God and Science

June 29th, 2025                          “God and Science”                      Rev. Heather Jepsen

Summer Sermon Series: Stump the Pastor

Genesis 2:4-25 and Psalm 19:1-6

          This morning, we continue our summer sermon series, “Stump the Pastor” where you ask hard questions about the Bible and I try to answer them.  This morning our questioner asks, “How is there science when there is God?  If the world started with the Big Bang and Evolution, where is Adam and Eve?”

          Let’s start with a look at our text regarding creation.  You might not realize it but even our own Bible contains two creation stories.  There is the one you are probably most familiar with, Genesis chapter 1, where God makes a different thing each day for 7 days.  But there is a second competing narrative right after that in Genesis chapter 2.  The idea that our scriptures only ever say one thing is false.  There are many narratives in this book, all competing for primacy.

          In the second Genesis story, God creates the earth and the man all in one day.  Man is created from the very material that the earth is made of.  God forms the dirt, Adamah in Hebrew, into a dirt creature, Adam.  It’s not until later that we begin to think of this as a proper name, Adam. 

          Dirt creature is put into a garden that God has made.  And God needs the dirt creature to work this land and operate as a co-creator.  If you look back at verse 5 one of the reasons that there aren’t any plants yet is because there is no one to till the land. 

          Right away we see that this was never meant to be a narrative of all the earth created just in Eden.  As God makes the rivers, they flow from lands outside the garden.  This is not a creation from nothing, rather this is an ordering of the chaos that exists prior to order. 

          Adam, the dirt creature, is put in the garden and told to eat the plants.  Factoid for today, humans in the Bible and strictly vegetarian until the time of Noah.  God sees that the dirt creature is lonely and so makes other creatures as companions.  Adam names them all but still none is a good partner.  So, God creates a second dirt creature from the first.  They are united, ishshah from ish and they have no names.  They are naked and without shame.

          As you know, we interpret the Bible in its historical context.  Why would this narrative come into being?  Because in its historical context, it is a testimony to a God who freely creates a world out of generosity and love.  In the Babylonian creation story that other people would be telling at this same time, Marduk defeats the chaos monster Tiamat and forms humanity from the blood of Tiamat’s sexual partner Qingu.  What does that story teach about the earth and people?  Creation out of violence and domination is a different story than creation out of generosity and love.  People formed form the earth and made as partners in tilling the earth with God, is a different story then people formed in violence and death.

          The purpose of this narrative was to claim a God who does not create in violence.  It was to claim a humanity that was connected deeply with the earth.  And it was to claim a power over the earth and humanity’s ability to bring forth good things with the help of God.

          When we look at this narrative in our own historical context, we can still find these messages being relevant.  Big bang is ordered chaos.  The order within the chaos of our world can be seen as a divine pattern and mystery.  The dirt creature is created from the dirt itself.  We are all carbon and stardust, the same as our earth and the stars.

Adam and Eve, while being a story of humanity’s origins in simplicity and goodness, were never meant to represent all people literally coming from one set of parents.  We see that in the text itself.  When their first-born son Cain is sent out into a world, we find that that world contains cities full of other people.

The story of a God who creates the earth in goodness is not incongruent with the story of science or a big bang.  Nowhere does this text make the claim to be a literal understanding of creation.  This text was written as a mythical narrative competing with the other mythical narratives of its time.  The idea that we must choose between God and science, like an either/or, is a false idea.  We can have both God and science, and it has always been that way.

Even our Bible itself shows growth and learning in this area.  Psalm 19 that Bill read is older than many of our other Psalms.  In fact, this beginning part, about the sun as a strong man racing across the sky, is from a much older tradition.  This is from a time when people believed that the sun itself was a god.  But the Israelites now believe differently.  They believe that God is not the sun, but that God created the sun.  We look to the glory of the sun to see the glory of God the creator.  Even here we can see science in the Bible.  People changed their minds about who and what is God.

As you know, the frontiers of science continue to expand our understanding of God and the world.  Last summer I preached a sermon on neutrinos and if you are new here you might be wondering what all those neutrino comments are about.  The smallest of the subatomic particles is the neutrino.  Billions of neutrinos pass through your body every second.  They come from all over and they make up all things. 

          One of the interesting theories surrounding neutrinos is that they could be the connection between the physical and spiritual realms of our lives.  Neutrinos come in three different types, and they change as they travel through the world.  Scientists are wondering if these three types might be a way for neutrinos to carry information.  What if the neutrino interactions represent critical moments of information transfer between the physical and spiritual dimensions?

          This theory is called the Spiritual Theory of Everything, combining spirituality and physics.  The idea is that if these neutrinos are the most abundant particles in the universe, and if neutrinos could possibly carry information, then maybe this is what is happening when we have spiritual experiences.  Maybe prayer is neutrinos, maybe the Holy Spirit is neutrinos, maybe all the ways we feel, and experience God are the language of neutrinos moving in our bodies and in our world.  The study of Neutrinos is the cutting edge of science at a quantum level. 

          Neutrinos are just one way science is showing us God.  Just this week, the world’s largest camera gave us digital pictures of deep space.  This is the cutting edge of science on the hugest scale imaginable.  As we look deep into the cosmos we can’t help but see the wonder and the glory of God.  As the Psalmist tells us “The firmament proclaims God’s handiwork.”

          Science and God work well together.  Humans were made to co-create this planet and to continue to till it for understanding.  From the smallest neutrino out into the galaxies the song of creation is everywhere.  As we continue to learn more and more about our world and our universe, we continue to marvel at God’s good work of creation.  Thanks be to God for all these wonderful things and the science that helps us learn and understand more about them every day.  Amen.