Some folks seem to think there is a war between science and
religion. There isn’t. The war is between militant scientism and ultra-conservative
strict fundamentalism. “Scientism” is the belief that science and the
scientific method are the best way to render the truth about reality. Militant scientism is the belief that
science and the scientific method are the only way to discern the truth about
reality. Whether you are a theistic, an agnostic, or an atheistic scientist,
you rule out supernatural explanations for events. All three types of scientists rule out the supernatural because
in science “. . . and then a miracle happened” is not a very helpful piece of
data. Theistic scientists do not rule out the possibility of the supernatural
in non-scientific areas, such as matters of faith. Atheistic scientists rule
out the possibility of the supernatural in all areas, and atheistic scientists
who subscribe to a “theology” of militant scientism are quite disagreeable
about their nonbelief, as are many ultra-conservative strict fundamentalists.
Today’s most hotly contested battle is between hard-core Darwinian
evolutionists and young Earth creationists. These two schools of thought are irreconcilable.
And they are both wrong. You can be a
Darwinian evolutionist and a Christian, as evidenced by books like Michael Dowd’s
Thank God for Evolution: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will
Transform Your Life and Our World. History and current events are full of
the stories of men and women of faith who have made and are making significant
contributions to science. And Christians don’t need to be ultra-conservative strict
fundamentalists who believe in a six-calendar-day creation and a 6,000-year-old
Earth. For me, John 3:16 is all the theology I really need.
Even before the New Testament was written, Jewish scholars
looked at the Old Testament as a book which was not necessarily absolutely
literally true. The Jewish historian Josephus, when writing about the creation,
ventured the opinion that Moses was “writing philosophically.” In other words, some
of the stories in the Torah, while not literally true, taught important
spiritual truths. The Jewish philosopher-theologian Philo wrote that Biblical
truth was often found in allegory rather than literal history.
The early Christian fathers were open to non-literal
interpretations of scripture. Saint Augustine wrote about four levels of meaning
in scripture: The literal (historical) meaning, the typological (allegorical)
meaning, the tropological (moral) meaning, and the anagogical (spiritual)
meaning. He also wrote that the literal meaning of a passage of scripture was
often the hardest to cipher out. Saint Augustine wrote a book, The Literal
Meaning of Genesis, in which he argued that the world came into being in a
fashion very similar to the Big Bang. As a matter of fact, a man of the cloth, Father
Georges Henry Joseph Edouard Lemaitre first advanced the Big Bang Theory in 1927.
Of course, he didn’t call it the “Big Bang Theory.” He theorized that the
Universe came into existence from a “primeval atom” or a “cosmic egg.” His idea
was ridiculed by the atheistic astronomer Frederick Hoyle. Hoyle used the term “Big
Bang” as a slur against Father Lemaitre’s “idiotic” theory.
Evolution was a theory long before Charles Darwin came
along. What he did was argue that the
engine driving evolution was “natural selection,” or “survival of the fittest.”
Both before and after Darwin many clerics affirmed evolution but argued that
God drove evolution through a process of “theistic evolution” or “evolutionary
creation.”
Thus, the argument between materialistic evolution by
natural selection and young earth creationism is a false dichotomy. There are
many different nuances of understanding between the two poles.
I have no problem
with evolution, but I am highly skeptical of “evolution by natural selection.” I
cannot accept the proposition that we are here because of a chain of random accidents.
Some atheists have had trouble swallowing that theory. Henri Bergson, in his
book Creative Evolution, argued that evolution was driven by a
non-theistic “elan vital” or “life force.”
I have my own ideas about the mechanism driving evolution,
and they are not incompatible with the belief that God created the Universe. I’ll
talk about my theory in another post. Soon, I hope.
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