On Science: Consequences Two (Part Five)

Having decided, then, what one consequence of revelation trumping science is not (that is, trusting revelation over science does not mean science is useless or generally untrustworthy), it seems like a good idea to note one of the positive consequences.

This will probably please some and rankle others, but I think one of the positive consequences about special revelation (the Scripture) being more authoritative than natural revelation (science) is that the whole apologetic debate about the age of the earth is really pretty useless and a gigantic waste of time.

The message of this post to OECs is that scientific analysis doesn't trump God's revelation of How Things Work and what is True. (The methods are flawed, data collection evolves, the interface to the data is fallen, and so on and so forth.) The message to YECs is that it's time to stop making scientific analysis the Gospel Message of Genesis. (Because it isn't a gospel issue. Really: no one is going to hell because Genesis isn't a science book. And the same caveats to your interpretation apply: acting like there's only one way to read Genesis 1–3 is just as dumb as assuming that we can interpret scientific data objectively.)

Ironically, both groups act the same way a metaphysical naturalist does when they say that special revelation and natural revelation have to agree with each other. And the unfortunate emphasis on the non-existent scientific narrative of Genesis distracts from the actual gospel narrative of Genesis (the image of God, the fall of the first Adam, the coming of the second Adam, and so on).

Our apologetic, then, should more properly be concerned with the underlying theological and philosophical issues: imago dei for starters. Indeed, this is pretty significant: purely natural processes cannot account for the supernatural imprint of God's image on Adam and the rest of humanity—or at least I've never read anything convincing to that effect. People also often forget that the idea of the superman is an evolutionary one (not a fictional comic-book hero). The next step in human evolution drove (and still drives) the ethics of many racial superiority hypotheses.

For those concerned with the need to answer modern and post-modern science claims against the Bible, the first order of business is to look at the resurrection, not at Genesis. Creation is certainly a miracle, but it is not the primary miracle: the resurrection is. This is scientifically improbable (one would say it violates the second law of thermodynamics at least), but it is historically accessible and within that realm verifiable. People were around when it happened, testified to it, and suffered death and torture for refusing to deny it. If you can accept that God became man in the person of Jesus Christ, lived among us, was crucified, buried, and rose again on the third day, it's not such a far stretch to consider that God could have created the world in six literal days. On the other hand, if you're convinced that the universe is old and can reconcile that with the clearly supernatural presuppositions of the narrative, well and good.