Science vs. Religion: A Thought Experiment for Bible-Believers

No worries

Solution 2 was rejecting the Bible.

I want to point out that if the primary purpose was not to convey a theological truth, rather a scientific one, there would be a conflict between science and the Bible. That’s why I wrote the two solutions, to solve that conflict in particular. If there wasn’t a conflict, it would be because as any particular passage would primarily convey a theological truth, not primarily a scientific one.

Yes, good points and I concur.  The Bible and science are apples and oranges that have little to do with each other.  This is immediately obvious just from the different literary genre that they are.  Genesis 1 is poetic prose, not a scientific treatise, and trying to make them accord with each other (the error of concordism) results in twisting the Bible to fit science or science to fit the Bible.

The only way they can truly be reconciled is by realizing that they don't really need to be reconciled---as you've noted--because they're apples and oranges.  A conflict is only created when we force the Bible to become a scientific textbook (and be meaningless to people for the past three thousand years who lived before the advent of modern science!).

OK, now for the 'controversial' part that will no doubt send some people off the rails.  It's something that a lot of people just don't want to hear but would rather remain in denial about.

The truth is that when we properly interpret the Bible in its proper historical context it's difficult to escape the conclusion that the Bible does in fact present a flat earth, geocentric view, including a three-tiered universe and solid firmament barrier above the sky to keep rain from falling down that periodically opened to allow rainfall with the sun, moon, and stars embedded in this firmament.  Now the non-Bible believer already writes off the Bible.  But for the Bible-believer there seems only one possible avenue from here: that of accommodationism (as opposed to concordism), which is the idea that God accommodates humanity by communicating in terms people can understand and even using the culture and erroneous ideas of the time. 

Divine accommodation is actually not a new idea, but has a long history going back to Calvin, St. Augustine, and before.  Theology aside, accommodation is used by all of us.  The 'modern mind' has a tendency to be smug about all this and look down condescendingly on past generations, while failing to see that even in our own science teaching we utilize erroneous analogies and descriptions all the time to make scientific "facts" understandable and relatable to students.  Such as the "greenhouse effect" that "traps heat" in the atmosphere (wrong! not how it actually works), the "Big Bang" 'explosion' that wasn't actually an explosion, or the simple, no-brainer scientific "fact" every educated person knows that light reflection is when light 'bounces' off a reflective surface (wrong! light doesn't 'bounce' off things, but there's no other way to describe it in a way that people can 'understand' without having to get into the actual quantum mechanics involved)

lol

which part?

It can be easy to trivialize these issues and forget they are matters of sophisticated scholarly study.  Here is one example among many for anyone interested in looking at this in greater depth: Biblical Cosmology: the Implications for Bible Translation

The article intro provides a succinct synopsis of 'biblical cosmology' that is more accurate than my 'geocentric, flat-earth' oversimplification....

....and documents the unfortunate trend in some Bible translations in the past century towards concordism by slightly altering the actual meaning of Hebrew words so it better accords with a more modern scientific view (but still doesn't quite work).

***So what does all this have to do with the 'Evolution Discussion'?  Not much, which is why I bring it up, because Bible believers frequently inject the Bible into discussions on evolution where it doesn't really belong (and vice versa, non-Bible believers injecting modern science into the Bible where it doesn't belong), creating an unnecessary conflict between the two, when Genesis 1 is not a scientific account of origins, but a theological rebuttal of Ancient Near East pagan cosmologies.  As such, the only significant incongruence is the theological one--the theistic claim in opposition to metaphysical naturalism.

***Genesis 1-11 has more in common with Ancient Near East cosmology, than modern science (that is worth repeating over and over again until it sinks in with modern readers who naturally think in modern categories that are foreign to the text).   This is simply a fact that is easily demonstrated by comparing Genesis 1-11 to Ancient Near East creation and flood accounts.  As such it seems a little insane to try to derive scientific information from the poetic prose of Genesis 1-3 like 'water vapor canopy', biosystematics and taxonomic classification of various 'kinds', reading mutations and the second law of thermodynamics into the 'fall' of Adam & Eve, reading plate tectonics into the appearance of land on Day 3 of the creation account when the waters were 'gathered together', and other such erroneous concordisms by YECs, but also OECs (old earth creationists) who do it too by erroneously trying to equate 'day' with long ages of millions of years or finding the Big Bang in "Let there be light" and other such nonsense.  

Some posts on another thread are probably more appropriate and belong under this OP:

Bible translation resource

Ancient Near East context of Genesis 1

Genesis 1 vs. Egyptian creation accounts

Genesis 1 as anti-pagan polemic

How everything is interpreted through cultural/world view lens

How reading Genesis 1:2 through a modern lens leads to the wrong understanding