Here we have another guest blogger- my husband! I am so blessed that he took the time to share from many hours of research and a heart for people to know what to say and be confident in it. I hope it blesses many people!
Hello, my name is Mårten,
and I have the imponderable joy of being married to the lady who
normally writes this blog. As a result of some recent talks I've
had, I decided to write this blog about
debating and discussing the Bible from a scientific perspective. This
is to help the people who want to talk about the Bible, but do not
know how to react when people try to refute them with science. My
goal is to give you a basic understanding of the scientific arguments
you might encounter, and give you some different possible
counterarguments. I have to warn you that this will be quite long, so
if you are short on time, I would recommend just skimming the first
part and skipping to the end. But I would appreciate it if people not
only read the whole thing, but comment with feedback if you think any
of my arguments are flawed or need clarification. Now, let's just
jump right in:
Fact: As far as science can tell, the
Universe is several Billion years old.
This keeps a lot of people from
discovering the Bible, because it seems to be contradicted on the
first few pages. I want to look into some ways to reconcile this fact
with what is written in the Bible.
The first question most Christians
would want answered is this: Can the science be wrong?
The short answer is yes, but it is
highly unlikely and it would be hard to argue it unless you really
know what you're talking about. You should also be aware that you are
highly unlikely to ever convince anyone of anything more than the
possibility that you might have a small chance of being correct.
Which would still be a victory, albeit a small one. Now, here are
some arguments which could be useful:
Most dating methods are built on
certain assumptions, which cannot be proven. The ones you would most
likely encounter in an argument are nuclear dating methods, such as
Carbon dating. These are methods where you estimate an object's age
by measuring the amounts of radioactive materials in it. The big flaw
with those methods is that it assumes the original amount of the
measured substance, and does not take into account the possibility of
outside forces damaging the material.
Ice- and wood-coring is a more precise
aging method, where they compare layers in the wood or glacier ice to
count seasons, and date things that way. However, wood coring cannot
reach further back than at the very most 10 000 years, so it isn't
much of an issue here. Ice coring could potentially reach much
further back, but it again requires a big assumption: there is no
proof that there has only been one melting season and one freezing
season per year. It is clearly possible that several separate ice
layers could form in a single year, and because of that the dating
gets more and more insecure the deeper you get.
On a similar level, we have the strata
of the Earth's surface, where it is again argued that depth equals
age. However, this is once again riddled with assumptions. Since none
of the other dating methods I've mentioned can be considered exact,
it makes the strata by themselves meaningless. Most dating processes
these days follow a simple positive feedback loop: An approximate age
is assumed because of the stratum in which an object was found;
dating tests are made with the purpose of proving that theory; once a
test shows a number which fits the assumption, that is seen as
confirmation of the age of both the object and the stratum. The
strata by themselves can possibly prove that one object is older than
another, but not by how much.
The most complicated issue is
starlight. Through mathematical triangulation, we can measure the
distance from the earth to any given star visible in the sky. Some of
these stars are several billion light-years away from us, which means
that their light would have needed several billion years to reach us.
While this is the most difficult argument to counter, it is not
impossible. Several leading physicists, for example John Moffat, have
proposed the idea that the speed of light might, in fact, not be
constant. Instead, light traveled far faster in the early stages of
the universe than it does now. This theory is not very popular in the
scientific community, mainly because it contradicts the majority of
modern physics, but it is a possibility. As mentioned above, it will
be hard to convince anyone that you have anything more than a faint
possibility of being right, but that would still mean that they
listened to you, and hopefully you would be able to move the
conversation onto more meaningful things.
Now, even if the person you're speaking
with (or even you yourself) remains unconvinced about the age of the
world, that is not necessarily a problem. What you need to do is
change the focus to the following points:
First, the exact age of the Earth or
the universe are not specified in the Bible. The numbers that young
Earth theorists use are all approximations and extrapolations based
on the numbers that are mentioned in the Old Testament. However, the
Old Testament fills a double role as historical document and symbolic
moral teaching. Sometimes the former is more emphasized, sometimes
the latter. For instance, we cannot know for sure that all of Moses'
major life events happened at exactly 40 year intervals, because the
numbers used in the Hebrew tradition have an inherent symbolism which
make the symbolic number sometimes seem more real than the actual
number. Likewise Job's story, while considered a historical document,
is so full of symbolism and moral lessons that it is listed with the
poetic books of the Bible rather than the historical ones. Thus it is
possible to read the early chapters of Genesis entirely as a lesson,
not as fact.
If that answer doesn't satisfy you,
you can take it a step further. It is possible that the story is
partly symbolic, but still mostly accurate. According to Psalm 90:4,
God has a different view of time than we do.
So if we allow the term “day” to stand for a variable amount of
time, how does the Bible match the science? Let's do a “day by day”
walk-through:
First,
it does mention that there was water on the earth before anything
else was created. If we allow for that to be symbolic (water is after
all the source of life), we can go more literal with the rest.
Day
one: God says “Let there be light”, and there is suddenly light
as from nowhere. This sounds like a description of what is often
referred to as “the Big Bang”, which the scientific community
recognizes as the beginning of our universe.
Day
two: God creates the sky. This matches up with the time period right
after the Big Bang, when the universe expanded rapidly. It is also
the time when smaller atoms, such as the ones in our atmosphere were
formed.
Day
three: God separates dry ground from oceans, and creates vegetation.
This marks the largest deviation between Biblical chronology and
scientific theory. The stars and sun should have formed before the
Earth. However, moving past that, and looking only at the Earth
itself, this still holds fairly well with the scientific models.
Day
four: God creates Sun, moon, and stars. As mentioned above, this
should be before day three.
Day
five: God creates animal life in the oceans and the air. Again, most
scientific models place the oceans as the place where life began. As
far as flying lifeforms go, they probably appeared later. On the
other hand, most models now claim that dinosaurs were more like birds
than lizards, so I'd be willing to give half a point for that.
Day
five: God creates life on land. This too fits the models.
Day
six: Humans are created. And again, science has no objections.
All
in all, the Biblical creation story differs from current scientific
models on maybe three points. To my knowledge, no other antique (or
even medieval) creation theory has that rate of accuracy. This was
written thousands of years before humanity had anything to help them
comprehend the scientific reactions behind the events, so slight
simplification should not really disqualify it, in my opinion.
However,
all of this is mostly pointless arguing. The way I see it, you can
compare the Biblical text to a three-course meal at a luxurious
restaurant. In that comparison, the creation story would not be the
main course, not the appetizer, nor even the dessert. It would be the
tablecloth. It is part of your first impression, and it affects your
visual enjoyment of the meal, but it does not change either the taste
or the nutritional value of the meal. When you are offered an
appetizer of forgiveness and understanding, a main course of
unconditional love, and a dessert of abundant grace and blessing, all
for free, should the look of the table setting be the deciding
factor? I believe that there is a use for these arguments (otherwise
I wouldn't have written them), but only as a way to pave the way to
share the Gospel of God's love. If you debate to win an argument, you
will lose souls. I pray that God will bless us all with wisdom to
know what to say, and what not to say, when these situations come up.
