"be on guard against giving interpretations of Scripture that are farfetched or opposed to science, and so exposing the Word of God to the ridicule of unbelievers."

Saint Augustine

The current trend towards attempts to reconcile Science and the Bible is most welcome, and I would draw attention to the Web site: God, Genesis, and the Big Bang, which gives access to a number of sources, including one from Judaism. These are serious studies , and worth reading with care and respect, although they may leave a sense of sadness at the futility of any effort that refuses to even consider modification of the dogma of inerrancy.

There is little general interest in the problem from the scientific side and it is a sad fact that the majority of scientists reject the theology of the Bible, and a great number reject even the possibility of a God.

It may be that the greatest barrier to a scientist is the Bible itself. Brought up to respect facts above all, and physical evidence as the only useful testimony to fact, he sees popular religion as focussing on exciting stories from the Bible of Creation, Adam's Fall, the Flood, and such, and improbable stories about the birth and childhood of Christ. Since his science and understanding tells him that these stories, read literally, cannot be factually true, the temptation is to look no further and to reject the whole Bible as having little connection with reality.

CREATION

The most difficult problem met in all reconciliation attempts is the origin of life - evolution vs creation - if some scientific ideas on the creation of life from a chemical soup can be accepted as invalid, the task of reconciliation is enormously eased. Even with this help the interpretation of the creation account in Genesis Chapter 1 has to be completely revised. Then the introduction of Adam and Eve into a world populated by Homo Sapiens and the technical impossibility of the Flood pose severe problems. Enthusiasm seems to dry up once these hurdles have been tackled.

In all the studies that I have so far seen the basic presumption has been that the Bible must be correct. Problems must be due solely to errors in interpretation, not errors of fact. See how the trick is sometimes worked for the creation account in Genesis:

Day 1. This is easy. God created the Big Bang, and the light referred to was the light produced by this. For 'deep', and 'waters' read Universe - dark before the Big Bang. The division between light and darkness has to be ignored, although sometimes and somehow said to relate to the ignition of suns bringing additional light in their area. The introduction at this stage of the concepts of night and day is also ignored. For 'day' we of course understand an age of indeterminate length, the severe problems this causes over the idea of mornings and evenings defining the day also has to be ignored.

Day 2. is more difficult. Precisely where or what the 'waters' are now is not clear. However a space (for 'firmament' read 'space') is created between two lots of them. It is assumed that the lower 'waters' refer to the Earth, the space to the sky - since the firmament has, in due course, to accommodate the stars it would appear to equate to the cosmos. Opinions differ as the upper waters. Some ignore the firmament and say that the upper waters are everything left over in the immediate area when the earth solidified, others that the upper waters formed a haze in the atmosphere that obscured the sun. You will recall of course that in the Flood story it was water from above the firmament that contributed so much - never mind, worry about that when we get there.

Day 3. is not without its problems either. The observed fact that grass and flowering or fruiting trees did not appear until much later is countered by a claim that the creation of plant life only started on the third day, and continued throughout the subsequent days. Ignore for now the question of how any plant life could grow without sunlight.

On day 4. we have to tackle the problem that the sun, moon and stars appear on the scene a bit late. We can explain this (or can we?) by saying that they were there all the time, but were obscured by haze until day 4.

Day 5. and day 6 are dealt with in the same way as day 3. A slight problem over the too early arrival of birds. Deal with it by reading 'winged fowl' as anything that flies, including insects. On day 6 there is a requirement that all creatures should only eat 'green herbs'. A pity that so many of them, them, including most sea creatures, are unequivocally made for killing and eating their neighbours. Ignore it, and leave the creation of man until later.

Well, we made it. But the distortions, and the amount that we have to ignore create no confidence that we have interpreted correctly. Fundamentally do we have any right to re-draft the Bible in this way? The approach of trying to force the Bible into agreement, distorting and editing it while maintaining that everything in it is absolutely true, just won't do. Before even attempting the reconciliation you must have come to accept the relevant science as substantially true, which leaves only one option open - you must consider that some statements in the Bible represent allegory or myth, and are not strictly true.

