Science & Models

Note: this is Part 2 of a series of posts on Christianity and Evolution. Read the introduction and Part 1.

2. The first two chapters of Genesis are a scientific account of creation, but cannot be used to inform our physical models of creation.

(I think I should have said “the first chapter of Genesis” — in this post I’ll limit my discussion to the first chapter. We’ll leave Adam & Eve for later, perhaps Part 6.)

To rephrase the thesis slightly: the first chapter of Genesis a a scientific account of creation, but that doesn’t matter to our discussion. We’ll touch on several huge issues in this post: the nature of science, the nature of truth, error, divine inspiration, etc. I hope I’ll be able to chart a reasonably clear course through these dangerous waters.

First of all, if I claim that Genesis 1 is a scientific account, what does that mean? Obviously there weren’t a lot of nerdy types in white coats with sadistic impulses towards harmless albino rodents in the second millenium BC. Science as we know it is a product of Greek logical disciplines coupled with Christian monotheism that took on its essential characteristics during the renaissance. The fundamental principles of modern science are an unswerving obsession with observational reality, and an insistence on fasifiability.

The first principle is obvious: if science is the study of the observable world, it must be based on observation of the world. Aristotle, one of the fathers of modern science, reasoned with great rigor and clarity about the physical world, but because he never bothered to cross-check his conclusions with objective reality, he made some pretty big blunders, starting with mis-counting the number of teeth the typical person carries around.

The second principle has a long philosophical pedigree — read the article — but it basically boils down to this: all other things being equal, a scientific theory that can be easily disproven is better than one that cannot. The reason for this is that science, at its heart, is a competition to find out the Truth about the universe. So we judge scientific theories by how close we think they come to the Truth, part of which involves making sure they’re easy to disprove.

This notion of “coming close to the truth” may seem strange. How can there be greater or lesser degrees of truth? You might think that a theory is either true or it’s false. Unfortunately, it’s a little more complicated than that. You see, a scientific theory is, and can only ever be, a model. All scientists are, in effect, is model railroaders stuck in a basement somewhere building a model train track. Now they’ve got a lot of different ways of looking out of the basement at the real track they’re trying to model, some of which are better than others. The way they test their model is if when they run trains around the model track, they see the trains on the real track doing the same thing as the model trains. For a model to be falsifiable means that it’s very easy to compare the little trains to the big trains, and if there’s a difference, then you know your model track is wrong, and you’ll have to rebuild it.

Now because our view of the real trains are limited, parts of the model might be better than others. There might be a long straight stretch in the track where, if you line up your model trains right they mimic the big trains exactly. So if all you were interested in were that long straight part of the real track, your model would be True — it would correspond pretty closely to the bit of reality you were interested in. But what if there were a whole section of track with curly, criscrossing rails going in and out of tunnels, over bridges and through mountain passes. There might be any number of different models that produced similar behaviors, but none as good as the straight part.

Science works the same way. For a long while we got along by thinking the world was flat. And if we’re only considering a city or a country, that’s not a bad assumption to make. You can easily model your city or country on a flat sheet of paper, and if you use such a map (or model) as your guide, you won’t go astray. But when you start to travel over continents, suddenly your flat map doesn’t work so well. If you try to make a map on paper, you find that your distances don’t add up, and if you use compass directions to travel, you’ll find you usually miss your target, and if you don’t, it takes you a great deal longer than you thought. But if you draw your map on a sphere, everything suddenly works again. All the parts of the map are at the same scale, and if you draw a straight line between two places, the path would have looked curved on the old flat map.

In the same way, we got along quite well for some time using Newton’s theory of gravitation. It predicted the motions of the planets pretty well, and it even works to get a spacecraft to the moon, say. But it’s not quite perfect. It doesn’t predict the motion of the planet Mercury at all! And if you tried to use it on deep-space probes you’d miss Jupiter or Saturn by millions of miles. It is a good approximation for some things, but Einstein’s theory of gravity is better.

Now here’s an important point. Science can tell us how something happens, but it is utterly useless at telling us why. We can describe the motion of the trains outside our basement to the smallest degree, and predict their motion to the millisecond, but we could not go one millimeter towards understanding why they move. With all our scientific knowledge today, we have no idea why we fall down instead of up, why there are 94 natural elements, why squids’ eyes are better than ours. And science can never tell us what came before the universe, or what happens after death, because science is by its very nature limited to observation and description of the natural physical world.

