Conflict or Harmony?

Science and faith should fit happily together, as the scientific enterprise reveals more and more about the nature of creation. Instead, there seems to be a great chasm thrown between them. Nowhere is this more pronounced than on the question of origins. Did God create the world in six literal days? Could it have been over a longer time period? Does the theory of evolution undermine the authority of scripture? From the new Creation Museum in Kentucky on the one side to vocal atheists such as Richard Dawkins on the other, the chasm seems to be getting wider and wider.

Yet if in fact all truth is God’s truth, this conflict should not be there. And actually there are many seeking to bring together the witness of scripture and the scientific evidence and coming to various syntheses. Two notable examples are Francis Collins, head of the National Human Genome Research Institute at NIH and author of The Language of God, and Darrel Falk, biology professor at Point Loma University and author of Coming to Peace With Science. Both are committed evangelical Christians, and both accept the validity of evolutionary theory and believe that it does not do violence to scriptural authority. In fact, they find it as an impetus to worship. Collins writes,

The need to find my own harmony of the worldviews ultimately came as the study of genomes—our own and that of many other organisms on the planet—began to take off, providing an incredibly rich and detailed view of how descent by modification from a common ancestor has occurred. Rather than finding this unsettling, I found this elegant evidence of the relatedness of all living things an occasion of awe, and came to see this as the master plan of the same Almighty who caused the universe to come into being and set its physical parameters just precisely right to allow the creation of stars, planets, heavy elements, and life itself.1

Biological evolution is simply descent with modification. Charles Darwin in his 1859 book The Origin of Species argued that over very long time periods, gradual changes in organisms could lead to the formation of new traits and even new species. He offered that all organisms are the distant children of a common ancestral species—a concept known as common descent. Observing the variation in different traits for populations and the way that some traits were better adapted for survival, Darwin proposed the mechanism for this change: natural selection. Essentially, natural selection means that if you are better adapted to your environment, you are more likely to survive to have children, which means the next generation should be better adapted overall. Recent work suggests other types of selection (sexual selection, group selection) also play significant roles. After Darwin, new discoveries revealed that DNA and genes are the way that traits are passed across generations, and mutations (changes in DNA) are the source of new variation in populations.

Here we will trace through some of the lines of argument put forward by Collins and Falk, first considering the meaning of the Genesis creation accounts. Next we will see how the scientific evidence leads us to the conclusion that the earth is very old. This forces us to take care in how we interpret Genesis, and it opens the door for evolution, which requires very long time frames to occur. Then we will turn to the fossil record. As we trace lineages of different species and see the changes in creation through time, we find strong evidence of gradual change and the relatedness of all species—key features of evolution. Afterwards, we will see how DNA sequencing independently confirms these and adds it weight of evidence in favor of evolution. Finally we will try to pull it all together into a hopeful synthesis.

But how important is this issue for the church? And how should the church approach this discussion, given that there are many differing views? Join me for a glimpse of a running conversation with Dr. David Norman, Executive Director of the Trinity Forum Academy, as we wrestle with these questions.

Next Page: How Important Is This?