I was raised believing very much what you do now. I still consider myself a Christian, but I’ve also come to realize that science and religion are not at odds at all. So I’ll be straight with you with you, with a couple things that I’ve come to learn over the years.
First, you take offense at being called irrational. Irrational isn’t an insult, per se, though it could be taken as such in certain contexts. For example, emotional responses are irrational, acknowledging such isn’t offensive at all. Similarly, religious belief is irrational; in fact, any discussion about the existence or non-existence of God and his nature is irrational. There is nothing offensive about acknowledging that.
When irrationality is an insult is when one takes an irrational response and uses it as a premise in a rational context. If you react excessively harsh to something because you are angry, you are being irrational in a bad way. Similarly, when you take a religiously held belief and apply it to science, you are being irrational in a bad way.
And, for what it’s worth, it’s just as bad to do the reverse and try to rationalize irrational things. If someone is really upset about something that should seem like a minor slight and you try to rationalize that person’s emotions, you’re being rational in an irrational situation (ie, insensitive) and that’s bad. And I would say it is the same when trying to apply science in any way to either support or deny a particular religiously held belief.
Second, extending this, crossing religion and science in any way sort of defeats the point. Science and religion are orthogonal concepts today, and they are best treated that way. Yes, there was a time when religion was used to explain concepts that are now explained by science, but that was before we understood what science was. Man has an innate desire to learn and to understand the universe in which we live, the religious would argue that God created us that way, the non-religious would argue that’s why we invented God, but that’s really beside the point.
Look at the creation story in Genesis for a moment. Let’s just assume, for the sake of argument, that God exists with the properties more or less as you believe but also that he created the universe more or less like scientists believe today. How would he explain that to a people thousands of years ago? They have no science, no concept of vast amounts of time and space, no concepts of genetics. Really, the only way they could understand it is much the same way a parent would explain where babies come from to an inquiring 3-year-old. So, really, presuming that that story should be taken literally today would be like that child believing the literal truth of whatever he was told once he’s an adult.
But the point is, just like that 3-year-old isn’t looking for a scientific explanation, those men weren’t either. A scientific explanation to either of them misses the point of their questions and would just confuse them. The child is looking to understand his relationship to his parents and siblings, seeing that adults come from kids and kids come from babies, they know that babies must come from somewhere too. And so, that story is really just giving us the same sets of relationships, that God created us, that we will grow and change over time just as children grow.
Third, the more and more I’ve thought about it, the more I think the knowledge we’ve gained through science reinforces my faith. I presume you believe that God is omnipotent and omnisicient, as most Christians do, so consider this comparison, which of these two concepts of God fits that better. One creates a planet and a race of people and countless other life forms in a perfect way, but that continuously gets corrupted and he as to keep interfering with it to keep it on track. Or one who can precisely tune the very fundamental aspects of the universe and let it run for countless eons knowing that, over time, it would organize in a precise way and actually seeing life arise and continue to evolve and change and improve.
To me, I find the latter one fits a whole lot better, and really seems to demonstrate both of those concepts, being able to create something VASTLY greater than just the Earth and being able to know exactly how it would play out over countless ages. Moreso, I see the latter as a greater form of perfection. We are not and should not be a tale of being perfect and drifting from it, rather a tale of endless improvement. Perfection isn’t a point in time, but a process, and thus the perfection is all of creation over all of time, and for an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent (in time and space), that is really the only reasonable conclusion for what perfection could be.
Fourth, whence this whole religion vs. science thing? If God created us, why would he give us this thirst for knowledge and the ability to pursue it and then ask us to deny it? Going back to my earlier example, it seems like the logical path God would want us to follow. Just like parents with children, first simply telling us things and giving us hard rules, then teaching us how to think for ourselves and understand our place in the world, then letting us learn and make mistakes on our own as we become adults. Compare this to the Bible, the Old Testament simply gave us rules to protect us, Jesus explains the purpose of those rules and wants us to learn to think in the context of loving eachother, and now we have science, philosophy, art, medicine, etc. so we can learn and explore the world he made of us on our own.
Really, if we are to believe in God, to believe he is beyond our understanding, we can’t keep him in a box that our ancestors created based on their understanding thousands of years ago. Evolution isn’t an argument about the existence of God; if anything, believing that he exists, it just goes to show an even more wondrous God than the one I was raised with, and one I’m even more inclined to believe in.
Either way, I would strongly suggest you research evolution because, quite frankly, in the OP you’re making an argument from ignorance. I mean, Relativity can’t possibly be true because bending space just doesn’t make sense, it’s a stupid theory; yet, it’s a quite elegant theory with roughly a century of science backing it up time and again. People who dispute it are quite rare, don’t understand it, and don’t offer any empirical evidence for their argument or alternative explanations for the observations. And Evolution has an even longer history than Relativity and opponents suffer many of the same issues with evidence and counterarguments. Yet, there’s a lot more anti-evolutionists out there only because so many people see it as a threat to their faith and it just shouldn’t be. Once it stops being seen as a threat, and it’s evaluated rationally, I’d hope you’ll come to the same conclusion I did.
