Reconciling Science and Religion

Okay, I’m going to wade out into the waist deep water for a bit here. I have never understood the problem with reconciling science and religion. Maybe I should clarify that by religion I mean Christianity as it’s the only religion that I’m even halfway familiar with. On one side you’ve got an all powerful, all knowing, all encompassing God. On the other physical evidence. To get specific let’s look at creation. On the one hand you have the world created in seven days. On the other a universe that took billions of years to create. On the surface there appears to be a discrepancy, but let’s take a look at the God part again. We are dealing here with an entity that is omniscient. God can literally do anything. If God can create the earth and the universe in seven days couldn’t he have created it in such a way that the physical evidence would lead you to believe that it was created in some other way. To be brutally simplistic could not an all powerful being have created an earth that was littered with fossils that would lead you to believe, just looking at the evidence that can be seen and touched and experimented with, that dinosaurs and other creatures predated the date that strict creationists see as the beginning of the planet. That man and all the other life on the planet were built in such a way that again would lead someone to believe, based just on what their senses and power of reason could tell them, that all life evolved from some original source. If you grant that God is all powerful then the answer, by definition, is yes. I really don’t understand why you need to go any further than that. You could ask why, but again we are dealing with an all powerful, all knowing being. When faced with the problem of evil, say why does God let the innocent suffer and the wicked be rewarded the common answer from the devout is that God is so far beyond us that it is impossible for us to see his plan. Which makes perfect sense as long as you grant the existence of some kind of omnipresent being. Why then is it necessary to twist and distort the facts to come up with pseudoscience like Intelligent Design. It’s almost like the proponents of babble like Intelligent Design aren’t quite able to believe that God could be so creative. They want to replace a beautiful subtlety with hamfistedness. Grasping this idea would seem to make the path of discovery an unbelievable joyful activity for the devout. I could imagine the thought process of some believing scientist to be something like this. “Yes God I know in my heart of hearts that you created everything about six thousand years ago exactly like it is laid out in Genesis and other parts of the Bible, and by the way any discrepancies I find therein are a failure of my understanding and not of the actual text, but I am fascinated by how you brought this bit of light I’m seeing into being so that it appears to have originated a million years ago on the other side of the galaxy.” Every new piece of knowledge would be a tiny step closer to knowing the mind of God. Every new bit of data collected would be literally a message from God and a confirmation of his love for us. Imagine the entire universe is one big puzzle lovingly created for us to unravel, to discover what our ultimate purpose is. Of course being a non believer I may be missing something very basic. I am the person who had to raise his hand in an Old Testament class to clarify that we should take it as a given that God is good after all. Maybe it’s my lack of faith and certainty that obscure some reasoning that throws a monkey wrench into what I’m trying to get at. Anyway it’s late, so here are some pretty pictures in case you actually got this far.

From Nighttime

And one more.

From Nighttime