I grew up in a Christian (UCC) household. However, even at five years old I was aware there was a discrepancy between the bible and my own knowledge.
I loved dinosaurs. I could name almost all of the major ones. I had snuck to into the television room at the babysitter’s house one day to see Jurassic Park on the screen. I was upset that I got kicked out because I wanted to watch the dinosaurs. (I did not understand at the time that the movie would likely give my nightmare-prone younger self, well, nightmares.)
So imagine my surprise when I’m told that God created the world in a week.
“Where are the dinosaurs?” I asked my Sunday school teacher.
“There aren’t any.”
Under the impression that my Sunday school teacher at the time was just mean, I thought about it on my own. (This same Sunday school teacher had told me that I couldn’t have been drawing water in a glass once because “… water is clear, and you colored your glass blue. It must be grape juice.” I never did like her after that. How else was I supposed to draw water? By leaving it empty? I was five!) I eventually came to the conclusion that clearly the bible was just metaphor. If a million dollars to God seemed like a penny, then clearly a week to God must have been millions and billions of years.
And if that were true, then during the day in which God was creating creatures he clearly had time to allow evolution to happen.
Of course, I realize I am saying some of this with 20/20 hindsight as to what I think I was thinking. I’m pretty sure my five year old thought process was more like: “Well, each day was a million years, and clearly that fixes everything.” It doesn’t completely cover the concept, but it was close enough that it formed the basis of my understanding of Christianity for most of the rest of my life.
I realize that for many, this reconciliation between religion and evolution will probably never occur. To switch up ideas which you have grown up with will be like yanking the rug out from under your feet. Many people have taken the bible so literally that even faced with evidence it is easier to believe that the evidence is faked, or that there isn’t enough evidence. The debate last night seems to have brought on a storm of “there’s-only-one-Lucy-therefore-not-evidence-of-human-evolution”. I will write about human evolutionary evidence another time. (It is one of my favorite topics.)
My all time favorite protestation of evolution is: “Why are you teaching the theory of evolution as a fact? You can’t prove a theory.”
Well, no. We don’t have evidence that disproves evolution. We do have evidence to support evolution. We’ve seen evolution at work in artificial selection of breeding animals. We’ve seen evolution at work in the Galapagos. We’ve seen fossil evidence of creatures that no longer exist. But we can’t actually test evolution with science experiments. Evolution relies heavily on mutations that spontaneously occur and happen to be good for the species. This is Darwin’s theory of natural selection. (Not “survival of the fittest”. Darwin actually really hated that phrase.)
My issue is when individuals see fit to teach the bible as a legitimate “scientific theory”. There is no fossil out there that would prove “creationism”. I will not dispute the idea of a mutation being caused by a God. I will not dispute the idea of God being the one to cause the big bang. A force of some kind probably did cause them – whether it’s a scientific force (that we have yet to find and prove the existence of) or God.
I suppose what I’m trying to say here is that there are things scientists still can’t explain. And in those spaces, it’s easy to leave a spot for God – if you realize that our knowledge of both religion and science are constantly evolving. God gave us the ability to explore our world – so why not use those powers to explore it? Don’t just shut yourselves off from the world and say, “It can’t be because God says in the bible it can’t be.” If you’ve ever read Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons, this is a highlighting point of that book. That there is a way to put both of them together, because we won’t always be able to explain everything.
Even Phil Plait, a writer for Slate, has commented on this need for us to step up to the plate and realize that the real problem is that American scientists are making it sound like it’s a case for science or religion. We are essentially attacking the Christian religion, and that’s why they’ve become so adamant that we ought to teach creationism in schools.
I can’t stress this enough. The conflict over the teaching of evolution is based on the false assumption that evolution is antagonistic to religion. This is why, I think, evolution is so vehemently opposed by so many in the United States. The attacks on the specifics of evolution—the claims about irreducibility of the eye, for example, or other such incorrect statements—are a symptom, not a cause. I can talk about how we know the Universe is old until the Universe is substantially older and not convince someone whose heels are dug in. But if we can show them that the idea of evolution is not contrary to their faith, then we will make far, far more progress. ~Phil Plait, Slate‘s Bad Astronomy Blog, 5 Feb 2014
I have struggled for most of my life to understand why people couldn’t reconcile the two when I was able to at five years old. And I’ve come to the conclusion that unlike many of these people, I have never felt threatened enough by science to think that it would completely cancel out my faith. If anything, I think the opposite has occurred. I’ve felt threatened by religion’s willingness to obliterate the science I believe in. But I believe in science. And the only way for me to rest easy was to understand the same theory I developed as a five year old – that the bible was never meant to be taken literally.
I like science. Science gives us a lot of the whys and hows. Not all of them, but many of them. Science gives us a method of exploring the universe that puts it in our own hands. Yes, it’s logical. The thing I like about logical is that it’s reliable. Sometimes the world breaks out of the logical patterns that we hold dear – but those unexpected deviations are just as beautiful as the patterns. And you know what? I think a creator should take credit for those patterns. Why do bubbles make circles and not squares? Because that’s the way this universe works.
And somewhere out there, there might even be a parallel universe in which God decided that bubbles should be squares.