My Science, My Religion

I never intended to write this post

In my cloud drive, I have a folder full of subfolders and links and lots of notes for the science and history posts I plan to write. And I have reminders about personal experiences I’ll tell about. This post was never planned, but I’m getting so frustrated, I need to write it. I badly want to “be myself” in sciency discussions at Facebook and Quora, but I get attacked from two sides.

If I agree with any science that science denying Christians (especially Young Earth Creationists), perceive as going against the Bible, they say I can’t possibly be a Christian.

If I state I’m a Christian, then science loving atheists say I can’t possibly have an understanding of science. In fact, a lot of them seem to be shocked that I claim to be a Christian yet acknowledge that the Earth is 4.5B years old, agree there was no world wide flood, etc. I’m not alone in this. Very many Christians believe in the science, and there are even Christian scientists and researchers with PhDs in the fields that deal with astrophysics, evolution and more.

Both sides have asked me how I can believe in God and science at the same time. They can’t seem to fathom it. I find myself caught in the middle. Both sides make assumptions. The two-way conflict will never be resolved. Minds are made up. Debates are pointless, because the two sides just talk past each other.

This post will probably make some people mad, and some people just think I’m plumb crazy. If some of my following points seem to be incomplete or lacking in detail, it’s because I’ve already covered a couple of these topics in more detail elsewhere on this blog, and I’ll be covering many others in very great detail in future posts.

I don’t know if I ever heard the term “creationism” before I was grown. Young Earth Creationists tend to believe the earth (and the rest of the universe), can’t be more than 10,000 years old.

Old Earth Creationists accept that the earth is old, and when I first started hearing about that, I thought maybe that’s what I am. But when I began searching out the subject, I learned there must be a hundred different flavors of Old Earth Creationism, and none of them fit me.

Then I learned about Evolutionary Creation. Ok, that’s much closer. That means you believe there’s a God, and you accept that the science, as presented by the scientific community, is correct.

But the word “creationism” is a label. So is the term Intelligent Design, which Young Earth Creationists came up with, thinking it would sound more scientific, but it just sounds ridiculous.

I don’t want a label. Labels divide and separate people, and cause conflict. I’m just a Christ-follower who happens to believe in science, because I actually do understand the science. Scientific theories are facts confirmed through observation and experiment. Rejecting them because they don’t fit one’s pre-conceived views is ignorance at it’s finest. I’ll explain more about that in future topics.

Letter to Science-Loving Atheists

You like to say: if you believe in God, you have no understanding of science. If that is your stance, please read my post Me, in Search of Self, then explain to me why I am unable to understand science. Keep in mind, that post only follows me through high school. I kept up my independent studies throughout my adulthood. Libraries, science magazines, actual conversations with real scientists. Then the Internet came along, and I was able to step up my game a few levels. First I found lots of articles to read. Then YouTube and Prime Video came along and with them came all kinds of documentaries. Then lots of Kindle books on all sorts of science and history subjects. And more articles and websites to read. And new streaming services with more documentaries, and even lectures to watch. And peer-reviewed papers that aren’t behind paywalls! I assimilate all of it – archaeology, paleontology, anthropology, and yes, even evolutionary biology. And more. It’s been a fantastic learning journey! But you think I can’t understand any of it because I believe in God?

Yes, I know it makes no sense that God exists. It makes no sense that anything at all exists. You want Christians to “look at the evidence”, but even when you see evidence of God, you reject it out of hand. I can think of many examples, but the event I will recount was relatively recent and reasonably public.

A few years ago, a fire department posted a remarkable series of photos on their Facebook page, along with the story that went with them. The post got shared thousands of times, which is how I first saw it.

They had been called out to a church fire, and the fire was so big, a second fire department also had to come out. There was nothing any of them could do except to keep blasting away with the fire hoses to keep the flames from spreading.

They finally got the fire out, and there was nothing except some walls charred black and piles of soggy rubble. The fire fighters started digging through the rubble… and… maybe you guessed what I’m going to say. The Bibles were all bone dry with no signs of fire damage. They did look like they’d been through a dust storm, but they were intact.

