Doing a science and religion talk with a biblical literalist pastor who is anti-evolution

This morning I was a co-speaking at the Senior Center on the topic of religion and science with another pastor in town, Roger Galstad, a Biblical literalist who is definitely anti-evolution (though believes the earth, geology-speaking, to be 4.5 billions years old, and the universe to be whatever the scientists say it is) and a self-professed person who does not know science.

Back in February or early March, it just happened that we each had articles in the local newspaper on the same day: me from a pro-science "religion and science are not enemies" attitude, and his with a "religion and science may not be enemies, but an idea like evolution clearly violates a literal reading of Scripture so must be false, and also, climate change is false"* attitude. So, the organizer at the Senior Center thought it would be a good program to bring us both in to talk to their group of seniors, who are in the second week of a five-week program called "Faith of my neighbors".

Our hour and a half ended up not being very much about science and religion, but almost entirely about our (and other) different approaches of biblical interpretation and reading, and understanding of the writing, development, transmission, and canonization of the biblical texts.

Our time together was set up to be mostly a dialogue with the audience, a chance for each of us to present not the correctness of our interpretations, but to offer our crowd a view into two different ways of approaching the topic of science and religion: how Roger does it and how I do it. Not versus each other, not trying to "win" an argument, but just offering our own stories.

Roger went first with a chance to speak, and he mostly offered a series of scriptural prooftexting of why Christianity is right and, from that, how to understand the universe and science through scripture only. Which for him is (and I am reducing his thoughts to a short form, so it is not as nuanced as he offered) summed up with the statement that the Bible says Jesus created everything (John 1) [and that's a fair interpretation of the scripture], and that humanity is the pinnacle of creation more special than all other life forms to have dominion over all the created order, that we are some day to be judges over the angels, and that creation was done exactly as the Bible says it was, and that between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2 is when Lucifer was booted out of heaven, and was sent to earth specifically later mess with humanity, once God got around to creating us. Galstad also has a way of exegeting Genesis chapter 1 and Genesis chapter 2 to be telling the same story without contradiction or variation, but I don't buy it. Thankfully, before he mentioned it today he had written about it - and I have that writing. But even after multiple readings, I still don't understand the hermeneutical aeronautics he did to get to the conclusion that they offer the same literal story.

He really didn't hit the topic of science very much. He was and is much more concerned with issues of salvation, and part of salvation is believing in Jesus, and part of believing in Jesus is taking scripture literally (except those parts that are clearly not meant to be taken literally, to quote him).

Then I spoke about my history of being fascinated with science, wanting to know how the universe works, studying science and engineering, and why I think that science and religion do not need to be enemies or at opposite ends with one another. In my prepared speech, I hit heavy on how the big issue, as I see it, isn't so much that science and religion are at odds with one another, but that the idea that they are at odds with one another is a manufactured controversy that really is rooted in difference of biblical/scriptural interpretation and divine revelation. Can God self-reveal only in the scripture handed to us, or in nature as well? I think so. Others, such as the Creation Science/ID camp, do not.

Most of the questions we took today really ended up being about interpretation and reading scripture. Not many questions about science per se, nor questions about evolution. I was surprised at how the questions kept coming back to how scripture is read and authority is found in/from it.

But, I'm so glad that is where the conversation went!

Roger and I sat next to each other the whole time, we disagreed with one another, and were honest about how we felt, with generosity and gentleness for the most part. Never did we accuse one another of being stupid, deficient, unchristian, unfaithful... we had a lot of compliments afterward about how we were so civil to one another. To which I said, "Well, we're brothers in Christ. However we might interpret our faith, we're created by God and we follow the same guy - there's gotta be some respect just in that."

And we also found that even though our paths to a particular faith claim might vary hugely, we often came to the same place - God as Creator of all; Jesus as the savior; God incarnate in Jesus; the importance of scripture. We differ on what some of those terms mean, and how we get there, and we each have faith claims that the other does not share at all, but ultimately we are in agreement on probably a lot more than we disagree with.

Whatever we said about science and religion, whatever we said about scriptural interpretation, whatever the purpose of today's session was, I think that what the people there heard most loudly is this: It's possible to speak one's truth AND to disagree with someone else's truth, without needing to win, dehumanize, or be mean.

It is that which I heard the most from people who were there who spoke to me afterward, and I found it surprising.

But given some of the nastiness in our political process and in our intra-Christian dialogue, perhaps I shouldn't be.

What do you think?


[* and yes, he did end his article by moving into a denial of climate change. I wish I could link to it, but the newspaper only keeps the articles online for a few days]