Bible and Science – Mistakes in the Genesis?

In his article "Mistakes in Genesis" [1], Andy Carloff enlightens us again with a pile of quotations in order to offer us "a critique of the first book of the Bible" and convince us "that not only is the Bible a tremendously foolish document, but it is outrightly dogmatic, contradicting, and corrupt of any moral value". Well, this is something! Generations over generations of individuals of our species have been inspired and educated by the Bible, in order to create a Science that today turns so violently against the Bible itself. Because we can positively affirm that Andy Carloff's attitude is not an isolated one. What went wrong?

One of the great questions of the Man witnessing the passions of Christ is how come that the Savior did not even try to save Himself. In spite of the fact that He showed by words and acts what salvation means, this attitude of the Savior generated a long lasting puzzle, for the Man judges according to this simple rule: if he is indeed the Christ, then He must save Himself from death!

This conclusion is an example of arrogance that characterized the Man from the very beginning of the species. In spite of all the warnings of God in the Old Testament and of Christ Himself in the New Testament, the Man still continues to pass his own judgments as attitudes that God must have. The present times are no exception, in spite of all gathering of Natural Philosophy over centuries. Publicizing the achievements of the Natural Philosophy doesn't seem to have other effect than making more and more people aware of some "truth" and thus partaking in the "elucidation" of "tough" problems.

The explanation of this state of the case comes, on one hand, from the fact that God is considered, humanly speaking, as a concept, having consequently some attributes extracted, like the attributes of any other concept, from our experience. Starting with Newton, this experience sublimated in what we'd like to call the modern positive Science – simply Science – whose essential ingredient is the force. On the other hand, every one of us is in possession of the truth, only not too many can express it into a concept. And whoever can, does it in a certain language which, by its very essence, is not universal, so the polemics ensues. Taken as dialectics, this polemics has its positive aspects, related mostly to the progress of Man. Unfortunately it cannot be always taken as such, and the relation between Bible and Science is such an instance.

To bring an example, let's quote from Nymph Kellerman's article "The Big Bang and the Bible" [2]. The description of the article is quite unambiguous: "The Big Bang hypothesis and the origin of the universe as described in the opening chapters of Genesis, are one hundred percent compatible and thus we know and believe that Physics and Theology is too". In the development of article, however, there is nothing of a proof, but simply arguments backed up by quotations from what Man has thought along the time regarding the subject of what God did in the Book of Genesis. The final argument of Nymph's is replacing the verse from the Book of Genesis 1:3 "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light" by a personal assertion: "When God said "Let there be light", the Big Bang happened. An illustrious aboriginal explosion that sired elementary elements which in turn fused into heavier elements within billions of stars, congregated in their billions of galaxies over billions of years."

Now, why would anyone want to do a thing like that? Nymph Kellerman's intention was indeed a noble one: to show that there is no incompatibility between Genesis and Science. However, there is no difference between her attitude and that of a long line of contributors to the explanation of the Bible along ages, which fuelled positions such as Andy Carloff's. And that attitude is best summarized by the woman who piously threw some chips of wood on the fire that burned Jan Huss, making him mumble the celebrated phrase "O sancta simplicitas!" Our intentions are always dominated by the general idea of "good" of a certain epoch, and all of us are willing to make the mark of our intentions in the World. This is our natural determination!

It is quite significant that Nymph Kellerman brings the Science into play, in order to 'correct' the Bible, if we may be permitted to use such a word. This is the general idea of 'good' in the problem of comprehending the Bible today. Nobody has even a spark of suspicion that it might be the other way around: the Science has to be corrected by the Bible! The 'truths' of Science are indeed to be taken cum grano salis so to speak, and only a scientist can do that properly. Their popularization gives them an aura of absolute truth, and the layman takes them as such without any discernment.

In the case in point, the Big Bang was best explained in Steven Weinberg's "The First Three Minutes of the Universe" [3]. The celebrated physicist goes into a great deal of extent in warning us about the limits of the theory, and every physicist can clearly understand the pros and contras in accepting the theory. However, in the popularization literature the Big Bang is sometimes presented as a fact, and so is taken by Kellerman, in spite of the fact that she tells us from the very beginning that the Big Bang is a "hypothesis".

Now, why do we feel the urge to replace a fact like "there was light", which any one of us can witness, by an assumption "there was Big Bang", that none of us witnessed, and which is still an object of scientific debate? The answer is simple: because we need explanations and these have to be done within our capabilities of understanding!

We just chose the story from the Gospel of Luke in the beginning of this article, because it reflects the dominant idea of all times, according to which God is almighty through force. The force is what the Man, as a species, fears and reveres most. In building a scientific view of the creation the Man simply imagined a construction like any other one he does: the Creation has to start from matter and proceeds by force! That's because we perceive the World around us by our senses. But, surprise: there is no matter, at least the way we understand it, in the beginning described in the Bible! On top of that, the next move of God after creating the heaven and the earth was not something obviously related to force, but the light. Something is got to be wrong! And here we are accepting, at any rate, everything that can explain the Creation the way we need it. Today the Big Bang hypothesis fills in. What will it be tomorrow?

References
[1] Andy Carloff, Mistakes in Genesis, this site
[2] Nymph Kellerman, The Big Bang and the Bible, this site
[3] Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes of the Universe, Basic Books 1993