We are in the process of developing a course called “A Beautiful Harmony – Scriptures and Science”. We intend to submit the course for inclusion in the YouVersion suite of applications and make it available freely to others as well. We are developing this course here in the open because it is a simple way to collect our ongoing thoughts and because it gives you an opportunity to provide feedback in the process.
Beautiful Harmony – Scriptures and Science
This course will attempt to explain the beautiful harmony that can be found between the Holy Scriptures of the Bible and the findings of modern science. To keep things simple, we will focus primarily on the first chapter of Genesis, the beautiful summary of the creation of our universe, the earth, creatures and mankind. This one chapter captures highlights of the different stages of creation, which we will explain more fully in this course.
Our Strong Logical Foundations
We hope that this course is interesting from an intellectual perspective. We also believe that this course presents one of the strongest intellectual arguments for the Christian faith that is available in our times. These intellectual arguments for a Christian faith rest on the following logic.
- The book of Genesis in the Bible is thousands of years old.
- Modern science is only about five hundred years old. But it appears to accurately describe billions of years of history of our earth and universe.
- Genesis harmonizes well with the descriptions from science about what happened billions of years ago.
- Therefore, only the Creator of the universe could be the source for the descriptions in Genesis. The Creator is the only one who would know what happened billions of years ago.
This course will primarily focus on the third point – that Genesis harmonizes well with the descriptions of science. This is the point that is usually not well accepted or understood. Examples of why this is the case will be covered in much greater detail in the following lessons.
Our Multifaceted Beyond-Genius God
It is helpful to begin with some background about our God, the Creator of this vast and beautiful universe and all that is good within it. As can be seen from creation, our Creator obviously delights in great diversity in the universe. And it is a diversity bathed in beauty and wonder. God is not only the Creator of the beautiful physical universe, but our God is also the Creator of our souls, spirits, and minds that allow us to appreciate the beauty and wonder of all creation. In human terms, we can say that God is so much beyond genius, beyond what we can ever comprehend. What we call human genius at its best can only glimpse a small part of the creation that God has made.
God is also the Creator of communication, with written language being a chief means of communication that can be kept as a somewhat permanent record over historical time periods. And so it is no surprise that our language can sometimes have very clear meanings and sometimes have very subtle meanings – to enable the various purposes of communication. So, our Creator God can be both clear and subtle in His communication to us in the Scriptures.
It is not surprising, then, that our multi-faceted, beyond-genius God has used language for Genesis 1 that can be interpreted and has been interpreted on many different levels. Genesis 1 has been interpreted as beautiful poetry for our soul. Genesis 1 has been interpreted as an origin story about who we are essentially as human beings, made in God’s image. Genesis 1 has been interpreted as a lesson about our place within creation, as care-takers of the earth and everything that has the breath of life. For the last century or so, however, mankind has missed out on the harmony between Genesis 1 and science. But now, we are coming to appreciate that Genesis 1 can also be interpreted as an appropriately accurate, high level summary of events that science has also begun to describe in greater detail. While the Genesis descriptions touch on only a few events that happened during the various phases of creation, the accounts are nonetheless appropriately accurate concerning events on the creation timeline. There are many books and writings that focus on Genesis as poetry, as our origin story, and as describing our responsibility as care-takers of this earth. But the harmony between Genesis 1 and science is not yet a story that is widely understood. So, explaining that harmony between Genesis 1 and contemporary science is the focus of this short course.