This I believe

As I open this blog, I had to try and pick what I thought would be the best foot to put forward, so to speak, in order to introduce my viewpoint to the world. After some internal debate, and consulting with the spouse, I chose to repost a response I gave to an exam question from Dr. Skip Smith's Evolution Survey course at CWU's Lynnwood campus. As a scientist and a catholic, how do I reconcile the spiritual and the natural? That will continue to be a major discussion point on this blog, and I hope it will be informative and useful to both myself and the reader.

Why is there no conflict between religious creation myths and an evolutionary explanation of human (or other) origins?

Much is made of the perceived incompatibility between the realms of religious thought and evolutionary biology, where little if any such incompatibility exists. Science makes no claims on the spiritual nature of humanity, demanding only the portions of our psyche that processes and collates perceived data. The Genesis account of the creation is full of flowery language, but does not offer any scientifically testable explanation for the diversity of species. The internal logic expressed in the tautological statement that “an omnipotent God can do anything”, while simplistically elegant, is by nature untestable, and therefore not a matter of scientific method. And neither should it be expected to be so. The Mosaic creation mythology has, at its core, the very same facet of the breadth of life on earth that fascinates the evolutionary biologist: the complexity and truly awesome nature of the natural world. The author's goal is undiminished even if the Genesis myth is a figurative, rather than literal, imagining of the formation of life on earth.

Additionally, looking at the question from a theological perspective, the Christian religious tradition defines faith as "the evidence of things not seen"(Hebrews 11:1). As science deals strictly with theories about the observable world, it would seem that there exists no conflict in the domain of concern between the two spheres. Problems arise only when people on either side of the divide attempt to argue from their perspective against the other, to imply that faith can invalidate scientific method, or vice versa. A person's faith in the divine creator of the Genesis myth cannot be invalidated by scientific observation (the old saw about “Absence of proof not being Proof of absence” comes to mind). Likewise, the scientific theory of Evolution is not invalidated by someone's faith any more than calling a lump of iron a doughnut makes it edible.