OK, so this is my theory. I figured I would post it here so all you smart people can poke lots and lots of holes in it, and we’ll all get a better theory in the end.
Hard-core Biblical scholars believe that the Earth was created 6000-some years ago in 7 days by God.
Hard-core scientists believe that the Earth was greated gradually, over the course of something like 4 billion years, starting from leftover matter formed during the Big Bang.
So here’s my theory - the Big Bang was God, forming the Universe. A “Let There Be Light” kind of thing. In his / her eyes, 7 days equates to 3.9999 billion years, forming the Earth and all the creatures on it, as well as all the other junk s/he saw fit to toss around the sky. The rest of the Bible fits pretty neatly into the 150,000 year timeframe that humans have existed on Earth if you just stretch the timeframes a bit - after all, some of the dudes in the early books of the Bible lived for hundreds and hundreds of years, right? So who’s to say that the two are incompatible?
Another way of looking at it, is that God is just a simpler way of looking at the whole chaotic idea of big bang, followed by millions of years of evolution.
This is actually an extremely common idea (and I don’t mean that to be insulting: all of us have theories and realizations that we later find are incredibly common). In fact, I would guess that it is the way a large number of Christians reconcile disparities between Genesis and science: and not in any sort of really impassioned way either (by that, I mean most of the people that assume this solution are not particularly worked up about Genesis needing to be literal or science being right: they just feel that both probably should reflect some basic conception of the truth of things that is neither misinformed nor wrong and aren’t really interested in looking into potential controversies much deeper than that).
In fact several Christians that I know were happy when the Big Bang theory became accepted. They considered it confirmation of “let there be light” in Genesis.
I think that you will have to stretch too far to reconcile any religion with science.
Hard core Biblical scholars know that evolution is wrong - do you need any more examples of incompatibility?
Why should 7 days equal a billion years, when other parts of the Bible need to be literally true?
What happened to the flood water?
Why are dinosaurs not in the Bible?
Why do you assume the Christian God is the only correct model?
To be fair, the idea that Genesis must be a factual, almost clinically historical text is not exactly a majority view among Christians. Most see it as a tale that gets many of the basic ideas and moral messages right, but is a story filtered through the limited understanding of early, non-scientific phrophets who perhaps saw these things in a vision and then wrote what they could understand of them without knowing the specifics of measurement and mechanics behind what they had been told/seen.
Interesting side note: in some ways fundamentalist literalism is more a product and a reaction to evolution and science than it is something that was supplanted or threatened by it. Prior to the major fundamentalist movements, the idea of a wholly literal and infaliable scripture was not a common or even well-known idea. In many ways, these movements emerged in response to the revolution that science brought about: the drive for factual accuracy and testability and skeptical criticism and so forth. They needed a Bible that could compete in some way with scientific texts, and for that they needed something that was held to be perfect and superior to all others. Prior to that, the Bible was simply safely taken as the superior cultural text period, and only fringe people actually questioned the authenticity of the Bible’s major messages based on the stories it told, so there was little need or thought to defend it as litteral AND infaliable as if it was deeply important to the defense of the religion.
Unless you are using “hard core” in a special (as yet undefined) sense, this is silly. Biblical literalists make up a minority of Christians and very few of them are widely recognized as “biblical scholars.” The majority of people who would be considered biblical scholars in a review of the people performing actual studies on the bible probably have a wide range of views regarding Creation–most tending to the notion of (anthropological) mythology and only a tiny fraction actually supporting YEC. (The Moody Bible Institute is simply not a good source for “biblical scholars.”)
Mendel was a Catholic priest and Dozhansky, who rescued Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection by applying Mendel’s studies in genetics was a devout Orthodox Christian. No reconciliation necessary, at all.
This makes sense from a Christian perspective. Traditionally, NONE of the New Testament could be called wholly literal and infallible scripture. It wasn’t thought that any of these books were directly dictated by God. They were just written (or, compiled later by editors) by mere humans, who at best just witnessed miraculous things. And all a Christian needs to believe is that they got the basic idea right. As in Jesus was the Son of God, who died for our sins. And anyone who sincerely repents all sins and accepts Jesus as their savior will make it to heaven. So what if an editor got a quote of Jesus wrong ages ago? I can still get to heaven so long as I accept Jesus as my personal savior.
Plus, why in Christianity are the nitty, gritty details of creation important? So long as I accept Christ as my personal savior, what is the importance of whether or not evolution was God’s method of creation? “Evolution didn’t happen” isn’t a Christian commandment. I seem to recall even the Roman Catholic Church decided that evolution wasn’t incompatible with the faith. Merely that mankind was somehow imbued with a special divine spark. (Anyone have a citation on this?) Since science can’t disprove that God has specially done this with man, Catholicism can get along with science. Science can’t prove that God wasn’t responsible for the Big Bang. From what I have read scientists generally hold that what happened before the Big Bang is unknowable.
This might be a minor thread hijack, but I had been thinking of starting a thread aimed at Jewish posters about how literally they take the scriptural texts? I seem to have a recollection that it was part of the Jewish faith the first 5 books of the Bible were literally dictated by God to Moses. If so, then Jews (and Christians) should take these as being infallible. In the same sense that in Islam holds the Koran was directly given to Mohammed by God.
The problem I see with this explanation is that God is an add on, completely unnecessary for any of the events to have happened. If you define “God” as some initiating force that got things going and then stayed out of the way, where does that leave all the other spiritual aspects of Christianity-- the soul, the afterlife, grace, etc.?
It appears to me to be simply an inability to let go of a belief in God, and a willingness to transform Him into whatever He needs to be to maintain some kind of compatibility with science. I guess that, in the end, I don’t see the point. Keep God if you feel it is necessary to do so, but once you strip away all the spirituality I really don’t see that anything is actually left.
None at all? This violates rfgdxm’s prime rule. That is “Any statement that characterizes human beliefs in the universal affirmative or negative is wrong.” All it would take here to keep my prime rule correct is someone to post a link where a serious Biblical scholar claims evolution is not wrong, and compatible with the Bible. I’m sure someone here can provide such a link. Surely some devout Christian somewhere thinks evolution happened.
What if God didn’t just get out of the way? Maybe he created the universe with evolution, and then when creatures became intelligent enough sent his son to whack us with a cluestick? This seems logically possible to me.
You want Humani Generis, and encyclical of Pius XII issued in about 1950. No link, sorry, but I dare say that a Google search will get you to the text of the encyclical, and plenty of commentary on it, without too much difficulty.
I don’t think that “even the Roman Catholic Church” is entirely fair. I think the Catholics learned their lesson on this fairly early on. The church made a complete fool of itself over Galileo, and everyone - including later generations of churchmen - knew this. So when the science versus religion debate raises its head in a big way in the 19th Century, the Catholic church has a very low profile in the ensuing debate. It is mostly conducted by fairly fundamentalist protestants (as it still is). Catholics had already learned that treating the bible as a science textbook - or, by extension, a literal newspaper of human history - leads you into very embarrassing positions.
I’m busy, and you can answer that question without directing me to read hundreds of pages. What was the cluestick? What’s in there that absolutely nobody had thought of before?