Intro to Religion
Intro to Religion
I am going to attempt to show that the events in Genesis are more scientifically correct than previously thought, and that science and religion should work together to explain our being here. The arguments traditionally used to show differences that I will use to show similarities are the time difference, the evolutionary process, and the time man has reported to have been on earth. Finally, I will show some practical applications to this knowledge.
The biggest difference between science and Genesis is time. Science says that the Universe is 15 billion years old. Genesis says that five days preceded the time that God first started forming the Universe to the time Adam, the first man, appeared. According to the Bible, Adam came into existence approximately 5700 years ago. This is quite a time difference to make up. Did the formation of the universe take 15 billion years or six days? The answer, yes. Gerald L. Schroeder used Albert Einstein's law of relativity to prove that both of these time periods is correct. As Schroeder said, "... The same sequence of events that encompass the time period between "the beginning" and the appearance of mankind did take six days and 15 billion years -- simultaneously -- starting at the same point and finishing at the same point."1
I won't go into the specifics of relativity because that alone would take up a whole paper, but relativity says that a person's perception of time is relative to that person's movement through time. Every point in the universe experiences time at a slightly different rate, but it all seems natural to the observer. So to God, six days may pass while 15 billion days pass by on our time line. Both are right. Scripture backs this up. 2 Peter 3:8 says, "Do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord, a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years are like a day." Sounds like relativity to me.
Now that time is out of the way, we shall move on to evolution. Darwin's theory of evolution is well known today and is taken as scientific truth. There are, however, missing links that have not been found. It has been over 100 years since Darwin proposed that theory and the missing links are still just as missing now as they were then. Also, evolution has seemed to stop. This was pointed out to anyone who has ever watched the movie "Jurassic Park." In that movie, the scientists got the DNA for cloning by finding mosquitoes caught in petrified sap. The cloning part is fiction, the mosquitoes in the sap aren't. In the movie, it states that mosquitoes have gone basically unchanged over the last 65 million years. Think about this for a minute. 65 million years of virtually no evolution. That means either A) the mosquito is the highest lifeform that can be achieved, B) evolution has spontaneously stopped somewhere along the line, or C) evolution is not the way things happened. Assuming for a moment that a person was standing on the earth with God's perspective of time during the formation of the earth. He would not see the single-celled creatures start to form, he would only see things as they became visible to him. The earliest plants would appear in the oceans but would move up onto the land and be visible to our observer on the third day. These plants, both under the sea and over the land, would work to clear up the atmosphere, allowing the sun and the moon to be visible on the surface of the earth on the fourth day. The formation of the atmosphere would also allow the seas to suddenly fill up with fish on the fifth day, and plants and animals would appear on land in the sixth day. Science says that life started in the oceans as unicellular creatures or plants, then got bigger. As the atmosphere formed, the plants moved out of the seas and onto the land. Then, in the seas, animal life started forming and growing, and eventually, moving up out of the sea and onto the land.
Evolution also goes against one of the very basic laws that exists in the universe: chaos. Chaos states that everything should always move to a state of disorder, that is, if something is organized, it should become disorganized over time. Life is dependent on the highly complex and organized state of matter in our lives. However, it is not natural. If, billions of years ago, inorganic matter did organize into life, chaos should have broken instead of letting it copy itself and then become more complex.2
The order of evolution works, but evolution itself just doesn't work. As Schroeder stated, "There is a new awareness in the scientific community that the simple evolutionary approach of inorganic chemistry leading to the biochemical requires modification."3
Another point of contention between the scientific and religious community is the length of time man has been on the earth. Science and archaeology have both found evidence that man has existed on the earth for as long as 300,000 years. This is a vast difference from the 5700 years described in Genesis, and relativity doesn't apply. I will have to defer this entire argument to Schroeder because I can't find his sources. He has found a commentary on Genesis written by a person named Nahmanides who lived from 1194-1270 C.E. He states that beings similar to humans existed on the earth before Adam, but they weren't technically human. They had most of the physical characteristics of humans, but they had no soul. Nahmanides believes that when God said "Let us make man in our image," in Genesis 1:26, he wasn't referring to physical characteristics, but the soul. Genesis 2:7 says, "the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being." This breath of life was placed only in Adam and not the other animals. This is what makes humans unique to the rest of the animals.4
The rift between science and Genesis has been a wide one, and has been a point of contention for years. This rift came to a head in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. The famous Monkey/Scopes Trial took place. A teacher at the junior high school in Dayton tried to teach the evolutionary theory to his biology class instead of the traditional creationist view. The school system took him to court. The idea in that trial was the Bible could not be taken too literally.5
Science has taken its stand on one side of the issue, Religion has taken its stand on the other. The middle is the correct stand to take.
Nahmanides, who I brought up before, does an excellent job of showing that science and religion can coexist. Remember, he lived from 1194-1270 C.E. He used the original Hebrew texts and discovered that, at the beginning, all matter in creation was compressed into a very small spot, smaller than a mustard seed.6
This very closely fits the scientific description of the Big Bang, which is a relatively new cosmological theory.
My conclusion is that science and religion are two ways of explaining the same events. The time in which each describes the events that took place are relative, the evolutionary theory is mistaken, and humanoids have existed longer than humans. These two very different adversaries should come together and figure out how the universe works. Religion says God created everything, science says how He did it. Franklin College freshman Rob Taylor probably said it best when he said, "Religion is the study of life, science is the study of how the universe works. It would be counter-productive to separate the two."
2) Ibid., pg. 129-133.
3) Ibid., pg. 114.
4) Ibid., pg. 149-152.
5) Pickett, Calder M., Voices of the Past. McMillian Publishing Comp., New York, New York. Copyright 1977. Pg. 270.
6) Schroeder, Gerald L., Genesis and the Big Bang: The Discovery of Harmony Between Modern Science and The Bible. Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Comp, New York, New York. Copyright 1992. Pg. 65.
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