Creator God, Evolving World

Chapter 1

1 ChaPtEr 1 God, religion, and science a Family Circus cartoon shows a young girl, Dolly, asking her father, “If we send astronauts to Mars, do they hafta drive past Heaven?” While this may strike us as funny, it illustrates the double world in which many of us live. Few educated adults would ask such a seemingly simplistic question. Yet many people live in a bifurcated world in which they have accepted the results of science and presume the reasonable world of scientific endeavor, but, when it comes to thinking about God, their worldview may still be somewhat childish, antiquated, or rudimentary. In the scientific world everything is open to question and results are only as valid as the evidence that supports them. With regard to God, however, both believers and nonbelievers often assume that religious issues can only be settled by reverting to a kind of mythic fideism , belief held in contradiction to reason. The relationship between science and religion has been long, complex, and at times quite conflictual. While everyone knows about the conflict between the scientist Galileo and the Catholic Church of his day, few know that the Vatican now runs its own observatory and there are priests and ministers with international standing in the scientific community. It remains a commonplace in our media to present science and religion as opposed, a position promoted by those on both sides of the issues. There are scientists who love to portray religion as based on superstition and ignorance; and there are believers who cling to fundamentalist readings of Scripture, particularly of Genesis, and so reject modern scientific theories such as evolution. Then there is the broader public caught in the middle, those who appreciate the technological progress made by scientific advances and may in fact seek to maintain some form of creator god, evolving world 2 religious commitment, but are caught in the pull and counterpull of a debate that they struggle to get a proper handle on. It is to this middle ground that we direct this book. While it will engage with various aspects of the current debate on science and religion, it is unlikely to convert the scientist who insists that science has disposed of God. Nor will it shift a fundamentalist who wants to maintain that the opening chapters of Genesis provide us with an empirical account of what happened in the first six days of creation. Our task is a more constructive one, of providing a genuine alternative to a number of current approaches to questions around God, creation, and evolution. While we will illustrate our approach with examples from contemporary scientific theories, at the heart of this constructive approach is an intellectual tradition that draws on the best of Christian theology and philosophy. Central to this tradition is an understanding of God as the transcendent cause of the created order. This position, which contemporary theologians increasingly question, nonetheless provides an account of the relationship between God and creation that is best suited to current scientific understandings of the cosmos; at least that is what we shall argue. Before we get there, however, we shall review elements of the history of the relationship between science and religion to highlight the major themes that we shall need to address. the Emergence of Modern science Human beings have puzzled over the night sky perhaps from the dawn of human history. What are these lights in the sky? Why do they appear to be in such fixed patterns? What are those lights that wander through the otherwise fixed patterns, those “planets” or wanderers of the night sky? What about the sun and the moon? How can we make sense of these phenomena? These were not idle questions for societies that needed to know the timing of the spring and fall equinox and the winter and summer solstices. These events also had a religious significance in many societies. At least here primitive science and religion had a common interest. The first serious attempt to respond to such questions was the system devised by the Greek thinker Ptolemy (83–161 ce), which placed the earth at the center of the cosmos, with the sun, moon, planets, and stars rotating God, religion, and science 3 around the earth in circular orbits. Of course, it was difficult to fit this model with the actual observations of the planets, in particular, so the model was refined over time to include...