The scientifically minded often have a lot of problems with the description of creation in Genesis — the order, the timeline, the dividing of animals into whether they flew, walked, or swam instead of orders or genuses — but I’d say it was never meant as a science textbook. Yet, there are some strong truths in it that led to science. Genesis describes not a world of spirits, but of things God created. The sun and the moon aren’t gods, they’re just more objects God added to this universe. They aren’t described more than as “lights,” but it’s clear you shouldn’t bow down to them.
And it’s having this faith God made a physical, ordered universe that allows science. There is no blasphemy in probing the world — God made it and gave it to us. And we know God is not capricious, so the rules we derive from His creations should be solid and meaningful.
Of course, sometimes the science conflicted with what at the time was religious belief, as when scientific discoveries showed the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around. This was certainly trouble for a time, but eventually it was decided there was nothing in the Bible that really said one way or another on who revolved around whom (it was just assumed the earth was the center of importance, but nothing God said was explicit about revolutions). Now it’s no longer considered a religious issue.
But a big split from science — one that is still ongoing — is about evolution. It’s easy to see how this was a big deal. For most of human history, atheism was actually really hard. There were so many strange unexplained things one could see from the lightning to the stars at night. Slowly, we peeled back most of those mysteries, but the hardest one to come up with a naturalistic explanation for had to be life itself. It was unthinkable for there to be some unguided process that could come up with all the many varied lifeforms we have on the planet.
And then someone theorized one. Now, this was a big boon for atheists — even more so than finding out the Earth is not the center of the universe. Now one of the biggest mysteries has a scientific solution, and many of them went, “See? You don’t need God. Animals just evolve from each other instead of being created.”
Now, there are two ways for a Christian to attack this statement — one good and one bad. And unfortunately, many settled on the bad method: Which is to implicitly accept the premise of it (“evolution disproves God”) and then attack the science.
