GENESIS AND SCIENCE

Reconciling Genesis and Science

Reconciling Genesis and Science

Introduction

The interpretation of Genesis and Science can be inferred from historical and scientific evidence. In my opinion, each of the interpretations is theoretically possible. For most, what you believe probably depends on what you were taught. I do not have a firm belief in any particular one and believe they all deserve to be considered without accusing each other of spiritual or intellectual blindness.

Discussion

In order to reconciling Genesis and Science, we have to focus on the belief that evolutionary science is wrong and that the history of the Earth and life can be explained only by numerous miracles. There is a range of beliefs ranging from the most extreme forms of creationism to evolutionary science:

Young-Earth creationists insist that the universe and all its components were created recently by God and the entire fossil record was produced by a single flood, the Deluge of Noah.

Old-Earth creationists believe that the Earth is old but that life-forms were created miraculously throughout the history of the Earth.

Theistic evolutionists accept the general outline of the evolutionary history of life on Earth but believe that God intervened miraculously, perhaps subtly, in the evolutionary process.

Deists believe that God set the natural laws in motion at the beginning and has not physically acted upon the universe since that time. Deism, in terms of scientific evidence, cannot be distinguished from evolutionary science, except perhaps in cosmology.

In the review that follows, the young-Earth definition is used. Creationism consists of a creationist theology, in which the Christian Bible is interpreted literalistically, and "creation science," in which scientific information is presented to support those literalistic Bible interpretations.

Although many evolutionary scientists believe in God, evolutionary science operates under the assumption that God, if God exists, has not influenced the processes that are being studied (Lazcano, 2006).

The fundamental assumption of creationists is that creationism is the only alternative to a completely nontheistic evolutionary philosophy; most consider creationism to be the only alternative to atheism. For this reason, creationists spend a great deal of time attacking aspects, sometimes even details, of evolutionary science. They imply, but seldom directly state, that if evolutionary science has even one flaw, then any reasonable person must accept all of the tenets of biblical literalism, from the six days of Genesis to the Flood of Noah. Most religious people, not only in mainstream but also in conservative Christian churches, accept at least some aspects of evolutionary science and have done so for more than a century.

There is a limited amount of diversity in creationist beliefs. For example, many creationists do not believe that God created each species, as defined by modern science, separately; they believe instead that God created separate "kinds," an undefined category that may refer to species, genus, family, or other level of taxonomic classification. Creationists have even invented a new taxonomic system called "baraminology" (from the Hebrew words for "created kinds") to express these ideas.

Creationism is rare outside of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, partly because polytheistic religions closely identify ...