The saddest result of the ongoing debates over whether Evolution or Creation should be taught in school is that science winds up pitted against God - or God against science, as if God were a despiser of knowledge, as if God were fearful of learning. God loves knowledge, and understands the intricacies of the subatomic, genes, and mitochondria, the dizzying expanses of the galaxies, black holes and red shift with total clarity. So the more we know, the closer we get to the mind of God.
Galileo, hauled before a Church tribunal and threatened with excommunication, wrote to a friend, "I believe the intention of the Holy Bible is to persuade us toward salvation, something science could never do. But I do not think we must believe that the same God who gave us our intellect would have us put it aside and not use it." God, in fact, is gently patient with our lack of knowledge. John Calvin was right: in Bible times, no one could have made the slightest sense of a scientific explanation of how the world was made - so God accommodated himself to their limited understanding, just as God does to ours today.
Genesis isn't a physics or biology textbook: it is theology, it is preaching, it is declaring who fashioned it all, who over billions of years wove it all together, and did so because God is "the Love that moves the stars" (Dante). Yes, there is a bad kind of science that devises a closed system of cause and effect and tries to shove God out of the picture; but God's system is open, shoving no one aside, embracing everything. The lone threat science poses to faith is in the illusion that we are masters of the universe, that we can solve all problems, that the world exists so I can manipulate it for something I want. But then science blows my mind, and humbles me, and I admit I am not Atlas: I cannot hoist the world on my shoulders. It's just too big. We need a God to manage it; we need a God who is Love.
Love does not wind up a world and leave it ticking on its own. Some form of evolution, far from shoving God out of the picture, helps us imagine God not merely as preserving some fixed order, but in continuing to create the concoct new wonders. Science is a tutor that can deepen our faith. God's power is unfathomably immense! Annie Dillard reminds us to "look at the horsehair worm, a yard long and thin as a thread, whipping through a pond... Look at a turtle under ice breathing through its pumping cloaca. Look at the fruit of the osage orange tree, big as a grapefruit, convoluted as any human brain. Look at practically anything - the coot's feet, the mantis's face, a banana, the human ear - and see that not only did the creator create everything, but that he is apt to create anything. He'll stop at nothing. There is no one standing over evolution with a blue pencil to say 'Not that one, there, is absolutely ridiculous, and I won't have it.'" The Creator was apt even to make me, and you, and a carpenter's son in a little hole in the wall in Palestine and crown him as the absolutely ridiculous Savior on a cross.
James
james@mpumc.org
Sunday's sermon on God as Creator, Genesis 1 and Psalm 8, may be heard on our web site by clicking here.
The complete email series on Bible Questions can be found if you click here.
Coming up:
eBibleQuestions10 - Who invented the idea of Original Sin?
eBibleQuestions11 - Why would Israel be God's Chosen People?
eBibleQuestions12 - Does God harden hearts?
eBibleQuestions13 - What about the Laws of the Old Testament?
eBibleQuestions14 - Why so much warfare in the Bible?
eBibleQuestions15 - What can archaeology tell us? and not tell us?
