Creation vs. Evolution

This is just something I wrote a while ago. It's probably babbling, but what the hey!

Are the Theory of Evolution and the Story of Creation Mutually Exclusive?

I grew up in the state of Kansas and the things that are going on there now with the system of education are beginning to gnaw at me. A lot of Christian conservatives are saying that evolutionary theory goes against the teachings of the Bible. While it is true that the literal interpretation of the story of Creation in Genesis is incompatible with what science teaches us today, one must look beyond the story. The Bible itself was written by fallible human beings who either interpreted the words of God to their own benefit or wrote what they felt the way the Earth worked. Let’s explore the second part of this statement first.

One must remember that the science of astronomy has changed a lot since the time of the ancients. Up until the 1500s, it was believed that the Earth was stationary and that the Sun and all the planets revolved around a central Earth. The Renaissance was not only a rebirth of culture; it was also a rebirth of science. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton all came along and turned astronomy on its ear. First, Copernicus was able to show that it was possible and much more likely that the Earth was moving around a central Sun. It was able to explain the position of the planets in the sky much more accurately and with a much simpler model than the previous geocentric model devised by Ptolemy in the 2^nd Century CE. Even then, astronomy kept evolving. Kepler was able to derive his three laws of planetary motion from observations made by Tycho Brahe to give us much more complete model of the solar system. It wasn’t even until Galileo turned his telescope to the sky that these models were shown to be more or less accurate and correct. Even today, astronomy is still evolving. The model of how our solar system formed may not even be correct. The formation of the solar system was only based on one example of a planetary system, our own. Since 1995, there have been over 150 other planets discovered outside our own solar system, and the majority of them look nothing like ours.

Planetary astronomy does not even delve into other astronomy disciplines. For example, cosmology studies the evolution of our universe as a whole. Cosmologists have been able to estimate that the universe is around 15 billion years old (give or take a couple of billion years). They also believe that the universe started in a giant explosion of space and matter into nothing in what is called the Big Bang. Galactic astronomy also can tell us a lot about how wrong the ancient astronomers were. They believed that all of the entire universe encompassed nothing larger than what is just found in the Oort Cloud, a spherical structure 100,000 AU in diameter (an AU is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun, around 93 million miles) containing millions of comet-like bodies. Our own galaxy, the Milky Way is 30,000 times larger than that, and the Milky Way is an average galaxy. This shows us how much we have learned in just the last 500 years, much more than was learned in the 1500+ years prior.

By no means does this mean that I do not believe in God. If we go back to the Big Bang, there are a lot of questions that cannot be answered by science. For example, the Universe is thought to be flat, which means that the Universe is expanding in such a way, that in the distant future, which we can think of as being an infinite time from now, the expansion of the Universe will stop. This model of the Universe was based on two things: the critical density of the Universe and the actual density of the Universe. The critical density of the Universe is the required density of matter and energy contained in the Universe that makes the Universe flat. The actual density is the actual amount of matter and energy in the Universe. Cosmologists have found that the actual density is very close to the critical density. They found that if the density of the Universe was just a tad higher that it actually is, the Universe would have been over dense, and instead of expanding, it would have collapsed too fast. On the other hand, if the density was just a little bit smaller than the actual density, the Universe would have expanding too fast and nothing could have formed from the matter and energy as they would not be able to collapse into stars and galaxies and all the celestial objects we see today. This question cannot be answered easily by science, if at all. There must be some otherworldly force, or even some force outside our own Universe, making the density it is. Other physical constants in the Universe must be what they are as well, or the Universe would not be here either. For example, the strength of gravity, or the gravitational constant, has to be its current value, or the Universe would have collapsed or expanded too fast depending on how it was different. The magnitude of the electron charge, the magnetic moment of the electron, the Bohr radius, and the speed of light must also be what they are or we would not be here. These types of things can only be explained by a supernatural being, which we call God.

There is also the question of dinosaurs. Anthropologists have shown that dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago. They disappeared from the face of the Earth before mankind became the dominant life form almost 50,000 years ago. Yet, there is no mention of dinosaurs in the Bible and we know they exist.

How about geology? Geology has shown that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, and life first appeared about a billion years later.

Lastly, what about biology? DNA comparisons between different species have shown that those wide varieties of species have similar segments of DNA. Humans and chimpanzees have a 97.8% similarity between their DNA strands. Even animals as different from humans as frogs have DNA that is more similar than it is different. If you compare the forelimbs of humans, birds, and frogs, the bone structure is remarkably similar as well. This is compelling evidence that somehow, these four different species, and in general, all species, seemed to have come from the same ancestor.

All this boils down to the Bible being the literal word of God. I feel that the majority of the Old Testament if not the whole Bible is probably one of the best works of fiction ever written. It is a nice moral story and a great code to live by. Science has shown that the Bible cannot be literal. It was calculated, based on the story of Creation in Genesis, that the Earth was created around 6000 years ago, and hence, the entire Universe was also created at that time. I have just stated that the Universe is around 15 billion years old, Earth is around 4.5 billion years old, and dinosaurs disappeared around 65 million years ago. All these numbers show that the literal interpretation of the Bible is the incorrect interpretation. Now, it is possible that God set in motion the mechanisms that created our Universe and brought forth life to the Earth. Another argument that we can make is the definition of a human being. It has been argued that humans are the only species to have souls. Who are we to say that God choose one of our ancestors, some Australopithecus Africanus, to have a soul and make him Adam? How about the wives of Cain and Seth as well? Adam and Eve didn’t have any daughters, or at least, none are mentioned in the Bible. They had wives, and we know that they had children. They each must have mated with someone. It seems highly unlikely that two people, Adam and Eve, populated the whole world.

We can also argue that God’s day is not the same day as a human day. What do we mean by a day? In astronomical terms, it is just the time it takes for the Earth to rotate on its axis once. The Earth day is very different from days on other planets. Mars has a 26 hour day; Jupiter’s day is 10 hours, and so on. How do we know that God didn’t have days that lasted millions or billions of years? We don’t.

So can the Theory of Evolution and the Story of Creation coexist in modern society? The short answer is yes, they can. However, one must be able to separate the Story of Creation and not take the Bible’s version as literal.