How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [69]
The lengths some will go to in the endeavor to prove their faith strains credulity. Physicist Gerald Schroeder, in his 1997 book The Science of God, offers perhaps the most painfully contorted attempt to squeeze modern science into the Bible. According to Schroeder, modern scientists have discovered what ancient Jewish scholars always knew: Genesis describes the large-scale sequence of evolutionary change (sea creatures to land animals to mammals to man); the six days of creation perfectly match the description of the creation of a fifteen-billion-year-old universe (in relativistic time one day is equal to a couple of billion years); and medieval Kabalists like the Jewish scholar Nahmanides somehow got it all right. “With the insights of Albert Einstein,” says Schroeder, “we have discovered in the six days of Genesis the billions of years during which the universe developed.” How can a day be as a billion years? “The million-million-factor difference between our local perception of time and Genesis cosmic time is an average for the six days of creation. As discussed, it derives from the approximate million-millionfold stretching of light waves as the universe expanded.” Faith and reason are reconciled, Schroeder concludes: “Genesis and science are both correct. When one asks if six days or fifteen billion years passed before the appearance of humankind, the correct answer is ‘yes.’”
The fatal flaw in this argument is that the universe’s age is only known within a factor of 2 (one often sees figure ranges reported such as ten to twenty billion years). This means that the days of Genesis, if defended scientifically, could have been anywhere from three to nine days. Since Schroeder argues that it must be six days (because, de facto, like everyone in this genre he begins with the assumption that the Bible must be true), the jig is up if the (still inconclusive) scientific evidence comes in at a figure at odds with Genesis.
A deeper and more troubling problem in this and other like-minded books is that Genesis is neither correct nor incorrect, because it is not a book of cosmology. Genesis is a cosmogony—a mythic tale of origins—and like all cosmogonies (for example, Egyptian, Hindu, Greek, Roman, Inuit, Polynesian, Mayan, Native American) it is neither true nor false because these evaluative terms are reserved for statements of fact, not myths and stories. Sure, if you stretch your imagination and play fast and loose with both the story and the science, you can find gross similarities between myth and nature. Comparing Genesis time to cosmic time is like comparing Taoism to quantum mechanics—the fact that they both speak of wholeness and integration means nothing more than that the author has found linguistic and conceptual similarities. But these comparisons do not prove anything, other than that the human mind is adept at finding and matching patterns.
Even those who do not consider themselves religious in any traditional way are attracted to some of these arguments for what they might imply about the possible existence of some sort of higher intelligence or human spirituality. In Skeptics and True Believers, physicist and astronomer Chet Raymo offers a very measured and reasonable discussion of the relationship between science and religion. Raymo considers himself “a thoroughgoing Skeptic who believes that words like God, soul, sacred, spirituality, sacrament, and grace can retain currency in an age of science, once we strip them of outworn overlays of anthropomorphic and animistic meaning. Like many others in today’s society, I hunger for a faith that is open to the new cosmology—skeptical, empirical, ecumenical, and ecological—without sacrificing historical vernaculars of spirituality and liturgical expression.” Along similar lines, Bruce Mazet, who has no belief whatsoever in the anthropomorphic Judaeo-Christian God, presented in the pages of Skeptic, “A Case for God.” Mazet reviewed the fine-tuned universe