Genesis Is Not Science

Last updated on: July 29, 2015 at 11:46 am by Tom Zampino

Genesis Is Not Science 2015-07-29T11:46:29-05:00 Tom Zampino

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The point has been made numerous times over, but it’s always good to circle back to it.

The biblical story of creation was never meant to be a scientific explanation of how we got here. Rather, the author of Genesis uses rich symbolic and poetic language to define and circumscribe man’s relationship to the divine from the beginning of time.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states it thusly:

362 The human person, created in the image of God, is a being at once corporeal and spiritual. The biblical account expresses this reality in symbolic language when it affirms that “then the LORD God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.” Man, whole and entire, is therefore willed by God. [Emphasis added].

Bishop-Elect Robert Barron directly alludes to this in the video embedded below, wherein he also reminds us that we have been loved into existence through God’s will.

The creation story reveals much about who we are, and even why we are. But it tells us not much of anything about our scientific origins – the how we are.

It wasn’t meant to.

I’m working my way right now through The Theology of the Body for Beginners, by Christopher West – a very brief introduction to the voluminous work of St. John Paul II on the same topic.

Here’s what caught my eye and which inclined me towards undertaking this very brief post this morning:

Consider the difference for a woman when her optometrist looks in her eyes and when her husband or boyfriend does so. The scientist is looking at her cornea and records scientific facts. The lover is looking at her soul and proclaims something more poetic and inspired (we hope). Does the scientist “disprove” the lover? No. These are simply two perspectives on the same reality. The author of Genesis wasn’t a scientist, but a lover inspired by God to proclaim the spiritual mysteries at the origin of the world and of mankind.

The biblical writer as a lover.

A lover, divinely inspired, who reveals to us certain fundamental truths, invoking symbolic and beautiful language to stir up both our imagination and our awe.

This, to me, is a perfectly succinct, perfectly apt understanding as to how and why Adam and Eve became our transcendent spiritual ancestors, if not our direct genetic ones.

Genesis is clearly not science. But it remains, nonetheless, truth. Science and the biblical account of creation have never been in conflict.

The biblical use of symbolic language makes the creation account no less real, no less important, no less critical to understanding our relationship to the heavens above.

Peace

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

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