One of the conflicts between science and religion (particularly some branches of Protestant Christianity) involves time, more specifically the age of the planet and how long humans (i.e. Homo sapiens) have lived here. For many centuries, Christian theologians have tried to determine when the world was created using their bible as a primary data source. The underlying assumption of these studies has been the belief that their bible is a literal, factual, and accurate history. Using biblical stories, they have attempted to create a chronology of not only human existence, but a chronology of the planet itself.
The most famous of the biblical chronologies was the seventeenth century chronology done by James Ussher, the Archbishop of Armagh (Church of Ireland) in which he concluded that the earth had been created at 6 PM on Saturday, October 22, 4004 BC. Other chronologies had placed the creation of the earth at 3761 BC (Jose ben Halafta), 3952 BC (Bede), 3949 BC (Joseph Justus Scaliger), and 3992 BC (Johannes Kepler).
Unfortunately, the data in the ground studied by scientists did not substantiate the conclusions from the symbolic stories of creation. Charles Lyell published his groundbreaking Principles of Geology (1830-1833) which showed that the earth’s origin significantly pre-dated 4004 BC. For some Christians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the findings of geology regarding the age of the earth were a bit unsettling and considered a form of heresy by some. However, Karen Armstrong, in her book A History of God: The 4,000-year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, points out:
“Since Newton, creation had been central to much Western understanding of God, and people lost sight of the fact that the biblical story had never been intended as a literal account of the physical origins of the universe.”
With regard to Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, Armstrong also writes:
“Monotheists in all three religions had regarded the creation as a myth, in the most positive sense of the word: it was a symbolic account which helped men and women to cultivate a particular religious attitude.”
In the twenty-first century, there is still a handful of people—primarily Protestant Christians—who cling fervently to the biblical chronologies, refusing to consider the scientific evidence regarding the age of the earth. From the Young Earth perspective, Homo sapiens, language, writing, and religion have always existed. Humans, therefore, must have walked the earth with dinosaurs. Richard Dawkins in his book
A Devil’s Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love writes:
“If a history were written at a rate of one century per page, how thick would the book of the universe be? In the view of a Young Earth Creationist, the whole history of the universe, on this scale, would fit comfortably into a slender paperback. And the scientific answer to the question? To accommodate all the volumes of history on the same scale, you’d need a bookshelf ten miles long.”
Dawkins goes on to say that:
“…the Young Earth view is not just that it is false but that it is petty, small-minded, parochial, unimaginative, unpoetic and downright boring compared to the staggering, mind-expanding truth.”
Seeming to compound the conflicts between science and Protestant Christianity was the development of the scientific theory of evolution. In 1859, Charles Darwin’s
The Origin of Species put forth the hypothesis that natural selection was the force that guided biological evolution. Bernard Wood, in his book
Human Evolution: A Very Short Introduction, points out:
“Charles Darwin’s contribution to science did not include the idea of evolution. What Darwin contributed was a coherent theory about the way evolution could work.”
In the years that followed Darwin’s announcement, scientific findings were unable to disprove this hypothesis and evolution became a scientific theory. Today, evolution is the basic concept which underlies our understanding of biology. In
Skeptic Magazine, James Randi writes:
“Evolution is possibly the most firmly established, well-defined, evidence-based fact of nature that we have ever developed.”
In the United States, however, there is a small, but very vocal and political group who feel that evolution is false because it conflicts with their religious beliefs regarding the creation of humans. In his chapter on “Creationism versus
Evolution,” in Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? Kendrick Frazier writes:
“Creationists and their sympathizers would expunge from our schools even any mention of evolution—the central unifying idea of the biological sciences and one of the most beautiful and most powerful explanatory concepts in the history of science.”
As a result, many public schools are hesitant to teach evolution in their science classes and the media reports on this issue as if there is a general conflict between religion and evolution.
However, most Christian traditions actually have no conflicts with evolution. Karen Armstrong writes:
“Science has been felt to be threatening only by those Western Christians who got into the habit of reading the scriptures literally and interpreting doctrines as though they were matters of objective fact.”
Stephen Jay Gould, writing in
Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?, reports:
“I have always been taught that no doctrinal conflict exists between evolution and Catholic faith, and the evidence for evolution seems both utterly satisfying and entirely overwhelming.”
In reporting on the debate over evolution and creationism in an article in
Skeptic, Ralph Barnes writes:
“If the conflict is going to be resolved by considering empirical evidence, creationists have lost the battle before it has even begun. However, if creationists can reconfigure the definition of science to suit their needs, they can make it seem that lack of empirical evidence isn’t that much of a handicap.”
To counterbalance the teaching of evolution in public schools, pseudo-sciences—most notably Creation Science and Intelligent Design—have been crafted to give a scientific appearance to religious ideas. These pseudo-sciences are then promoted as scientific “theories” which must be included in public school science curricula. In promoting a religious agenda, these pseudo-sciences emphasize that evolution is “just a theory” which “has not been proven.” In some schools stickers with these statements must be pasted in all science books.
In science, the term “theory” does not refer to “speculation” like it does in the pseudo-sciences. While religion begins with a belief and the consequences of this belief are then deduced, science begins with observations—also called data or evidence—and then produce a tentative explanation of these observations known as a hypothesis. Gathering additional data, scientists then attempt to disprove the hypothesis. When these attempts fail, then the hypothesis may become a theory if it can make predictions about things which have not yet been discovered. Carl Zimmer, in his book Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, sums up the scientific approach this way:
“The task of science is twofold: to determine, as best we can, the empirical character of the natural world; and to ascertain why our world operates as it does, rather than in some other conceivable, but unrealized, way—in other words, to specify facts and validate theories. Science, as we professionals always point out, cannot establish absolute truth; thus our conclusions must always remain tentative.”
No scientific theory, including the theory of gravity and the theory of evolution, has ever been proven, but since massive amounts of verifiable data seem to substantiate these theories rather than disprove them, they are generally considered true or factual.