Draft for Column for second week Feb.

We just noted Darwin’s birthday. we just had a series of dueling presentations on creationism between the Creation Museum’s ken Ham and Bill Nye, the Science guy. Back in Indiana, our daughters attended conservative Christian schools. While they had some good training, some of the perfidious effects of their schooling linger. They were told that it was wrong to question assumptions. They were fed outright lies about natural science and heard them called facts. They were given a remarkably nationalistic view of American history. Indeed, the school pushed out a most talented social studies teacher as she attempted to be more even-handed in her methods.

I consider myself a moderate Christian, but the constant drumbeat of the right wing would make me a liberal in some sets of eyes, I suppose. When the girls were bored in the car on the way home, they would try to get a rise out of me by going through some nonsense in school on biblical interpretation, history, or science. I usually could be counted on to go through the roof on the latter, if I held my tongue on the first two.

Why? First of all, Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6) . I cannot countenance seeing scientific truth disregarded in the name of a different truth. Second, John 1 identifies Jesus as the very logos, word, idea, vision, plan of God. We live in a time when we have uncovered some of the very divine blueprints of creation. I cannot grasp how then we can ignore those findings in the name of the one who embodies the divine plan for all of creation (Col. 1:15-20). Finally, the assertions frankly embarrass me. Being religious cannot mean one leaves one’s mind locked away. I use assertions deliberately, as they do not amount to arguments on evidence, but are a series of rhetorical strategies to deflect a sense of authority from the evidence produced by science. When Bill Nye presented mountains of evidence, Ken Ham was left holding the bible, not as revelation but as some sort of magic card to deflect evidence. It merely gives militant atheists something new to make Christians a laughingstock.

More seriously, I do not comprehend how a group can dare to insist that only the creation account in Gen.1-2:4a can be given priority over other creation themes in the Scripture. Recently, we have been working on creation accounts in the Bible in our Wednesday class. One of the resources is a fine book by William Brown of Columbia Seminary in Georgia. A fine biblical scholar, he obtained a grant to read natural science for a year. The result is his book, Seven Pillars of Creation. Here he has the passages interact with elements of natural science, and he also has the points in the science raise new ways of approaching the texts themselves. (See Ps. 104, Prov. 8,  Job 38-41, for instance).

One of the points Dr. Brown makes may well be vital to dialogue between the two camps, if the conservative side would ever be interested in such. He ses a sense of wonder, of awe, of grandeur pervading the biblical view of creation and the quest for science toward deeper understanding and explanation. I do not think that creation itself is evidence for the divine. I do hold, with all of my mind and heart, that a religious perspective on creation only deepens a sense of wonder at the immensity and intricacy of the natural world. At its best, religion is a gateway to the numinous, a liminal threshold to a world beyond our senses alone. To see a picture of the Hubble telescope, to see a picture of the newest nearly quantum level microscope is to see a world from a divine point of view. We cannot permit, a particular way of interpreting one bible passage to isolate ourselves from the wonders only our generati