We have started working on Genesis in church lately, and as I feared, it has centered largely on a discussion of origins. I am not fond of the debate.
I don't really know that Genesis is intended to shape our understanding of astrophysics and biology. I know there are plenty who would disagree, but I would also stress that one needn't have such a conviction about Genesis to believe young-earth creationism. (That is to say, we can still believe in a young earth without using Genesis as the primary source for such a belief.)
I suppose at least one of the reasons that I hate having the origins debate is that it usually ignores one of the key features of science: it is supposed to change. While scientists surely draw philosophical and religious conclusions from what they've learned (and many of them quite false), science represents a changing understanding of how the world works and what it looks like. Thumbing your nose at a scientist because he misunderstood something is childish at best and at worst teaches people exactly the wrong way to approach science.
It is also true that one of the fundamental tenets of science is naturalism: that is, that natural explanations are the only acceptable ones in scientific exploration. To put it another way, if you accept supernatural explanations for phenomena, by definition what you're doing isn't science. That doesn't make it wrong; it just means that it's not science.
When we begin by disqualifying supernatural explanations, naturally we'll cause friction between those who posit a supernatural explanation and those who deny it. But attacking science for being defined as it is smacks of begging the question.
In the end, science interrogates small-t-truth, while religion interrogates big-t-Truth. It's when scientists begin to use science to shape their moral views that problems arise (see eugenics). Science cannot by its very nature say whether an act is morally right or wrong. The moral of natural selection is "survival of the fittest," but this hardly gives us license to select out the unfit members of society (despite efforts of abortionists and others).
Science is fundamentally undecidable: it cannot say with certainty that it has ever actually finished making a decision on whether something is true or not. We know today that Newtonian mechanics is flawed, even though it accurately predicts gross observations. Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics are incompatible, but we haven't yet found any reconciliation between the two. So when a YEC posits a supernatural solution to questions of origins while an old-earth atheist posits another based on science, the problem isn't that science is contradicting the Bible—at some level science always will. The problem is that the YEC is arguing with the OEA on the wrong grounds: the issue with evolution isn't the scientific application, it's the fact that morally reprehensible doctrines are derived from it and flow inexorably from a scientific application of them.
When we spend all of our time pointing out holes in scientific theories that scientists already know and admit, we do little to actually advance any sort of Biblical cause. Worse yet, we teach people that science is inherently flawed (without any qualifications on what that actually means), and we condition them to think of Genesis solely in terms of the origins debate.
With some fortune I'll have some time to discuss more themes in Genesis instead of just cussing in the near future. I have been extremely busy with a variety of personal pursuits and with buying a house, so time here has been hard to find.
Lord-willing, though, more posts will follow.
