Picture having a conversation with someone who sees the world differently than you do. Somehow (as conversations often do if you’re me), you find yourselves discussing Genesis, evolution and whether the biblical creation stories should be understood literally.
That’s how a recent online conversation began for me.
Someone insisted that God is “above and outside” science. Science studies nature, he argued, while God is supernatural, beyond scientific explanation. Therefore, we shouldn’t expect science to explain what God does.
I replied, playfully, “God is above science? Sounds like something a false prophet would say.”
His response: “????”
Fair enough.
But beneath the jab was a serious question. If we continued that conversation, here’s what I would have said:
Let’s accept your theology for a moment. Let’s assume God created the universe, that everything ultimately exists because God willed it into existence.
Evolution still isn’t a problem. Science isn’t in opposition.
If God created the universe, then presumably God created a universe capable of evolving. And that raises a question more interesting than whether Genesis is literally true: Why do we assume God gets more credit when nature breaks its rules than when nature follows them?
If God created the universe, presumably God also created the processes governing it.
Gravity. Chemistry. Genetics. The formation of stars. The growth of an embryo. The remarkable work happening inside every living cell. Within that theology, why would any of those things be less God?
Yet we’ve developed a habit of looking for God mainly where our explanations run out. Someone unexpectedly recovers from illness: miracle. A storm changes course: miracle. Something happens that we can’t explain: God did it.
Then science discovers how something works, and suddenly God disappears from the conversation.
Lightning was once mysterious. Now we understand it. Disease was a mystery to us. Now we understand much more about its causes. The diversity of life was confounding. Now we have overwhelming evidence that living things evolve over immense stretches of time.
With each discovery, some believers worry that science has taken another piece of territory away from God. But why should it? That only makes sense if God was living within our ignorance in the first place.
There’s a name for this habit: the “God of the gaps.” We encounter something unexplained and put God there.
But that creates a problem for anyone who believes God created everything. Every time we learn something new, God gets smaller.
That seems a fragile place to put the Almighty. If God exists, It isn’t hiding in the gaps. The Divine would be present within the pattern itself.
Consider evolution. Some people imagine it competing with God. Either God created human beings, or evolution did.
But if you believe God authored creation, and I tell you an oak tree grew from an acorn, you wouldn’t respond, “Well, I guess God didn’t make that tree.”
Why should evolution be any different?
To my thinking, creating a world capable of growing, adapting and renewing itself is more remarkable than simply placing everything in its final form.
What’s more impressive: making something once or making a world capable of continually remaking itself?
Evolution explains how living things change over generations. It doesn’t settle why there is a universe capable of producing life.
And this is where religion and science become unnecessarily tangled.
Science investigates how. How do stars form? How do organisms evolve? How old is the universe? These questions can be tested, investigated and revised.
Religion and philosophy often explore different questions: Why is there something rather than nothing? What does being alive mean? What do we owe one another? What makes something sacred?
These questions intersect, but they aren’t identical.
Which brings us back to Genesis. When Genesis says, “Let there be light,” I don’t need those words to compete with cosmology.
Even if someone believes God spoke the universe into existence, that doesn’t explain precisely how it unfolded. And the unfolding is astonishing.
The universe expanded and cooled. Matter gathered. Stars formed. Inside those stars, elements were forged. Dying stars scattered those elements into space, providing materials for new stars and planets. Chemistry became increasingly complex. Somewhere on at least one small planet, life emerged.
Life evolved. Adapted. Diversified. Eventually, some ancient stardust became conscious.
Us.
Here we are, made from material forged inside stars billions of years ago, capable of looking back at the universe and asking where we came from.
Tell me what part of that story isn’t miraculous?
Maybe we’ve confused a miracle with an interruption. We imagine God most visible when ordinary rules are suspended. But if God created those rules, why wouldn’t they themselves inspire wonder? A universe capable of producing galaxies, oceans, trees, whales, human beings, compassion and love without constantly overturning its laws hardly seems evidence against a creator.
Maybe creation isn’t merely something God did. Maybe creation is something the universe is still doing.
That comes closer to my own theology. My understanding of the sacred is broader and more mysterious than a God occasionally reaching into the machinery and changing the gears. But nobody needs to share my theology to appreciate the argument.
If God created nature, learning how nature works shouldn’t make God smaller.
So turn on every light. Study the fossil. Examine the cell. Learn what stars are made of. Investigate everything our strange little minds can comprehend.
If your theology is true, what exactly are you afraid we’ll find? Surely not a universe without God.
Science isn’t pushing God out of the room. It’s showing us what’s in the room. The miracle isn’t that the universe occasionally breaks its own rules. The miracle is that there’s a universe at all — and that, astonishingly, its rules made us.
Wil Darcangelo, M.Div, is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister of the First Church in Lancaster at the Bulfinch Meetinghouse in Massachusetts, progressive theologian and essayist on optimistic spirituality in the Information Age. Follow him on Substack, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
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