Guest: Church and science appeared to be in conflict until this realization
I was in my second year at a church college, pursuing a degree in theology in preparation for entering the ministry. I had limited my reading to books and literature recommended by my church, so the story of creation was pretty much a neat little package that no one dared dispute. In those books, creation took place about 7000 B.C. and was completed in only seven literal 24-hour days. At the end of the seven days, the Earth, animals and humans were pretty much as they are in the present.
This view seemed plausible until I ran across a copy of Life Magazine with a discussion of the age of the Earth. The story portrayed the Earth as being millions of years old! It was a jarring experience because it challenged all I had been taught. I had read or heard such stories before, but the church had simply brushed them off as falsehoods.
I couldn’t get the story out of my mind, so I found time to go to the main Oklahoma City library to do research in science journals and books, not willing to dismiss all the claims made by well-known scientists regarding the age of the Earth and universe. The articles told of various methods of determining the Earth’s age, such as carbon 14 dating, the amount of salt in the sea, how many millions of years it took to form sedimentary rocks, the size of stalactites and stalagmites in caves, and many other studies that indicated a very old Earth and universe.
After further study and thought, I finally concluded that the Bible and science don’t really disagree but portray events in different ways. The Bible presents a simplified picture of creation that people of that day could understand, with the main objective of showing that God was the originator of all things; it was never intended as a scientific study. I also found Bible verses teaching that God is not limited by time, such as “… one day with the Lord is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as a day” (2nd Peter 3:8, KJV).
A related conflict concerned the size of the universe. The Bible narration seemed to put the Earth at the center of the universe, with the sun and stars rotating around it. But according to science, the Earth is merely one of many planets revolving around the sun, and the sun is only a medium star in one arm of the Milky Way galaxy, which in turn is only one of billions of galaxies stretched across the unfathomable depth of space. Considering the enormity of the universe, the Earth is merely a tiny speck of dust floating in space!
For a while I felt like an insignificant nobody in the great scheme of things. Then I began to realize that the vastness of God’s creation only magnifies how great He is, knowing that He numbers even the hairs of our heads, and that He loves us and has a plan for our lives. With that assurance, we can rest in the Lord, and can sing with the songwriter, Stuart Hamblen:
“How big is God? How big and wide is His vast domain?To try to tell these lips can only start.He's big enough to rule His mighty universe,Yet small enough to live within my heart.”
Ed Koonce, of Mustang, grew up in Kingfisher and earned a degree in theology from Southwestern Bible College, a bachelor's from the University of Central Oklahoma and a master's from Oklahoma State University. He served as interim pastor of a small church, followed by a career at Tinker Air Force Base, working in electronics repair, engine tech services and systems analysis.