Science and religion find common ground

Ken Ham, whose Creation Museum in Kentucky just celebrated its second anniversary this weekend, has never been more sure that the Earth is only about 6,000 years old and that God created everything in six divinely ordered 24-hour time slots.

To Ham, it doesn’t matter that scientists have recently unveiled Ida — the 47-million-year-old fossil hailed as the evolutionary link between modern primates and more distant species — the latest in a string of significant fossils to be hyped by the media.

“No other book gives an account of origins as specifically as the Bible,” said Ham, whose museum just 20 miles southwest of Cincinnati has attracted 720,000 visitors since opening in 2007.

I met Ham, founder of the nonprofit ministry Answers in Genesis, earlier this year in London after he gave a speech at Westminster Chapel, part of an ambitious effort to bring creationist theory to Britain and the rest of Europe.

Rarely have I met someone so confident and engaging. I became interested in Ham’s message after writing a biography of Mary Anning, a dirt-poor girl who cajoled one never-before-seen prehistoric monster after another from their Jurassic tombs in the cliffs along England’s southern coast in the early 1800s.

Her fossil finds – ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, pterodactyls — paved the way for the work of Charles Darwin, whose book “On the Origin of Species” was published 150 years ago, and thus forever changed the way people thought about the world around them.

Like Ham, most people during Anning’s time had absolute faith in the fact that species never evolved or became extinct. Everything that existed had always existed. There wasn’t any radioactivity or relativity, extinction or evolution, to muddle things.

Indeed the very religious Anning likely was unsettled by the fossils she was finding — as was Darwin himself, who asked in one of his private notebooks: Who else but God could have made things happen in such a marvelous way?

After writing about Anning, and speaking with Ham, I’ve spent a lot of time wondering whether anyone will ever be able to close the gap between religious beliefs and scientific evidence.

Insisting that the great flood is responsible for the fossil record, Ham argues that God created the world in six days — literally. Simply put, he says the word “day” shouldn’t be taken symbolically because a word can never be symbolic the first time it’s used.

But, interestingly, some of the earliest Christian theologians accepted that at least some parts of the Bible’s text, including the Creation story, were meant to be taken allegorically. In the early fifth century, St. Augustine argued against the validity of a literal six-day creation in “The Literal Meaning of Genesis.” Augustine also displayed an incredibly scientific mind-set, contending that people should be willing to draw different conclusions in the face of God-given reasoning.

Ham agrees that natural selection can provide an organism with an edge in its environment, but refuses to believe that the process can lead to a new species. In other words, dogs can develop new traits from one generation to the next, but dogs will always remain dogs.

But after years and years of observation, Darwin, of course, believed there was something inherently wrong with the idea that species are fixed. And, so, can the two sides ever be reconciled?

Today there is a movement that believes one can have faith in both science and religion while emphasizing that the Bible doesn’t specifically mention the Earth’s age.

Evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala has repeatedly argued that the Genesis story not be seen as a scientific treatise on the origin of the universe but rather as a declaration of God’s sovereignty over his creation.

When asked whether God exists, Ayala says he cannot prove or disprove it, arguing that the question is not one of science but one of religion. The former president and chair of the American Association for the Advancement of Science has said Darwin’s greatest accomplishment was that he removed the idea of a creator from biology. But he also hasn’t completely ruled out the idea that evolution might have been guided by God.

In England, Simon Conway-Morris, a well-known paleontologist, also argues that science and religion are compatible, and heralds a new interpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory.

The professor believes that evolution isn’t quite as accidental as one might suspect. In his view, if evolution began over again, human intelligence would develop pretty much the same way.

Conway-Morris emphasizes that developments happen as a result of pre-existing conditions, such as the need for blood cells to have hemoglobin in order to transport oxygen. Evolution works only because it plays out within a certain set of rules.

For those unable to accept development by happenstance, Conway-Morris’ viewpoint is a palatable one. In today’s increasingly secular society, people love to believe that science can explain everything. But there are plenty of mysteries that have yet to be solved — even in 2009.

Despite decades of space exploration, for example, more than 90 percent of the mass in the universe still hasn’t been detected.

What’s out there? It’s still anybody’s guess. Scientists also can’t figure out how exactly to explain free will, which may or may not be just an illusion, and there’s still no rock-solid scientific reason as to why everyone must die.

Even years after Einstein’s theory of relativity, and amazing advancements in quantum physics, scientists can’t truly explain exactly why the world’s many wonders — such as the slow blossoming of a flower — appear beautiful and appeal to the emotions of some people.

Perhaps one day the debate over evolution and creationism will be settled. But I doubt it. The arguments on both sides are too persuasive. Still, one can hope.

Shelley Emling is the author of the forthcoming biography of Mary Anning, “The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World.”