In the endless fight over creation versus science, what if both sides were right?
On Feb. 24, David MacMillan, who describes himself as a former creationist turned science advocate, wrote a guest op-ed for the Herald-Leader plugging an independent documentary, “We Believe In Dinosaurs,” that was broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens.
The film took issue with the Ark Encounter theme park in Williamstown. The Ark Encounter upholds as literally true the Genesis account of a six-day creation of Earth.
A few days later Ken Ham, the CEO of Answers in Genesis, the organization that operates the Ark Encounter, fired back with an op-ed of his own.
Ham disagreed with both “We Believe In Dinosaurs” and with MacMillan’s essay that praised it.
The documentary, MacMillan’s op-ed and Ham’s response all centered around disputes over the financial promises the Ark Encounter’s founders made to locals and the financial incentives the project received.
But make no mistake, the underlying argument is about whether 21st- century Americans should put their faith in religion or in science.
Some conservative Christians such as Ham think that if the Bible says the Earth was created in six days, then that means exactly what the book says: it took six, 24-hour days. Not five days. Not nine days. Certainly not billions of years.
To believe anything else is to deny not only the factual accuracy of Genesis, they say, but to destroy the credibility of the whole Bible. If the Bible is wrong in one fact, it might be wrong on anything or everything.
(I should point out that millions of other Christians wouldn’t see it that way. But that’s another column.)
Scientists largely don’t ascribe to Genesis as their urtext. They say Earth is roughly 4.5 billion years old, afloat in a universe that started about 13.8 billion years ago.
They believe in the Big Bang and evolution.
And never shall the two philosophical factions meet. Or so you’d think.
Granted, no one has asked my opinion on this, but lack of demand has never stopped me from giving my two cents’ worth.
Actually, my opinion has several parts.
The first part is that I don’t overly care whether the Genesis account of creation is historically or scientifically accurate.
My academic background is in English literature, among other things, and I’m joyously comfortable with stories that are more metaphorical (or metaphysical) than factual.
I find plenty in the Genesis story to ponder—that a benevolent God created a bountiful world for humans to enjoy alongside him, but that through our pride and short-sightedness we messed it up. And we continue to mess it up.
The specific calendar Genesis uses doesn’t matter much to me. It just doesn’t.
Second, I’m not scientifically gifted, but I tend to trust science in most matters. The scientific method has an impressive record.
It enables aircraft weighing many tons to somehow soar five miles up in the air at 600 miles an hour, a feat that still amazes me. I flip a switch on my wall in the dead of night, and the room is instantly filled with light. I can pick up my wireless phone and watch my grandkids dancing in their living room 50 miles away.
That’s science. Good stuff, mainly. I’m for it.
Third, I’m not at all sure that, when it comes to God and the universe, either religion or science has arrived at many answers.
Some years ago I read a book called “Genesis and the Big Bang” by a renowned Israeli physicist and Orthodox Jew named Gerald Schroeder.
I comprehended, oh, maybe half the book. Later I loaned it to someone and never got it back, so I’m writing this from memory. Faulty memory.
But basically Schroeder explained that scientists already know time isn’t linear as once assumed. It stretches, bends, speeds up, slows down. It exists across—or perhaps exists across, I’m not sure—multiple dimensions.
Given what’s known about time, he said, the very same event could take six days and also take billions of years, depending on which point you happen to be looking at it from. It’s not a matter of which is literally true—they could both be literally true. Look at it from over here, it’s six days. Look at it from over there, it’s billions of years.
Schroeder said the fight between Genesis and the Big Bang is unnecessary. In theory, both accounts could be speaking accurately of the very same beginning.
I still think about that.
As much as I believe in both the Bible and the revelations of science, I also believe in the limitations of human knowledge.
We are 7 billion atoms on a planet that is itself comparable to a dime dropped from a helicopter into a cosmos the size of the Himalayan Mountains. Yet we pretend to comprehend how it all came to be.
We serve a God who created, inhabits and directs this cosmos, and yet imagine he’s held captive by our dogmas.
I suspect the great mysteries we’ve unraveled so far—Schroeder’s observations about time, for example—will someday seem about as profound as the gurgling of infants.
Community columnist Paul Prather is pastor of Bethesda Church near Mount Sterling. He can be reached at pratpd@yahoo.com.
This story was originally published March 4, 2020 at 12:41 PM with the headline "In the endless fight over creation versus science, what if both sides were right?."