bombchu link : I am actually not an atheist. I am a Christian man. But I also have a science degree, and am an advocate for the science community. 

For your question as to why Genesis starts with "In the beginning" in stead of starting with Adam and Eve. It is an important detail that God created and shaped the world (and Universe, for that matter). But it is NOT an important detail to put in all the hows. To stay on topic of what the message is supposed to be, those tiny details on how he developed the world needed to be generalized. Not only to make it understandable for the people alive at the time the Bible was written, but to keep the Bible from being 50X longer than it already is. 

" So you can't really blame them for not trying to know this. Now that we DO know about all this, does it mean that God does not have to exist?"
This is the question that makes me think you aren't quite getting what I was saying. I agree with this completely. I am not blaming them for not knowing. How could they know? The point of what I was saying is this. If God ordered the Bible to be written so that it included all the scientific details on how he developed and shaped the Earth and the creatures in it, the people would not be able to comprehend it. They didn't have the knowledge to understand the concepts of how it was all done.

So you asked "Now that we DO know about all this, does this mean that God does not have to exist?"
My answer is the same as yours. Absolutely not. What it DOES mean is that there might be more to how God created the planet and everything living on it than what was specified in the Bible. This leads us to the concept of creating the world in 7 days. The 7 day concept is one that I don't think is literal. 24 hours in a day is a man made time frame. The world was created before the concept of man's understanding of days was even around. I believe that the Bible means 7 days in the eyes of God. But Earth's 24 hour days is not the only kind of day. For example, a day in Jupiter is only 9.9 hours in Earth's time. One day in Mercury is 87.97 days in Earth's time. We can't begin to imagine what a day in the time of God is. I don't believe 7 days in God's time is literally 7 days in our time. 

But anyway, I will go ahead and skip the rest of the parts you brought up because I mainly wanted to clear up some things. You had interpreted my view to be an Atheistic one, so you misinterpreted the point of some of the things I said By no means do I think that having more advance scientific knowledge mean that God doesn't have to exist. I believe in the scientific explanation of how everything developed, but I believe that it all is merely a more detailed explanation on how God did it that the Bible didn't include. Those specific details weren't important for the overall message in the Bible. The important part is that God created everything and orchestrated everything's development. No matter how you look at it, when you go back to beginning of time, something had to create the energy that developed into everything in existence. My only explanation is a divine power. But most think that because of some differences in explanation on how God created created everything, that means science and religion can't coexist. I see them as one and the same thing.

rcarter2:

"I am actually not an atheist. I am a Christian man. But I also have a science degree, and am an advocate for the science community. "

Oh, I'm sorry, I just automatically assumed that. :/ 

... 

Since we agree with most of what each other said I'll jump to the important part as well. 


"What it DOES mean is that there might be more to how God created the planet and everything living on it than what was specified in the Bible. This leads us to the concept of creating the world in 7 days. The 7 day concept is one that I don't think is literal. 24 hours in a day is a man made time frame. The world was created before the concept of man's understanding of days was even around. I believe that the Bible means 7 days in the eyes of God. But Earth's 24 hour days is not the only kind of day. For example, a day in Jupiter is only 9.9 hours in Earth's time. One day in Mercury is 87.97 days in Earth's time. We can't begin to imagine what a day in the time of God is. I don't believe 7 days in God's time is literally 7 days in our time. "

The thing is, it can't really be much longer then 24 hour days because you run into some problems....

If the flowers were made on day three with all the other plants, and the sun was made on day 4.....wouldn't that present some problems? 
 
We would need a really big miracle to have the plants wait that long for the sun to be created, all God did on day one was make light, he didn't make our sun you know.

and also God made the beasts on day 6 (this would include the bees) if you have a science degree, you would know that bees need to pollinate flowers so that there can be more flowers. 
 
So I really can't see it being longer then 24 hours or even a week if you want to really stretch it before the flowers die along with all the other plants.

Unless the 7th day was really long, but I don't think that God would make one day longer then the rest. (unless God was tired after the first 6 days, but then again, God doesn't get tired because he is immortal)

bombchu link :  

" if you have a science degree, you would know that bees need to pollinate flowers so that there can be more flowers."
In no way are bees remotely the main method of spreading pollination for flowers and other plant life. They help, sure. As to animals with fur as pollen and spiked seeds attach to the fur. But again, that is only one method, and not even the most efficient in many cases. Wind is often the main spread method for pollen. Rain water does this as well as it picks up pollen when it hits the flower and the pollen travels through the ground with the water and is left behind when the water evaporates. With these 2 methods, spreading to farther areas takes longer because wind and water mainly carry the pollen around the surrounding area.  Things like bees help spread them to separate location. But bees are only one of many different pollen spreading methods, and they aren't even the main one. So the creation of beasts being after plants is no conflict. According to the scientific explanation of the development, plant life emerged before complex animal life (beasts).
 
