There are many who think that truth exists only in our reason and our experience, while others think that in order to be faithful to the biblical texts, they must throw reason and experience out the window. However, both viewpoints are missing the bigger picture and are too narrow a view of both God and science.
Can Science Alone Answer Questions About Life?
At some point during the 19th century, it was decided that truth came in only one shape: data, numbers and equations. While these things are true (2+2=4 is indeed true) this is not the ONLY way to talk about truth. Poetic truth, story truth and parabolic truth are often more profoundly true in terms of ramifications. Science may help one understand the methodology behind how the world works, but science does not inform one of ethics, morals and philosophical understandings of what exactly it is that is being observed or how to handle the knowledge one is acquiring.
Additionally, one of the greatest misunderstandings of science is that science deals with fact alone. Since all data/fact must be interpreted, science is always a combination of both fact and opinion. While science can allow one to view the laws of nature, it gives little information about who or what is behind those laws. The only conclusion one draws from observation of nature alone is: everything dies. This was Darwin’s conclusion as he came into contact with God’s “law,” and why his conclusions resulted in negating God from the processes of life. What science cannot deliver, but scripture can, is who is behind these laws and what this entity behind the laws wants from us as human beings—and what God has to say about and is doing about death. This truth can only be revealed through scripture.
Is There Any Scientific Truth in the Bible?
Of course. The aim of the religious quest, like the scientific quest, is to gain understanding about the world we live in. The writers of the bible were profoundly engaged with concerns regarding how the world worked. In fact, prior to the Enlightenment, most scientific breakthroughs and theories originated with people who were also theologians. Sir Isaac Newton is best known for his “discovery” of gravity, yet he wrote many more books on theology and church history than he ever did about science and mathematics. To say that the bible is about the “why” and science is about the “how” is much too simplistic an understanding. The bible is deeply concerned with the question of “how” as well as “why,” but it employs the understandings of its day and context as well as divine revelation. It invites the reader to understand the world around them on a much deeper level.
Don’t Genesis and Evolution Contradict One Another?
It depends on how one understands the point and purpose of the Genesis creation accounts. Many Christians state that they believe in the “literal” truth of Genesis 1. But what is meant by this? Genesis 1 is a poetic text that reveals a definite truth—“In the beginning, God…”—and stands in stark contrast against the other creation myths of its day (in particular, the Babylonian Enuma Elish). Questions that must be engaged when reading Genesis 1 are: "Why was it written? What was its main purpose?" To thousands of years later repudiate scientific theories regarding the age of the earth? Or to answer the question regarding the nature of God and God’s relationship with humanity? Most ancient near eastern creation myths portrayed the gods as petty, spiteful beings that created humanity either to be slaves or were simply by-products of some great battle. Either way, the relationship between the divine and human was hostile from the beginning.
Genesis, by contrast, reveals a very different God who created not out of anger, accident or bloodshed, but out of love and viewed creation as “good.” Humanity was not created for a life of servitude or amusement, but to be in relationship with the divine and even to share in the divine Sabbath. God's ordering of chaos had a point and a purpose that ultimately resulted in relationship. To narrow this text down to only a “literal” step-by-step understanding of creation causes one to lose the overarching statement of Genesis that reveals God’s word breaking through nature to reveal something nature itself can never give. Using the bible to debate the validity of a scientific theory that may or may not be true misses the larger argument being engaged in Genesis.[1] That argument is: "who is God, what does this God do, and what does this God have to do with me?"
Doesn’t Accepting Biblical Truth Defy Reason and Experience?
While granted, there are certain elements to the divine that balk against human reason (as Paul points out in 1 Corinthians, the cross is foolishness in regards to human wisdom, yet it is through this “foolishness” that God’s power is revealed so completely), that does not mean these issues should not still be in conversation with one's reason and experience. While there are definitely things that can be known and can be learned from reason and experience, relying solely on reason and experience is, as Mark Allan Powell states, like trying to sit on a two-legged stool.[2] Utilizing only these two sources of knowledge does not provide a sturdy or reliable grasp of the truth. The third leg, divine revelation, is necessary to understand truths that reason and experience can never provide. Scripture thus gives one a perspective through which one may analyze and understand his/her reason and experience.
[1] For further reading regarding the Christian argument for evolution: John Polkinghorne, Quarks, Chaos and Christianity, (New York: Crossroad Classic, 1995); For further reading regarding the argument against evolution: Lee Strobel, The Case for a Creator, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004)
[2] Diane Jacobson, Mark Allan Powell, and Stanley N. Olson, Opening the Book of Faith, (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2008) 24-25
