As I preach a sermon series on some of the tough questions of faith that my parishioners have submittted, I want to use this forum as well to engage some of those questions. Over the next few weeks, I will be posting a new question and some thoughts on that question. As always, feel free to comment and discuss. This week's question is:
How do you reconcile faith and belief in God as Creator with science and especially evolution?
For some reason, there are those in the scientific community and those in religious arena that want to make faith and science mutually exclusive. There have been churches that have said that science is folly and shouldn't be trusted when it comes in conflict with matters of faith. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there have been those in the scientific world that resist any thought of religion or faith because the facts of science seem to contradict what the faith community says. Is it possible that faith and science are not as exclusive from one another as some would like us to believe? My position is that faith and science are NOT mutually exclusive and that it is possible to be a person of faith while still accepting the truths of science.
This also holds true in the debate between Creationism and Darwinism. A strict interpretation of either theory leaves no room for the other. Perhaps, then, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. As a person of faith, I hold as truth that God is the Creator of all things. Nothing has come into being without the initiation of God. A strict interpretation of Creationism would hold that all things were created in their final state; in other words, human beings were created in the state which we now find ourselves. In addition, these creations were accomplished in a relatively short amount of time, a 24 hour time period. Also included in a strict interpretation of Creationism is usually the "young Earth" theory--the idea that the Earth is, in reality , only a few thousand years old.
A concise interpretation of evolutionary theory would simply hold that the creation has evolved over time. Said another way, species have evolved from where they were at their beginning to where they are now. This would stand in opposition to the Creationist belief of unchanging species. Evolutionary theory would also neccistate a vast amount of time in order for such changing of species to occur.
Perhaps at the heart of the discussion is the concept of time and the definition of "day". We know that one day is equal to one revolution of the earth on its axis. The story of Creation in Genesis proclaims that God finished the work of Creation in six days. Elsewhere in Scripture, though, we told that ways and thoughts of God are not exactly the ways and thoughts of humans, and that human time is not the same as God time. God is outside the boundaries of the human and natural world and, therefore, to subject God to the limits and laws of the natural world would be to somehow limit God. What this means for the creation/evolution debate is that there is room for both theories to be equally valid. It is possible to believe all things as creations of God, and still recognize that species have evolved through time, that evolution is a process within the Creation story. This merged theogy is also called "theistic evolution", because it rejects neither while affirming the validity of both theories.
In conclusion, neither faith nor science must be rejected in order to accept the other. It should be noted, though, that a merging of the theories of creation and evolution do not completely reject God. All things, including science and its laws and truths, exist because God exists. Without God, there would be nothing. The laws of science and the natural world are a part of this marvelous work of God that is creation.
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