisfy our curiosity, to answer all of our questions, or to convince
the skeptical, as if God’s revelation of himself to us has to be on our terms;
the “gap” between God’s proclamation (revelation) of his activity and our own
understanding of it is the place filled by Faith. If answers to our questions are available, that’s
fine, but we don’t need them when we put our trust in the faithfulness of God. We don’t need to know how and when if we know who and why.
If
Genesis is indeed not an attempt by God to explain how/when he created the
Cosmos, including humanity, it leaves Christians free to accept scientific
explanations if they prove plausible, and if those explanations are later
refined or rejected thanks to new evidence or new theories, to not have that
process impact our faith. Faith is no
longer on defense against science, forever trying to fend off its attacks, nor
is it endlessly trying to accommodate science, hoping to be able to squeeze the
latest developments in numerous scientific fields into the sparse text of
Genesis 1-3. Christians are thus free to
focus upon the most important question: Why did God create us, however and
whenever he did so, and what does that tell us about the purpose of our
lives? God is still the ultimate cause,
God is still the intelligence behind the natural laws set up by his hand and
maintained by his will, and God remains the final destination of each human
soul. Science cannot answer questions of
why, it never could and it never will.
Philosophy and Religion are not scientific fields, they seek to answer
questions beyond the materialistic realm of science, questions that cannot be
verified or disproved by experimentation.
These are the questions which have been of the utmost importance to
humanity throughout the ages. Our
ancient ancestors in the faith, the children of Abraham, had comparatively
little scientific knowledge to work with, but it did not impact their ability
to be a people of faith, dependent upon God and in obedience to his will. Today we know many things about how the
natural world works, but the truly important questions remain dependent upon
revelation from the spiritual realm.
Faith
and Science are not enemies, nor are they bosom buddies, and they don’t have to
be strangers; they answer different questions in different ways. Science can make our lives better, faith
makes our lives meaningful. Science can
fix some of the problems that humanity has brought upon itself, faith can fix
humanity itself. Science can expand what we can do, faith can
tell us what we should do. Science if forever learning and growing, faith
rests upon a bedrock of Truth that stretches back beyond Abraham and calls us
to live righteous lives by faith just as did our ancestors in the faith.
