I grew up in a Christian home. To be more accurate, it was a home that was dependent upon God’s grace made known to us by Christ, because we didn’t always act very Christian. But that is an accurate description of every Christian home I have ever known, even though most of us spend a lot of energy trying to prove we don’t need anything, including grace.
I have always been a member of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a mainline Protestant denomination that began on American soil in the early 1800’s. It was there I learned about God’s grace, and I pretty much internalized it. I tried to do what I thought God wanted me to do, but more out of love and respect for God than out of fear. That’s the best thing about the Disciples: we do believe in grace, even if we sometimes have a hard time extending it to each other. But, that’s another story.
I grew up in love with God and with God’s world. Science was always attractive to me because it simply revealed more about God’s world. I enjoyed knowing where things come from, how things work, and how to operate stuff. So, as a child of the newly minted Space Age, growing up in Central Florida, I loved astronautics. Fortunately, none of the pipe rockets I built and launched from our back yard ever hurt anyone nor started any serious fires. My experiments with making black powder and other substances never injured me.
As a 10 year old, big for my age, I mowed neighbors’ lawns for a dollar or two to earn enough to buy my first telescope from Eckerd Drugstore, a little 60 mm Tasco scope. Despite its shaky little tripod, it literally took my breath away when on my first night of ownership I pointed it toward a bright object in the sky and saw the planet Saturn for the first time!
As a 12 year old I rode the city bus or sometimes peddled my bike downtown to Albert Whitted Municipal Airport, where I found that if I looked sad enough sitting on the bench in front of the pilot’s lounge I would sometimes be invited to ride along in a Piper or Cessna. At 14, I became a Civil Air Patrol cadet and had a chance to learn a lot more about the physics of flying and weather. I joined the St. Petersburg Science Center, a local place for middle and high school kids to learn about things. I began with a class in bacteriology and ended up in astronautics. At 15, my buddy Charlie and I became ham radio operators. Well, you get the picture. I loved science.
Still do. I got my pilot’s license as soon as I could. I have owned a variety of telescopes and built an observation platform in my backyard so I can see over the house and trees.
While I understood God’s grace at a deep level, my Disciples upbringing did not teach me much about praying and other spiritual disciplines. So I was drawn as a college freshman to a fundamentalist Christian campus group for whom the Spirit of God seemed a very present and personal reality. I learned a lot from this group and remain grateful to them for teaching me another, very personal side of the Christian faith.
However, in a Bible study one day, the teacher was waxing eloquent about how all of creation was fallen and in need of redemption and one cannot trust science. In fact, according to her, one had to choose between science and Christian faith. After all, while science claims the world is several billion years old and that life evolved, “Christians” know the world is only 6000 years old.
I was stunned. So I asked her, what about dinosaur bones that have been dug up and studied by paleontologists? Her response? “Dinosaur bones were planted by Satan in order to fool us into choosing to believe science rather than the Bible.”
That was my last meeting with that group! I knew that science was simply a way of studying God’s creation and order (a very Disciples of Christ perspective, by the way, though I had never really been taught that as such at church). I also knew that the Bible is not, and does not pretend to be, a science book or even a history book as we think of a history book now.
I couldn’t wait to get to college and then seminary to learn just how science and religion are in fact two halves of a whole, not two disciplines that should be set against each other. I consumed everything I could about the Bible as seen through the lens of anthropology, archeology, and linguistics. I read theologian Ian Barbour who made the case for science and religion. I relished with joy Process Theology which affirms the compatibility and partnership of science and faith.
So, the question of whether science and faith are compatible was settled for me about 60 years ago, when I was 12. But the fundamentalist descendants of that Bible study teacher of my college years are still spouting the same tripe, the same denial of science, the same unbiblical belief that faith means choosing Jesus instead of science. So, instead of fostering the care of God’s creation, they deny climate change and encourage the gutting of environmental protection laws. They regard COVID-19 as probably a hoax conjured up to score political gains somehow.
Yes, I have also learned that creation is in need of redemption, even as the Apostle Paul suggests; and I have learned and experienced much as a person and a pastor about the depravity of humankind; and I have learned that I cannot trust everything my senses tell me. But I have also learned to reject any theology or belief that seeks to somehow separate matter from spirit, any theology that denies the need for and redemptive roles of good religion and good science (which constantly questions its own assumptions, since science, like religion itself, is always subject to flaws of the human condition).
Those who want to pit science and faith against each other belong more to the 19th century than the 21st. In the face of the challenges confronting the entire globe in this century, such demagoguery could get us all killed.
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