One of my favorite quotes from the guests on "Politically Incorrect" was "Why do people who never read the bible, automatically assume they know more about it than people who spend their lives reading it?"
Siaf_csf, first just to introduce myself, yes I'm a pastor and an evangelical and I believe in biblical inerrancy. While it proves nothing objectively, I do hold two graduate degrees, an M.A. in Modern History from St. Andrews University, Fife, Scotland and a Master of Divinity from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, PA. I note that simply to prove that while I may indeed be an idiot, I am not the infamous "poor, uneducated and easily led" idiot of Washington Post lore.
I do not come from a religious background, and I used to be an anti-theist and a believer in Darwinian evolution. My wife studied Geo-Chemistry at the University of Rochester, where one of her projects was neodymium/selemium dating of rocks from the Canadian Shield. So this is a topic that I've had to discuss and think through for some time.
Just a couple of points to begin with:
1) The bible doesn't teach geocentricity (that the earth is the center of the universe) The Roman Catholic Church (hereafter RCC) did indeed promulgate that doctrine as something to be believed by the faithful, but this had more to do with the fact that the RCC accepted an Aristotelian Cosmology (which was obviously a Pagan Greek construct) and allowed it to trump a strictly biblical cosmology.
The Royal Academy of Science, on the other hand, was established by deeply religious Protestant Puritans and did much to advance the Copernican cosmology and many of the scientific paradigms still in use today to explain the observed data. Amongst the more famous Puritan Scientists in the Academy where Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon. None of these men woud have accepted the notion that a belief in inerrancy entails geocentricity.
2) While the Bible specifically teaches special creation and intelligent design (something that both the DNA data and astrophysics support - see for instance John Byl's "God and Cosmos," Behe's "Darwin's Black Box," or "Intelligent Design" by Dembski) the idea of life, per se, on other planets is not ruled out.
In fact the consistent teaching of the bible is that "The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork" (Psalm 19:1) i.e. the very purpose of Creation is to show that there is a creator worthy of being glorified. Given the doctrine that man was created in the image of God, with dominion over creation as His steward, the idea of intelligent life on other planets is a bit of theological stretch, but bacteria? Nope, nothing biblical precludes the existence of one-celled critters or any other flora or fauna on other planets. It simply teaches that God is the author of creation everywhere in the universe.
Your Servant,
SEAGOON
