Scientific or Religious Explanations

You Don't Have To Believe Genesis Literally True

• It's your choice how you deal with Evo. You can stick your head in the sand and try to ignore it. Or, you can do what most Christians have done - accept that it's probably correct, and find a way of accommodating it into your faith. Most Christians are secure enough in their belief that it isn't threatened by new knowledge. It's the great strength of human beings - we are flexible. We are capable of changing our minds when evidence shows us we're wrong.
  
  Few christians think that every word of the Bible is true and every instruction has to be obeyed.
  
  The OT is full of rules and instructions that we reject today. The Bible says not to eat pork or shellfish, not to shave off your beard, that slavery is OK as long as you don't enslave your own people, that if your daughter is not a virgin on her wedding night she shall be dragged out and stoned to death, that if your sons disobey you, they shall be stoned to death.
  
  Christians ignore the inconvenient bits of the NT as well. Ignore the bits which say divorce is adultery, that women should not speak in church, that they should do what their husband tells them.
  
  And don't even think about this bit
  
  
  
  

  The excuse given is usually "Oh that's just for the Jews" or "Oh that's just for when you're in Israel" (despite the fact that the NT tells you that the OT laws have to be kept). Whatever reason you come up with, you are accepting that the Bible is not to be followed word-for-word. You have updated your interpretation to incorporate modern attitudes to slavery, women's rights and child abuse.
  
  Most Christians have abandoned the idea that the Earth is flat, that lightning was a sign of God's wrath, that the Earth is the center of the Universe, and that hereditary diseases were because of God's curse on an ancestor.
  
  And on the other side of the coin, you accept modern science in almost every aspect of your lives - the cars you drive, the TV and the computer, the satellites that let you see instantaneously something happening on the other side of the world, the medicine that lets women survive childbirth. All stuff which would have seemed magic or witchcraft at the time the Bible was written.
  
  So why are you stuck on Genesis?
  
  Just as with Galileo, all the verifiable facts contradict your non-factual interpretation. To cling to a literal interpretation of Genesis means you have to reject not just biology, but also chemistry, physics, astronomy, astrophysics, paleontology - you have to simultaneously hold the position that all these sciences are wrong when you apply them to the Bible, but right in every other part of our life.
  
  "Geology shows that fossils are of different ages. Paleontology shows a fossil sequence, the list of species represented changes through time. Taxonomy shows biological relationships among species. Evolution is the explanation that threads it all together. Creationism is the practice of squeezing one's eyes shut and wailing: 'does not!'" - Dr. Pepper.
  
  

  
  

  Just as with Galileo, blind faith has to eventually give way to reason. You can't stop people looking through the telescope. And you can't stop people from noticing that the world lines up with the scientific explanations, and doesn't align with the religious ones.