"If the flowers were made on day three with all the other plants, and the sun was made on day 4.....wouldn't that present some problems?" 
That can be argued a few different ways. One being that because the first plant life would have been in the ocean floor deprived of sunlight, they would not acquire energy through the process of photosynthesis, but by other external means. There are still numerous plants today that do not use the sun as it's energy source. There are even plants on land that thrive nocturnally. So if the Earth was actually made before the sun (granted, I do not believe as quantum physics understanding indicates otherwise), it would be likely that the first plant life to emerge would not have been photosynthetic. Another would be (again, going with the Earth being created first) an implication of the fact that upon the Earth's creation, it was dark. So God said 'let there be light' and it was so. It is not established where the light comes from, but it was established that there was light due to the fact that it was currently dark. So this light could be what sustains photosynthetic plants until the sun was made to provide necessary light. But the non-photosynthetic plants would be more likely of the two. 

But the reason why I believe Genesis says the Earth was created before the sun would again stem from the scientific knowledge people had at the time the Bible was written. We were at a time where we were set on believing that the Earth was the center of everything, therefore everything revolved around it. I mean 'revolved' not in the literal sense, but in the terms of the Earth is the main thing (being as the concept of spherical celestial bodies revolving around each other wasn't thought of yet). So Genesis was written to correlate with man's understanding at the time. We are humans. We don't follow things or believe them easily if they go against what we currently believe to be true. It likely wouldn't have been accepted had it promoted the concept that the Earth was not the central thing that everything revolves around (again, figuratively) 

As someone who's not religious, I'd have to say yes. There's simply too much that science can't (and possibly won't ever) answer.

Well idk in christianity we are tought that "Science was made to prove religion wrong"

Science has had a strange relationship with religion.
Many have tried to proove or disproove the miracles of Jesus.
Results?
You might want to look them up.
The idea of faith is to not need proof.
Can science co-exist with religion?
Yes.
Yes it can.
Good Luck.
Peace.

Both are incompatible. Science is based on proof and logic; religion is based on faith and assumption. One something is proved, it becomes "scientific knowledge"; you don't "believe" in it, that's simply what it is. If it can't be proved, it usually means that we don't have the necessary tools at the moment. 

However, you can't prove a negative. If there is indeed a god, then the burden of proof is on the side of the believers. So far, most of what the Bible says (including the great flood, the origin of the world) has been reasonably disproved with the scientific method

TristanTehGamer1 : That is untrue for any real credible scientist. Others might try to use the findings of scientists to 'disprove' religion. But in no way is the science world trying to disprove anything. Any real scientist experiments and researches not trying to prove or disprove anything. If they have a result they are aiming for (like trying to disprove something), then it is not science, but skewed and bias results. Again, a laymen might wan to use knowledge found by scientist to disprove religion, but it is not the science community's fault how the laymen community tries to use their work.

Also, if your church says that, then they better not have light bulbs, treated water that comes from plumbing, or use of electricity. All those things are made possible by science, the very thing you are told is trying to disprove religion. So wouldn't that make it wrong to have any product of science in the building?

Yes, it is compatible. At one point religion even supported science. They still support it, there are just hang-ups on things like evolution.

Science never existed to disprove religion. It came into being to answer questions about how things work and why. Then they found out answers to things the church had already "answered" (Galileo and the heliocentric solar system for example) and it caused some problems. But religions constantly evolve, as do our beliefs without it shattering faith.

When Christian children are little, they are taught that Santa Claus is part of Christmas... is their faith destroyed when they learn that Santa is not real? No. They adapt and move on.

Religion is just a set of myths that our ancestors told us to explain the universe and teach us lessons. Yeah, the earth isn't the center of the universe like they originally thought, but that does not invalidate ideas like helping those less fortunate than you, not harming others, and being a good person... ideas that all world religions share.

The conflict comes from people that cannot accept change and adapt. It always has.

Yes I think it is possible for them to be compatible.. there is many scientists who are Christians and I feel if they worked together or tried they could both be compatible in a lot of ways.

I believe that the things written in the Bible are merely stories that man wrote, or possibly things that they remembered and weren't directly from God or even from Jesus. With that in mind, when I learn about things through science, I feel that God arranged that to happen that way. Sure, God COULD create things just because, but if something happened, it would be a problem. If the things he created needed Him to constantly be there, it wouldn't be a very good thing to make. That's what I feel, anyway; I feel he directed the creation of things the way they are for a reason.

It's just how I feel; it's okay if no one else agrees with me, but this is what I truly believe.

In my opinion religion explains universal concepts in vague terms. Religion was created in order to answer mankind's fundamental questions such as "Why does water fall from the sky, " How was the world created" etc. In the absence of science, the answer to this question was GOD. Religion claims that God created the world. Slowly vagueness about how the world work's is slowly eroding however the concept of a creator has not been destroyed. Physics indirectly proves the existence of God because human beings and all nature go against the Law of Entropy( basic physics law that states that everything moves into disorder), so in a holistic sense God is creating the universe since only something beyond human discovery is keeping everything together. Similarly, nobody knows how or why the big bang occurred, therefore , a creator must exist to have initiated the big bang because things don't expand naturally. Naturally things become more stable when the lose energy. The fact that molecule organization occurs is in itself proof of the existence of a creator

my personal opinion: God creates natural processes such as the big bang and evolution, and now these scientific processes occur.  
 

