The Creationists are at it again. In a news story I recently learned about a museum in Kentucky that has dioramas with Adam and Eve alongside dinosaurs "cavorting" together. In terms of exhibits, this is a pretty good one. I mean the photos just smack of realism.
The Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY is set to open next week. The museum has a theological agenda of teaching that the earth is about 6,000 years old and that dinosaurs roamed the lands at the same time as Adam and Eve. It's a jab at evolution, and it's a really good art instalation, but I still don't get it. What's the problem with believing in both the idea that God created the world we know (and a few we don't) and in the idea of natural selection/evolution as outlined by Darwin et al?
I grew up in the household of a father who was both farmer and chemist. Faith and science blended nicely before my eyes. I learned on the farm that a faithful planting, fertilizing, and watering mingled with a mysterious germination and miraculous growth to yield a fruit. The process called for something from both God and farmer.
But I also saw a scientific side to it, and never once saw a disconnect between The Farmer's Almanac with it's pithy and sometimes Biblical quotes and the Chemical Engineering News that graced our mailbox each month. There was God-mystery in both, and I discovered at an early age that God was a genetic engineer who used amazing processes to bring about the world as we know it and that those holy processes line up with the knowledge that scientific pursuit yields.
Leafing through the pages of my father's technical journals I didn't always understand the world but I never felt threatened. Similarly, my small hands would dig tunnesl in the dirt rows of the corn and soybean fields and knew that the earth was a precious and holy thing. Though I didn't understand why I perceived it as holy, I never felt threatened by it. So why do we Christians get wrapped around an axle by scientific theory?
I believe both ideas - that God made us and that evolution is accurate scientific theory. Some of my more conservative Christian brothers and sisters disagree and try to claim a place of primacy in the created order that we humans do not rightly deserve. I think they have a real problem not being the center of the universe, but if the Christian theology that so many rabid Christians espouse is true then it is God that is the center of the universe, not us. We are, in keeping with the imagery of Scripture, nothing more than clay in the hand of the Creator, and if the Creator chose to arrive at my bodily expression by way of clay-mation and evolution, then so be it. What's the conflict?
1 comment:
Gary, I agree with your "both-and" analysis. I doubt that there are very many conservative Christians who believe that the world is only 5,000 years old (or whatever the number is). I wish they (we) could think more and react less.
If Genesis isn't a timeline, then what in the world is it? :-)
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