(Or, perhaps more accurately, the conflicts inherent in a literal interpretation of the account in Genesis.)

I hope all my Christian friends don't stop speaking to me after this post.

I grew up around Christians teachings and values - don't steal, don't hit your sister, chew with your mouth shut, you cannot hook up motors from VCRs that you found on the curb directly to 120 volt outlets, etc. My K-12 education was no different - I was home-schooled almost my entire life. (And the one year that I wasn't, I was in a private Christian School) Naturally, the scholastic curricula of my life has necessarily been mixed with Biblical teachings. It works like this: Christian school is just like regular school, except you have a special teacher alongside your regular one: Christ Jesus! Not surprisingly, the classes in both schools went out of their way to incorporate Biblical concepts. (During the last year of my homeschooling, we used the unparalleled-in-sheer-awfulness ACE curriculum. There is no reason to use this curriculum to teach a child, ever. But that is a story for another day.) Most of the classes, at least at ICA, didn't really have a lot of room for large amounts of Christian-eze, for instance math, but the one place that the Big Bible Guns really came out was science.

Ever since I was little, I have enjoyed science, especially space. My room growing up was practically a gallery of images of the cosmos. I had a giant space mobile of the sun and all the planets, a poster of the shuttle Discovery lifting off on my wall, books with large colorful pictures of the planets. I was fascinated by science. I would sit for hours memorizing the backs of science flashcards, committing to memory the location of the Van Allen radiation belts and other obscure and useless trivia. Of course, most of the books that I checked out of the library casually threw around spans of time in the millions and billions of years. This didn't really bother me at the time - I had always been raised to believe in a young Earth, and when you're a kid, you tend to accept the beliefs of your parents as the gospel (No pun intended) truth. Lately, though, I've begun to question that blind faith. Why would God give us a brain, arguably the most amazing computer ever, drop us into this amazing world with planets and stars and trees and rivers and human beings and tapirs and flowers, and then not want us to use our brains to figure out the whole thing in it's entirety? 1st Thessalonians 5:21 says to "test everything". "Everything" means more than just the Biblical information. Acts 17:11 says "But the people of Beroea were more open minded than those in Thessalonica, and gladly listened to the message. They searched the Scriptures day by day to check up on Paul and Silas' statements, to see if they were really so." The great Welsh preacher Arthur Burt also agrees. "Truth demands independent witness," he preaches. "Test it! It's your responsibility to test what I say!"

Christians everywhere seem to despise the idea of a universe in which everything was less than God-directed. To them, the very idea of something happening outside of God's explicit direction and control is repugnant. And for some reason, this attitude often goes hand in hand with another common Christian attitude - that every account in the Bible should be taken in a completely literal fashion. And this is where science starts to have problems with the Biblical account. There is quite a bit of evidence that the universe had a very hot beginning, and that it has gradually cooled. For instance, take cosmic microwave background radiation.

In a nutshell, Einstein's theory of general relativity indicates that the universe had a definite beginning - and since we can today observe that galaxies are moving away from each other, they must have been closer together in the past. In fact, a very long time ago, they would have been quite closely packed together and quite dense - and the temperature quite high. This observation agrees with another observation, called cosmic microwave background radiation - we can measure this radiation and observe that the spectrum is characteristic of radiation from a body at a temperature of 2.725 Kelvin above absolute zero. According to the observations, early in the universe photons (For those playing the home game, a photon is single "packet" of light.) wouldn't have bounced around like they do now - they would have interacted with the plasma from the densely-packed (And hot) universe. At a certain point (About 3,000 Kelvins) they started travelling freely through space, and started to cool. This radiation, which we observe today, has cooled to 2.725 Kelvins, and will continue to cool as long as the universe keeps expanding. In addition, since the spectrum of this radiation agrees so exactly with that of a body at 2.725 Kelvins tells us that the radiation must have come from regions that are opaque to microwaves - and thus we can conclude that the light we observe today must pass through a certian amount of matter as one follows it back through time. This amount of matter is enough to curve spacetime, so the light rays in our past are bent back toward each other. As one follows our past back still further, the positive energy density of matter causes the light rays to bend toward each other more strongly, eventually shrinking to zero size in a finite time. (For information on this subject, see the definitive work on the matter, The Universe in a Nutshell by Stephen Hawking. My recounting of these theories is clumsy.)