The FD put all this on their FB page, and they got so many hateful, horrible comments from atheists, they finally had to delete the post. I saw a great many of those posts. They were awful.

I have no trouble believing it, because I have personally experienced and witnessed events equally as miraculous. But of course you don’t believe me, and I’m not expecting you to. You’re thinking of ways that Bibles can get through a fire intact.

I do want to mention- God never ever produces miracles to convince atheists of anything. That’s not how He does things. He produces miracles for believers as a way of letting them know He has our back.

Atheists keep challenging Christians to prove God exists. Don’t be silly. God exists outside of time and space, and can’t be studied in a laboratory.

Letter to Science-Denying Christians

You like to say: if you believe in evolution and a 4.5B year old Earth, then you can’t be a Christian. If that’s what you think, please visit the Christians Only section of this blog, then explain to me why I can’t have a personal relationship with Jesus.

Yes, I understand Young Earth Creationism very well. I grew up in a very churchy extended family with a preacher grandfather and I was immersed in it from birth. I’ve heard ALL the arguments. It just happens that I was born with the independently thinking scientific mind that God gave me, and I was able to figure out things for myself.

To Christians who take every word of the Bible literally:

First, let me say this – I do not underestimate the importance of the Bible. In fact, I have a stack of study Bibles. The Bible is a valuable tool for spiritual guidance, and it’s one of the means by which God communicates with us. I find it amazing that, no matter what situation I find myself in, there’s a perfect Bible verse for it. I also find it amazing that I can read the same Bible passage 100 times, and get something new out of it every time. That’s how powerful written scriptures are.

That being said, God did not write the Bible, and He didn’t dictate it. Man wrote it, and God appropriated it. It has been said, Everything in the Bible is true, and some of it actually happened.

The following statements are a brief outline. I will be covering the history of the Bible in great depth in a future post, but I have a few quick points to make here.

The Bible was first assembled as a book by a monk named Jerome around 400AD (no, not at the Nicene Council as some claim). Jerome was a learned multi-lingual scholar who took the Jewish scriptures and some of the early Church letters, translated them into Latin, and turned them all into a single book. From that version until King James, many versions appeared.

Copies of a great many of those versions still exist. When Bible scholars compare all these different versions from oldest to newest, there were continual changes – books having new passages and chapters added and old ones disappeared. Many people claim the KJV is the only accurate Bible. It absolutely is not. The KJV has many differences from the earlier versions it evolved from. Since the KJV was first published, new ancient manuscripts and fragments of manuscripts have been found. Not just the Dead Sea Scrolls, but others as well. There are so many mistranslations in the KJV, additions that shouldn’t be there, and subtractions that probably should be.

Some like to claim that the Dead Sea Scrolls prove that the Bible hasn’t changed. Actually, only parts of the original writings have remained mostly unchanged. Some are so drastically different, they’re almost unrecognizable when compared to modern Bibles (including KJV).

To Young Earth Creationists who deny the science:

In recent decades, there has been an explosion of new scientific discoveries, and increasingly sophisticated technologies that prove the old age of the earth and the universe, and provides more and more proof that evolution is true. This is resulting in the most interesting trend I’m noticing on young earth creationist websites, and in the videos they produce. They keep changing their narrative in an attempt to make the science fit the Bible, and to debunk the science they don’t like, which is becoming more and more difficult to explain away.

They use strawman arguments. They invent new terms to sound more scientific. Sometimes they just make things up.

Sometimes they say ridiculous things like, scientists are frantically trying to prove that they’re right and that young earth creationists are wrong. That is beyond laughable. Young earth creationists are engaging in a psychological defense mechanism called projection. It’s not the scientists who are frantically trying to hang on to false scientific beliefs. It’s creationists who are frantically trying to hang on to their presuppositions.

By now, some of you are having unpleasant thoughts about me. So I have one last thing to say.

In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter whether or not you believe in the science. The important thing is your relationship with Jesus Christ. But please don’t troll science topics. That is not proper Christian behavior.