Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [25]
Where does that leave Darwin and his Origin of Species? The forces of science are still constantly pitted against the forces of religion. Aided by a media that loves to reduce complex issues to the simplicity of a Super Bowl, there is an ongoing contest between scientific knowledge and faith. Science is generally depicted in the media as dispassionate, rational, and nonbelieving. Religious people are generally represented in the media as conservative, backwards, trailer-park dwellers. Fundamentalists and “creationists” are usually featured only when attempting to get public schools to teach the Genesis version of the Creation alongside biology and evolutionary theory or eliminate Halloween celebrations from schools as a form of Satanic worship. Often these people are caught in the media spotlight when they refuse a child medical treatment out of their belief in the healing power of prayer and a faith in “God’s will” being done. In “good faith,” these people still hold tightly to their purely literal view of the Bible and history. The contest between these two sides is usually presented as one with no middle ground—that wouldn’t make good headlines.
Yet a majority of scientists recently surveyed holds some religious beliefs, including a belief in God, as a New York Times article reported in 1997. The proportion of “believing” scientists hasn’t changed much since a similar survey of scientists was conducted in the 1920s. And at another extreme, Pope John Paul II has recognized the validity of teaching Darwin’s theory of evolution. So the challenge remains, more than a century after Darwin first proposed the ideas that formed the basis for modern evolutionary theory: can science and religion coexist? Nowhere is that battle more clearly defined than in the question over the Divine Creation. As many creationists like to point out, evolution is “just a theory.” And that’s true. In a purely scientific sense, all theories can only be disproven. But theories can also be supported by evidence. And the past hundred years have provided ample evidence to support and expand the scientific view, not only of human origins but of the origin of the universe. Putting Genesis in a biology or genetics class, however, makes about as much sense as teaching the changing of water into wine, Jesus’ first miracle, in a chemistry class. Or calling a bat a “bird” because the book of Leviticus lists bats among flying creatures that may not be eaten.
But that does not mean that scientific and religious theory cannot somehow be brought together. As biblical scholar J. R. Porter writes: “The extended descriptions of creation…are not to be viewed as providing a scientific account of the origin of the universe. They are religious statements, designed to show God’s glory and greatness, the result of theological reflection by which the older mythology was radically transformed to express Israel’s distinctive faith.” Genesis should be in our classrooms. Perhaps it can be placed alongside all the other religious and legendary creation stories in a comparative literature class.
As science explores further and further past the “known” world, whether it means seeing 13 billion years into the universe’s past, or using DNA strains to push humankind’s origins back another million years, or discovering the basic ingredients for life in a chemical stew that spews out of volcanoes at the bottom of the ocean, science is ultimately left with more questions. The notion that the universe is all energy has forced scientists who deal in the astonishing world of quantum physics to look past their equations to a universal creative force.