Several months back I wrote a column about my faith and my feelings about church. I encouraged readers to respond, but I felt many people missed the point I was trying to make.
The overwhelming majority of responses I received entailed how I was wrong, then proceeded to invite me to their church like my column was a cry for help. It wasn’t. The point I was trying to get across is every church I’ve ever attended — and I’ve been to a lot of them — I felt as though I was being addressed with that particular priest’s or pastor’s interpretation of the Bible. If you attend a church long enough it’s likely you will end up believing that interpretation as your own rather than reading the Bible and drawing your conclusions. That’s just my opinion, and it is no more right or wrong than your own.
With this column, though, I am asking for help. I’m asking for help because the more I learn about our earth, its history and our history as a species, the more conflicted I become. So I want to know how others weigh what we are told in scripture from the Bible and the information we are presented by science.
I like to think of myself as an intellectual, someone who actively seeks information on myriad subjects, though I tend to stay away from politics. As a result when I watch TV, I often watch the History Channel, National Geographic and Discovery Channel. One of the programs I have recently started watching is “One Strange Rock” on National Geographic. It’s a truly fascinating show.
It details how incredible our planet really is and the factors that allow it to sustain life when no other planet, to our knowledge, has such qualities that allows life to thrive. The big one being oxygen. Too much oxygen in the atmosphere and we boil. Too little and we suffocate. But we have the perfect amount of oxygen with our atmosphere being made up of it at 21 percent. It also describes how the earth came to be 4.6 billion years ago and how it took millions of years to fully form.
The earth’s origins is one of the biggest questions in the science vs. faith debate. I know some of you aren’t going to agree with me, believing the earth to only be a few thousand years old, but I believe there is a happy medium on this topic where religion and science intersect. We are told in Genesis that God created the earth and the heavens in six days. As a result many reject science’s argument that the earth is billions of years old on principle. But we are also told in 2 Peter 3:8 that a day to the Lord is a thousand years on earth. While the math still doesn’t add up — we’re talking thousands vs. millions of years — I believe our sense of time compared to God’s simply cannot be deduced, leaving both sides of the argument as its own truth.
What I think to be the truth of this matter is that God did not write the Bible himself. Its stories are certainly God inspired, but the Bible consists of oral histories handed down and later recorded. When it was transcribed, it was before the age of science and discovery, and people didn’t have the knowledge to fully understand earth’s unfathomable scale for context.
I think science should coincide with religion as we continue to learn about what God created for us. But we still don’t have all the knowledge, and while a lot of science behind our planet’s origins and different periods is convincing, the majority of it is theory that cannot be proven.
While I accept these propositions, I remain conflicted in certain areas and would love to hear from those of you who wrestle with the same concept of the science vs. faith debate. Sometimes when I watch certain shows or read different things regarding science I have this guilty feeling that I’m cheating on my faith because the convincing information I am consuming contradicts the Bible. Maybe hearing others takes on it will help me rationalize it in my own mind. That’s what I’m hoping for at least.
Joshua Campbell is sports editor of The Columbian-Progress. Reach him at joshuacampbell@columbianprogress.com.
