Evolution, awe, and original sin (part I)

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 

Now the earth was formless and empty,darkness was over the surface of the deep, 

and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 

God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” 

And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

Genesis 1 (NIV)

I have never understood the purported conflict between religion and science. Yes, on occasion there are clashes over divergent values--e.g. when scientists want to experiment on embryos and people of faith raise ethical concerns. But the same value clashes happen e.g. between scientists and secular animal rights activists, over the fate of lab animals. Or between religious people who have different life ethics such as "against abortion" vs. "against war".

So, apart from these very real issues that occasionally pop up, science and religion have been coexisting, for centuries, as complementary ways of knowing. And every now and then, their respective quest for truth leads them on paths that touch, or almost touch. This beautifully written piece by physicist Marcelo Gleiser is an example for that: a breathtaking vignette on the evolution of life. I'm quoting it at length here to convey some of its flavor.

Ours is an old story, starting some 13.8-billion years ago, when our collective father, the universe, came into being. (Maybe the cosmos should be a mother as well; it's up to you, dear reader.) (...) The first stars appeared some 200 million years after the Big Bang.

Recall that stars are balls of hydrogen, nuclear-fusion furnaces that make hydrogen into helium at a furious pace. That's where it all starts, with hydrogen, the simplest of all chemical elements, becoming all others, all the way to carbon to iron to uranium. (...) We carry in our bodies the products of this cosmic alchemy, forged in stars dead billions of years ago. We are the memory of this distant past, molecular conglomerates that assumed a form complex enough so that stars could remember.

In a choreography of cosmic proportions, gravity sculpts matter, making it flow here and there, spin around, take different shapes, spirals, elliptical, spherical swarms of millions to hundreds-of-billions of stars. (...) About one star per year is born in our galaxy; our sun and its planets appeared some 4.6-billion years ago.

Earth is a special planet. Just take a look at pictures of other worlds to see why. It's special because it's covered in water and it has an oxygen-rich atmosphere that protects the surface — and life thereon — from the constant hostility of outer space; in particular, from cosmic and solar radiation. We live in a blue womb, an oasis of life in a cosmos that is — at least as far as we know — lifeless, cold and hostile.

Earth's climate, warm and stable, allows for life to thrive, to explode into a bewildering diversity. A short stroll through a jungle or a coral reef and we are overcome by the ecological wealth, plants and animals that fight for survival, searching for food, struggling to preserve their genetic imprint (...). Life uses the present to create the future.

Wow. 

At this point, do yourself a favor. Go back to Genesis 1 and read it in its entirety.

Notice anything?

Exactly: this is the way Genesis was meant to be read. Not as a drab account of six literal weekdays but as a sacramental rendition of events of overwhelming magnitude in time and space. Of processes so completely out of our control, and yet so intimately woven into each of our lives, that we have to muster all our courage and all our capacity for awe to do them justice and read them the proper way. 

There is no fundamental conflict between religion and science unless we create one. Both are routes to insight and awe, each "according to their kind". It is our own hearts and minds that create problems from them: by succumbing to the temptation of seeking fault lines instead of surveying the landscape as a whole.