This will be an agonising realisation for many, brought up in the belief that the whole of the Bible is the literal Word of God. The heartfelt cry of one: "I cannot see how I can have immovable faith in Scripture wondering which portions are "God breathed" and which are not". But there is no hope of a true reconciliation unless we can free ourselves of all pre-conceived ideas, of dogmas, both about science and about the Bible. The inerrancy of the Bible is no less an unproved theory than the evolutionist theory of creation of life from a chemical soup. The truth that is in the Bible must agree the truth that is in science, but first we must decide what is true - in both, and we cannot afford to make any assumptions.

EVOLUTION

The arguments for a large degree of evolution are solidly based, but I suggest that no-one should blindly accept evolutionist claims without first carefully examining them. You will find that no scientist will claim that the creation of life by purely natural processes has been shown to be a real possibility, that only some will claim it as a probability, that many will deny it could ever be a realistic possibility. You will find no scientific explanation for the sudden (geologically speaking) bursts of new species following major extinctions, although theories abound. While limited macro-evolution by the modification of existing genes is well supported science has difficulty in explaining , and can provide no evidence, as to how active new structures - the so-called new information - as opposed to inactive rubbish, can be added to existing DNA. The number of 'intermediate' forms found is exceedingly small and offers only limited support to evolutionist claims.

At the same time a great deal of evolution theory, including a degree of macro-evolution, cannot now be challenged, while the Biblical account appears deeply flawed. There is, I believe, a growing realisation that a combination of the two is possible once doctrines of Bible inerrancy and scientific infallibility have been set aside, and that this could be accepted at least as a working hypothesis by all except the most determined atheists and the most dogma-bound fundamentalists.

The evolution/creation debate raises enormous heat, but it is based on ignorance and a refusal to examine opposing points of view with any sort of open mind.

THE GENESIS STORIES - ADAM AND EVE AND THE FLOOD.

One of the most difficult problems for reconciliation is that of what do with Adam. I have yet to find any Bible apologist (the word is not used in a pejorative sense) who, accepting both science and the Bible, can find an answer that satisfies even himself. The main problem lies with the so-called hominids that indisputably lived before the supposed creation of Adam and Eve. (They become even more of a problem if they lived AFTER Adam and Eve). By Adam's time the world population of these is estimated as around ten million. They lived in villages, irrigated their crops, herded domestic beasts, believed in an after-life, buried their dead with ceremony and with food and weapons, had the arts of painting and sculpture, could scatter flowers on a child's grave. In every detectable way, in both spiritual and physical life, they appear identical to we who follow. I would love to have been present when one of these relatively sophisticated creatures was brought to primitive naked Adam to be named! (Gen 2:19).

It is necessary to explain how this population, which had spread over the whole earth, died out to be replaced by Adam's descendants, or alternately how their descendants got human souls and were afflicted by the curse placed on humanity after Adam's fall.

Or perhaps that Adam lived some 50,000 years ago, not six thousand, and that all the hominids other than Homo Sapiens Sapiens were genetic freaks. But either of these ideas would invalidate whole swathes of Bible text. There are two other possibilities, that the story is an allegory, or that the story is an imaginative legend. Such would satisfy science but would seriously impact on Christian doctrine. These aspects, together with problems over internal details of the story are considered in the article on Inerrancy.

The Flood is a little easier so long as its consequences are not examined too closely. It is possible to say that the Hebrew word 'erets', commonly translated as implying the whole of Earth, really means no more than an unspecified area of land. That all the 'land' and all the 'high hills' only means all that the writer knew of. So far so good. Real difficulties come with the innumerable scientific and technical impossibilities inherent in the Bible's story, which can only be covered by a great arsenal of attendant miracles - which in their turn would deny the actual words in the Bible. Acceptance of the scientific verdict that the Flood was only a local event does of course create an irretrievable problem when the Bible claims that all subsequent life descended from the survivors on the Ark, and that all the languages of earth were born at Babel. As with the story of Adam you also have a choice of allegory or legend.

CONCLUSION

If I appear unsympathetic to current attempts at reconciliation it is because the studies of most authors have been crippled by their current dogma, in particular the dogma that the Bible cannot be wrong. I firmly suggest that no genuine reconciliation can ever be attained unless this dogma is put aside. There are too many direct contradictions which cannot be accommodated by trying to distort the words of the Bible to fit those scientific facts which cannot be denied, or by denying or distorting evident scientific truth to fit the words of the Bible.

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