A Monday rerun from 2008

Why are so many religious folks so scared by science?

It’s a question I’ve pondered many a sleepless night, like tonight.

Are they afraid science might stumble upon something that would provide incontrovertible proof that there is no God? If so, they can rest easy. Science does not work that way. Science deals with the real world, not the spiritual world.

I guess the biggest bone of contention between science and religion is how humans came to populate the planet – evolution vs. creation, observation vs. words, evidence vs. faith.

At first glance, it might appear creation and evolution are mutually exclusive, but nothing could be further from the truth.

God may well have created the universe. He may even have taken six days to do it. Six of his days, which could be a billion years long for all we know. And he may well have created us, and everything else, not by crafting each individual species of plant and animal, but by crafting an environment where bits and pieces of what he created could come together and evolve into us and the myriad life forms around us.

Think about it. A being who can do anything can certainly create us whole. But where’s the fun in that? All life on Earth shares a common core – DNA. And what an elegant commonality it is. Four molecules repeated over and over in varying arrangements. One arrangement makes a rose and another makes the pretty young girl who’s admiring it. And it has the ability to change over time. How freaking amazing is that?

If you believe in God, then you must believe God created DNA. And he must have created evolution since the process so clearly exists. And just as God gave us food to eat, language to communicate, and brains with self-awareness and the ability to observe, think, and reason, so too, God gave us Science – a method of learning about the universe He created.

Indeed, to deny our abilities and dismiss out of hand that which God put before us to discover would seem to deny his very existence.

The bottom line is this – it’s okay to believe in creation and evolution. God created the universe and the laws that govern it. Those laws led inevitably to the creation of solar systems and planets and life as we know it.

What better tribute to His omnipotence than a creation capable of taking itself from random bits of energy to random bits of matter to what we see before us, today.

Whether you believe in God or not, you have to admit, it’s a darn impressive universe we live in, and a darn good method He, or we, developed to learn about it.

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