But what does this have to do with Genesis? First of all, all cultures have theories to explain the universe. Not all of them share our western scientific obsession with observation and falsifiability, but nobody just says “I don’t care about why things are the way they are.” Not surprisingly, people in the Near East of the second millenium were no different. They observed the natural world and came up with theories about why it was the way it was, and how it all came about. The ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians actually had pretty advanced mathematical and astronomical skills, but they put them to use more for engineering than basic science. Ignoring Genesis for a minute, let’s look at a creation story from a Near Eastern culture contemporary with the Biblical patriarchs.

The Babylonian Enuma Elish is the story of how Marduk, the patron god of Babylon, came to be the greatest of the gods. It starts out with primordial chaos, in which Tiamat and Apsu, the gods of salt and fresh water commingle. Then Tiamat and Apsu are split and separated by Marduk into the sea and the sky. Then the gods of dry ground and salt marshes on the edge of the sea appear. Then Annu, the god of the sky is born, along with the gods of the heavenly bodies. Then Ea, Marduk’s father, the god of words and singing, makes all things on the earth. (Note that you can spell Ea “Eyah”, or even “Yah”. But that’s another story :-) All of these gods have been fighting like cats and dogs since their various creations. Finally, Marduk makes humans out of blood spilled in the conflict. The humans are put to work for the gods, allowing them to relax and take it easy as the humans toil and work to provide for them.

Interesting, isn’t it? Stripped of theological content, the Babylonian story is practically identical to Genesis. There are six generations of gods in the Enuma Elish, and six days in the Bible. The physical events are the same. You have the primordial chaos of water, which is separated into sea and sky. Dry ground appears. The sky is populated with astronomical bodies. The earth is filled with creatures, and finally humans, and the creator gods rest from their labours.

Imagine, for a moment, a divinely inspired Moses sitting in the dorway of his tent, dictating the story of the world for a people new-delivered from slavery in Egypt. (I am not so naive as to deny that the Old Testament is the product of lots of editing over a long period, but there’s nothing that makes it impossible that many original bits of the Pentateuch come from the time of Moses.) Isaac Asimov used this idea to great effect in a short story:

“Fifteen billion years ago, the universe came into being as a infinitesimally small lump of primordial stuff in which the five fundamental forces and matter and energy were combined in a kind of universal pyroclasm.” Uh, Moses, are you sure you’re OK? Haven’t been smoking anything? Everyone knows that the world began in primordial water, and that water was divided into the sea and the sky…

Moses didn’t have anything new to teach the Children of Israel about how the world was created. They already knew that. What Moses wanted to tell them was why. The Babylonian story is depressing if you’re wondering about your place in the universe. Primordial chaos gives rise to squabbling, quarreling gods who, coincedentally enough, are the patrons of cities with whom Babylon was at war. People are created to be the slaves of the gods, endlessly toiling to please capricious and indolent powers.

What Moses wanted to teach the Children was this: that Yahweh, the high God of Word and Song, who was only dimly remembered by the Babylonians, had been there before the waters. His Spirit was brooding over them like a great bird waiting for a nestling. And then as His fierce light filled the cosmos, by His Word were the waters separated, and the dry ground created. At his Word did the lights of heaven appear to guide the days and seasons of the inhabitants of Earth, and to affirm His faithfulness in their endless round. At His word were the plants and the beasts of the seas and the air and the land sung into being. And at every step He marvelled at His creation and proclaimed it wonderful. But He did not sing us into being. For us, he knelt down in the mud and with His own hand He sculpted out an image of His glory, and the form in which He knew he would come down, one far-off Judean night. And then He filled that image with His life-force, and male and female he set us in a paradise, to marvel at all His vast and marvellous works, and call them by name, and to walk and talk with Him as he rested in the cool green light of evening.

Scientific theories change. For that reason, we cannot couple our theological convictions to particular scientific models. I believe we have a better understanding of the physical nature of the universe, and what it looked like at every stage of its creation, than the Babylonians did. But although I have a different model of how the universe was created, that does not change what I think about why it was created. On that subject, I’m with Moses. God is prior to the universe, and brought it into being by design, and every part of that design is good. God’s character of glory, power and faithfulness is reflected in the majesty and regularity of nature, from the wild power of the sea, to the strong strength of mountains, to the ordered dance of stars, to the verdant field and forest, to all the myriad forms of life in the world. And God took care when He made people. We are designed to be in His image. We are filled with His life and Word, and we can walk and talk with Him, if only we take the time to stop and listen. That’s the true message of Genesis. All else is quibbling over details.