I’m sort of a film buff. I enjoy all kinds of films, well, that’s not exactly true. I can’t abide films which feature dancing or serial, sweet, romantic scenes or gratuitous sex. Other than that, I do enjoy all sorts of films – new ones and classics alike. One classic that I enjoyed was Inherit the Wind. In it Spencer Tracy and Frederick March played riveting portrayals of the chief legal opponents in the dramatization of the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial, in which a public school teacher was brought to trial for teaching (exposing his students to) Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Almost 100 years after the real Scopes trial, Creation vs. Evolution or faith vs. observations based on empirical data seem to be more at odds than ever.

This summer even the most casual reader of the news can’t have missed the most recent battlefield of the so-called American culture war – whether it should be required for public school teachers to expose students to both the Theory of Evolution and Intelligent Design Theory. As always, talking heads on the right and the left are lined up on each side of the issue – complete with behind-the-scenes interest groups and "scholarly organizations". At issue is who gets to decide what gets taught in public schools and how. On another level the issue is how faith and empirical reason relate to each other. Do people of faith have an obligation to reject observations about empirical data if they seem to contradict their faith? Do those who research empirical data have an obligation to reject faith?

I find this to be a false dichotomy and an unnecessary conflict. As a person of Christian faith, who believes that God inspired what the Bible says, I find no final conflict between faith and reason, between hypothetical observations based on empirical data and belief in God, indeed between Creation and Evolution. All truth is God’s truth, since God is the Creator of all that is, and observations about all that can be measured describe truths about what God has done. It’s not the job of scientists to try to disprove God or for people of faith to deny empirical data. It’s the challenging job of people of faith to try to work through whatever new information comes our way so as to expand our understanding of God and His ways.

Take the current controversy, for example. The Bible states that God created the Heavens and the Earth and all that’s in them. That’s the point of the first creation story in Genesis, chapter 1. The literary form of that chapter is Hebrew poetry. Hebrew poetry was based on thought repetition. That helped people who didn’t have a printing press and so had insufficient copies of the biblical writings, to remember the story and the point – God created everything. It wasn’t meant to detail the dynamics of physics, biology or chemistry by which God accomplished His creative processes. Simply that God did it, that He did it in an orderly fashion, without help, and in a manner of work that people should emulate in the way they do their work – with planning, objectives, goals, reflection, critical appraisal, and rest.

Charles Darwin, a person of strong Christian faith, who studied theology in university as well as medicine, had a chance to observe a wider variety of creatures than most of the people in his time did and simply wondered at their traits – imagining that they may just have adapted over time in their capacities to survive. Insofar as that may be true (and I may be wrong, but I think viruses do it rapidly so that we can observe it happening) it simply suggests that God cares enough about the creatures He made to create them with a capacity to adapt. Call it evolution or what you will. It doesn’t suggest that there is no Creator, simply that the Creator instilled a capacity for survival within His creatures. If that’s true, it suggests even greater things about God – that He continues to create dynamically – rather than statically, once and for all. It suggests that God instilled the capacity to change under stress, and I find this both compassionate and even more awe-inspiring than a static, past-tense creation. Who cares whether God created humans as is or after a long process of adaptations in which God directly had a hand and breathed His Spirit within our progenitors? Only those enslaved to consistency of limited human reason.

On the other hand, if God did create each and every type of creature as it currently is except for trying to defend the literal inerrancy of a chapter of Scripture as if it were prose rather than poetry (and by the way there’s a contradiction between the first chapter and the second chapter Genesis accounts – with Humans created from nothing in the first and from dust in the second) I can find only one other implication of worth. It means that if God cared enough to create every creature as it is, we humans should make every effort to protect and preserve from extinction every single one by every means possible.

I wonder if that’s the role of public schools or if it’s the role of parents and churches to fill in the blanks of faith. Christian folk are quick to pick up on scientific observations such as the laws of thermodynamics or the Big Bang theory to try to help prove their faith and to reject theories like Evolution that seem to challenge it. I guess the bottom line is that some Christians want science to lend credibility to their faith, but that’s not the role of science. Likewise, it isn’t the role of believers to prove their faith, but it is the role of believers to find meaning for their faith in new information and to help their children to do the same.

Faithfully in Christ,