I am disappointed and saddened by the increasingly strident ‘debate’ (if I can be allowed to dignify the ‘mud-slinging’ by calling it a debate) between the ‘militant scientific atheists’ and the ‘creationists’.
Both sides disappoint me because of their arrogance, and their intolerance. Neither will accept that the other might have a point, and both are increasingly rude about each other. Both sides take the most extreme (and uncharitable) view of the other’s position and character... The creationists portray the atheists as god-haters, whilst the atheists portray all those with any religious belief as ignorant, medieval, bigots, who have been duped into believing a lot of rubbish.
Both would have you believe that there is no middle ground. As someone who squats in a small, muddy, patch of that ‘no-man’s-land’, I feel almost equally insulted by both sides.
I am an evangelical Christian. By that, I mean that I believe God wants his followers to ‘Be in the world making disciples’. That does not mean that I consider it my duty to ram the gospel down the throat of everyone and anyone, whether they want to hear it or not. It also does not necessarily mean that I agree with what I consider to be one of the ‘lunatic fringes’ of the church. In my view it does not matter one jot whether, for instance, the story of Genesis is literally true or not - that is a side issue - the crucial issues are those of sin (by which I mean a turning away from, or a rejection of, God) and redemption (God’s act enabling a return to a right and proper relationship with Him).
I am also a physicist. I spent 25 years working in a low-temperature physics lab. Some of that time was spent performing experiments designed to model what might have happened a tiny, tiny, fraction of a second after the ‘Big Bang’. To perform those experiments I needed to have a working knowledge of the various theories of how the world came into being and what they predict. That does not mean that I necessarily believe that the world began ‘by chance’ in a totally random ‘Big Bang’.
Whatever the atheists in this debate would have you believe, science says nothing about God, whatsoever. Nothing I read whilst working as a scientist has ever set out to prove, or disprove God. That is not science’s job. Science’s job is to explain how the world is today, and (perhaps) how it got here (but not, in any sense, the ‘why’). There is, I believe, space for both God and science. I am (or try to be) rational, and to consider the evidence before me. If I thought that science disproved God, I couldn’t believe in God - that’s the way I am.
I believe that religion (Christianity in particular) has the power to transform lives for the better. I am not denying that a lot of wrong has been done in the name of religion - witness the Crusades, Jihad, the Inquisition (Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition...), the extreme imposition of Sharia Law in some countries today. But that isn’t because religion is wrong, it is because mankind is sometimes wrong in the way it practices religion.
I am not a biologist; I cannot claim to truly understand the process of evolution by natural selection. I am not a theologian; I cannot claim to fully understand the scriptures - particularly the early chapters of Genesis. I am, instead, an interested, thinking, layman, in both fields. I doubt that Genesis is meant to be read, by modern man, as a literal account of how the world began. There is irrefutable evidence that the world is far older than the ‘recent creationists’ (whose views, worryingly, seem to be gaining increasing acceptance amongst certain parts of the church) maintain. The earth simply cannot be a few thousand years old. To imply that it is, is to (a) deny that the evidence we see before us is true and (b) to make God out to be deceitful.
Why does a belief in a 'young' earth imply that God is deceitful? What I mean by that is that the implication is that the evidence (from geology and cosmology) was ‘planted’ by God to make the world appear far older than it is - in effect making God out to be a liar. Because make no mistake, there is solid, virtually incontrovertible, evidence that the earth is several billions of years old, and the universe older than that.