Huff Post: In my previous blog, I talked about how religious believers often feel as though they are faced with a lose-lose decision — science or religion. The Bible, for example, seems to speak of a fairly quick and recent creation by very specific divine interventions — the creation of light on one day, for example, and the creation of all of the animals just a few days later. Science, on the other hand, speaks of a very slow creation with light, for example, not appearing until 500 million or so years after the Big Bang and animals appearing slowly and through very natural processes billions of years later. Given a forced choice between physics and faith, then, some people choose physics and some people choose faith. I think this lose-lose feeling is rooted in a culturally influential but historically false conception of the relationship between science and religion as one of perpetual warfare. But even if the warfare narrative is false, many religious believers today feel like they are forced to choose between science and religion.

In my new book, Religion and the Sciences of Origins, I offer a Two Book model in place of the warfare metaphor. Here’s the basic idea: God speaks to us in the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture, and these two books cannot conflict.

Consider the case of an apparent and historically influential conflict — geocentrism versus heliocentrism (an earth-centered vs. a sun-centered cosmos). Common sense experience and the Bible seem clearly on the side of geocentrism. We don’t feel the earth rotate and we see the sun and stars revolve around the earth. What about the Bible? In Joshua 10: 12-13 we read:

On the day the LORD gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the LORD in the presence of Israel:

“O sun, stand still over Gibeon,
O moon, over the Valley of Aijalon.”
So the sun stood still,
and the moon stopped,
till the nation avenged itself on its enemies,
as it is written in the Book of Jashar.

Joshua’s prayer was for more time in the day. The way to increase the length of the day? Stop the sun in its orbit around the earth: “O sun, stand still.” According to the text, the sun stopped, giving Joshua an extra day to avenge his enemies. If God caused the sun to stand still, the sun must be moving. Prior to the scientific revolution, the vast majority of biblical interpreters accepted a literal interpretation of this passage and others like it. Common sense and the Bible converged on geocentrism.

Geocentrism was first challenged in the 15th century by Nicholas Copernicus (1473-1543) with very little controversy. Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) would carry on the debate within both the Church and the scientific community. Questions naturally arose regarding Galileo’s commitment to Scripture and how he could reconcile this new science with the Bible.

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