Unless we find scientific support for the religious beliefs, they cannot be compatible.

 

Science disproves religion, and religion disproves science.

You cannot rely on both.

To know if religion and science are compatible, first you have to understand what ti means to be compatible. compatible is existing together without conflict. Obviously there is conflicting ideas, so conflict exists. But if we take the human factor out science and religion would not exist.

So now we understand that humans are a critical factor for science and religion. They just give different views of the same situation. Some people like to know how stuff works, and others like to believe that a god or deity made it happen. They are not completely compatible because we as humans constantly fight over who is right.

I am religious, but I believe that science is the answer. We have physical evidence that science is the reason that certain events occur, like the rainbow, for example. A scientist would know that the bending of white light through a prism would separate the colors and show the rainbow. but a catholic in particular would see it as a sign from God to never do something again.

Who is right? The person who thinks they are right. In other words, we will constantly fight over who is right, there can never be in agreement, that is just who humans are. So in conclusion, we are trying to debate two different points of view. Some people are arguing that human debate makes the two incompatible, while others are saying science and religion alone are compatible.

So in one way they are and in another way they are not.

Depends on what religion we are speaking of here. Assuming we are talking about Christianity, as that is the leaning this thread has taken, yes, in general they are compatible. There are many great scientists out there who believe in God and the creation account given in the book of Genesis. There are also great scientists out there who are atheists. The problem here is that the instant someone in the science community says something that appears to contradict the bible, everyone assumes that the scientist is right, even if they admit that it is just a "best guess". If people admit that scientists are not perfect and can make mistakes *GASP* then we would get along much easier.

There is a video that I think people here should watch. It's the debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham about Creation vs Evolution. You can find it here. I reference this video because of some points that are brought up. First of all, Ken Ham mentions multiple scientists who are Christians and hold PhDs in their respective fields. He also separates the broad scope of "science" into two categories: Observational/Experimental science (i.e. Laws of physics and nature that can be observed today) and Origin/Historical science (ideas and assumptions we make based on ideas about the past that we infer using the previous category, i.e. Evolution/Big Bang).

All scientists share the former type of science, and this is fully compatible with Christian beliefs. It is the second category where things don't fit as well. As far as evolution goes, as this is the most commonly debated topic, there are some major things that scientists can't account for:
   1) A change of kinds. This is going from a fish to a reptile to a bird, for example. Or a dog to a cat. Or fish to a cat. That sort of thing.
   2) Where the first living thing came from. We have only even observed living things coming from living things, never from "dead" matter. Also, according the cell theory, all living things are made from cells and all cells come from pre-existing cells. One could rephrase this, replacing "living thing" with "cell".
   3) How various aspects of human character came to be when they are not found in any other animal.

So, from what I know of the subject, Evolution is not good enough when it comes to an origin story.

Then we get to the Big Bang, which I know very little about. But from the first verse of Genesis: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." As later in the chapter God says a lot of "let there be ____!", it seems valid enough for me to say that God said "let there be a universe!" and the nothingness that was there exploded into the universe we know today. I am not saying that is how it happened, as again I know little about the subject, but it explains how the entire universe came from one explosion, and where all of the matter in the explosion came from. This is an (albeit imperfect) example of science being compatible with Christianity.

The only incompatibility only comes when scientists assume that there is no God. That is the major flaw, IMO, behind evolution. I could go more into this but I'm afraid I might come across knowing something I really don't, so I'll just stop here.

I don't really believe that any of it is compatible at all but of course, they are all just theories. None of us know for sure what is right or wrong. It could even turn out that there was a god but he created the big bang and physics and all of that. Wouldn't that be interesting. I wouldn't really say any of it is compatible because most of the way people think is either it is one way or another. No in between or putting things together.

MoblinGardens: That's what I was talking about, at least partly. People have the idea that science MUST disprove every religion out there, and that it proves that there is no God, when in fact it could - and people like me believe it does - serve to show that there is a God and we are simply "Thinking God's thoughts after him" (kudos to Johann Kepler for coming up with that phrase). In other words, just figuring out how God created the universe, similar to how people study famous artists and the brush strokes they used, what was in their paints, why they chose the colors they did, so on and so forth. The two can be compatible but many people don't let it.

Unless the religion doesn't make supernatural claims no (but then again I guess it wouldn't be a religion then).

Science is based on things that can be proven or has substantial evidence for it, religion is the opposite as it's faith based.

Zlinqx :

I don't think you quite understand the word "faith". I have faith that you are not an artificial intelligence, but that can be proven. When the Christians 2000 years ago talked about faith, it wasn't faith in the supernatural or faith that God existed - everyone believed in those things then - but it was faith that God would give new life. Faith, without over complicating it, is synonymous to trust.