$Id: evolution.txt,v 1.2 2012-04-09 12:26:55 mike Exp $ INTRODUCTION A little about me: my role as an active Christian serving churches in worship, preaching, small-group leadership, church planting; and my scientific experience including my Ph.D at Portsmouth, my affiliation at Bristol and my work describing and naming Xenoposeidon and Brontomerus. My goal is not to persuade Christians that the current scientific understanding of evolution is the true account of how life came to be as it is. I want only to demonstrate that it is not necessary to be a creationist in order to be a Christian. This is of enormous practical importance: I have known people who were prevented from becoming Christians because they were told they had to subscribe to a 6000-year-old Earth and disbelieve the evidence for evolution, and they couldn't do it. We don't want to erect barriers to the Gospel. BACKGROUND Science and religion set out to answer fundamentally different questions. * Science: WHAT is the universe made of? HOW does it work? * Religion: WHY does the universe exist? WHO are we? I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. -- Galileo Galilei. Science (initially called "natural philosophy") began as a way of trying to understand God better. The notion of science and religion being opposed is a modern (and quite incorrect) one. They are complementary. The idea that science and religion are at war is kept alive by fundamentalists on both sides, such as Ken Ham among creationist Christians and Richard Dawkins among atheistic scientists. CREATIONISM IS A PARTICULAR INTERPRETATION OF THE BIBLE In the absence of reasons to interpret it otherwise, many Christians have historically read Genesis 1-3 literally. But even in the distant past some important Christian thinkers have disagreed: At least we know that it [the Genesis creation day] is different from the ordinary day with which we are familiar. -- St. Augustine, "The Literal Interpretation of Genesis" (A.D. 408) While we trust the bible as inspired, we need to be careful that we don't consider our INTERPRETATION of ambiguous passages as inspired in the same way. We should not hold rashly an opinion in a scientific matter, so that we may not come to hate later whatever truth may reveal to us, out of love for our own error. -- St. Augustine again. This was the mistake the Church made in the 17th century. When Galileo wrote about the Earth orbiting the Sun, he was persecuted by church officials who had assumed the Sun orbited the Earth based on a literal reading of e.g. Malachi 1:11 ("My name will be great among the nations, from the rising to the setting of the Sun.") But no-one now worries that Christianity is challenged by the Earth orbiting the Sun. God did not intend Genesis as a science text-book. THE PURPOSE OF THE CREATION ACCOUNT Then what is the point of Genesis 1-3? Its goal is to show us God as the author of creation -- the one without whom there would be nothing -- and to show us who we are in relation to him. It is not concerned with mechanisms. CLOSING REMARKS: AN OBJECTION, A THOUGHT AND A WARNING An objection: some will ask, if we can't read Genesis 1-3 literally, what about the rest of the bible? But the nature of the writing is very different in different books. The gospels and Acts are journalism (C. S. Lewis called it "reportage"), while Genesis and Job are poetry. A thought: one perfectly reasonable stance for Christians to adopt towards evolution is: "I don't know about that, and I don't think it's important to Christianity". A warning: creationism as an evangelistic approach is misguided and counter-productive. Although there are many Christians in the sciences (more than you'd think, especially in palaeontology) those who are not themselves Christian tend to assume that all Christians are scientifically illiterate, and therefore (they reason) ignorant and not worth listening to. QUESTIONS