There is other evidence to support the idea of an old, hot universe. The Hubble Law measures the redshift of distant galaxies and shows that it's porportional to their distance - so either we are at the center of an explosion of galaxies - which is untenable given the Copernican principle—or the universe is uniformly expanding everywhere.

These are only two examples, and I have explained them poorly, no doubt. My point is the way Christians react to these findings is asinine. Instead of re-examining their beliefs, or doing research of their own, the cry scientific "foul!" and huff away in anger. How dare science throw their sacred cow in the barbie! Now it's time to question the aptitude and character of the people making the observations - start exclaiming that "secular humanists" (A red herring if ever there was one.) are out to get them...again! They yell and scream that science is out to disprove God, that science wants to make man a god, that evolution in any form implies that there can be no moral absolutes, that our system of moral codes dissolves into utter chaos, etc.

I think we're going about this all wrong.

First off, I think the idea that all of science is a vast left-wing conspiracy out prove Nietzsche's quote that "God is dead." (This quote, by the way, it pretty much always taken out of context.) is silliness. I doubt that a majority, or even a minority of scientists get out of bed every morning thinking "Beautiful morning! Sky shining, birds singing! Now, how can I dedicate this day to the decimation of the Christian belief in God?". (Well, Richard Dawkins does, but he thinks Christians are responsible for all the world's ills.) Most scientists, with a few notable exceptions, are far most interested in the results of their latest experiments, in what they can glean from pure science than on disproving the beliefs of any religious group.

Second, interpretations change, and this is not a Bad Thing. The Catholic church browbeat Galileo Galilei into refuting his claim that the earth orbited the sun based on an literal interpretation of Psalm 93. Years later, during The Enlightenment, other people discovered the truth, and doctrine was changed accordingly. Sound theories on the world are a mathematical description and codification of the observations we make around us. Blind faith isn't what God had in mind - He endowed us with senses and a brain and an incredible ability to reason for a purpose - to explore and hypothesize and figure out How Things Work. Does faith has a place in one's view of the universe? Absolutely. It takes faith to believe in any explanation of the cosmos. And without science, we would still believe that the sky was a solid sphere, and that the sun revolved around us. Science and faith need each other. Both sides of the creationism / evolution theory have problems. A completely literal interpretation of the Genesis account is incompatible with observation. Science has it's own puzzling issues. Science doesn't have all the answers. Not even close. But I don't think that a scientific worldview is incompatible with a belief in the Bible, or God.

I think the bigger issue here is the energy wasted by Christians on this subject - and the energy wasted by Christians who are doing decidedly un-Christian things. When a group of Christians goes around to the funeral of soldiers killed in Iraq carrying signs that say "God Hates Fags" and "God Hates America", something has gone terribly wrong.

This is not to say that apologetics and cosmology and finding out the truth about the universes' existence is wrong - far from it. Everything depends on truth. But the real issue isn't how long the earth has been around, or whether or not the fossil record proves that mankind evolved from bananas. The real issue is how we're living our lives - Jesus didn't come to earth to start preaching against Charles Darwin, He spoke about loving your neighbor, He became angry at people who turned the temple into a commercialized den of thievery. He healed the sick. And He told His people to go and do likewise.

I'm rambling, I know. So what else is new?

There's a verse in 1st Corinthians 11:14 says "Doesn't even nature itself teach you it's a shame for a man to have long hair?". But there's another verse right next to it that says "But if anyone wants to argue about this, I simply say that we have no other custom than this, and neither do God’s other churches." In other words, get on with the stuff that's important. A lot of things are a "shame", it's a shame that my car got totaled when I hit a deer in Colorado. The people of Westboro Baptist Church are a shame. It's a shame that we don't have a toaster in our house anymore.

And if God's people keep putting more energy into debating intelligent design than living their lives with integrity and following the commands of the one they claim to love?

That'd be a shame.

Exit, stage left. Sparks