Science and Religion--Conflict or Concord?

This past week our group discussed the often-used argument against God that “Science has disproved Christianity.” …that science has shown through evolution how we have come about through purely mechanistic means …that we have gone past the “dark ages” of religious mythology and miracles and have entered an “enlightened” age of science.

Are miracles possible? Keller argues in his book that miracles can exist, if one believes that God exists, which is an article of faith either way – believing or not believing. That’s about all for that subject, as he simply appeals to his general theme of “faith either way.” Which is a good point.

So what about the “enlightenment”? Are science and religion compatible? Keller doesn’t really answer this, but rather spends most of his time presenting a description of the wide spectrum of thought on the matter of creation/evolution. What do you think? Are they compatible?

I have spent much time thinking about this subject. My thoughts have evolved over time and are bound to change in the future. However, I come at it with this viewpoint: I have many reasons to believe in the existence of God and in Christianity and the good news it presents. I also admire the scientific method and believe evolution to be an extremely solid and believable explanation, at least if you don’t believe in the supernatural. To some extent I have lived in two worlds. However, I have always desired to bring them together somehow. In order to do this, I need to resolve areas in which both systems do not mesh. Here are two of my questions (and some possible answers) regarding both creation and evolution:

Creation – while one can always appeal to the “we will never understand everything, God could have done it that way, just have faith in a literal reading” argument, a rational mind must ask questions. 1) the order of Creation in Genesis 1 has never made sense to me. How does light come before the sun/stars/moon? How were the stars created 6000 years ago if they are hundreds of thousands of light years away based on current science? I have found an explanation for this that satifies me. It can be found here: http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1332 . Basically, this states that Genesis 1 is mythology with one goal – to present a monotheistic creator God. The order of creation is presented as such, because it is arranged in two sets of three days, with the second set populating the first (e.g. stars (day4) populating light and dark (day1). I find this a fascinating explanation.

Evolution – my big beef with theistic evolution is this: If Jesus came to redeem and restore, etc, etc, things back to its original condition, how is that original condition different than now if death through natural selection was the norm of the day in God’s “perfect” creation. I just did an internet search and found some retorts to this problem of mine… (e.g. http://www.godandscience.org/youngearth/death.html) the major one being that God created only humans to live forever, through eating of the tree of life, and that they were familiar with the concept of death all around them… that Jesus came to redeem and restore mankind only, not plants and animals. Interesting ideas.

These are thoughts that I will ponder, while my science friends consider me a fool for even wasting my time, and my church friends consider me a heretic for even wasting my time :). What do you think?