I’m going to talk a little about my novel in progress. It’s about a teenage genius who is super into science. I am not a teenage genius. So I actually needed to look stuff up, which I am good at.
But now I stand on the edge of a divisive canyon. Should my science based book be religious? I do not agree with evolution, this theory has no place in my philosophy or my novel. But does that mean that I have to have an overly creationist message? Am I going to write to my beliefs and sentence my YA novel to the uncertain audience of Christian publishing. If I just have my main character say he doesn’t agree with evolution, will that turn off secular publishers?
It finally dawned on me that it didn’t matter. I can talk about science without mentioning either Creation or Evolution. Because true science is about the way the world is.
The sun rises every morning due to the rotation of the Earth in it’s orbit around the sun. Plants use the rays of the sun to make food, through a process called photosynthesis. The water evaporates into gas and causes precipitation.
Atoms make up everything, regardless of where they came from. Water always has two Hydrogen atoms for every Oxygen atom. Humans breath in the oxygen atoms and the hemoglobin in our blood takes in the oxygen, it distributes the Oxygen and takes in waste atoms called Carbon dioxide. We release this waste when we exhale.
All of that science and not once did I mention Creation or Evolution.
Something has been lost in the eternal battle between Creation and Evolution.
The Science.
I watched the much publicized debate between Ken Ham and Bill Nye. I was disappointed in how little science they used. It was a battle of religions not of facts. That is why there was no winner.
Science is facts. Not opinions.
Evolution is not a fact. It can not be proven through experiments or observation.
Creation, I hesitate to say, can also not be proven through experiments or observation.
Anyone who tells me that I have to add either one or the other is no longer talking science they are advocating religion.
To the Creationists, just because scientific facts back up Biblical accounts does not prove the existence of God to an unbeliever. Science can make people think. But people who want to believe God is a myth will always find an argument around it.
To the Evolutionists, nothing I say will make you change your mind because you are a very faith based religion.
But I will say this. If Creation is true then that means that God created this thing we call science. This wonderful, predictable, observable thing. It’s patterns and cycles and numbers. It’s real, it’s now, it’s provable. We haven’t even managed to understand it all yet. New discoveries are still being made. And my God thought it all up. He numbered the electrons on the atoms, he set the orbits in motion. He twisted the DNA into a helix and established the rate of decay. God is the ultimate world builder. The original genius. Yet he didn’t feel the need to spell it out for us. He left it for us to discover, through experimentation and observation. Why?
Because if we can accept the unbelievable wonder of the universe without bringing religion into it, then maybe we can accept that a deity made himself mortal, lived a human life, died, absorbed all of our wrongs, rose back to life, ascended beyond our dimension of existence and is coming again, without bringing science into it.
C. O. Bonham 