I believe that God is everywhere and is everything. But my beliefs collide with what I know. Mind you, I don't know much and I'm going to be spending all my life learning. I expect that at the end of it all, I'm still not going to know very much even after a lifetime of learning. I'm concerned that I'm not going to have the answers when my daughter decides that she wants to know what or who God is.
I'm currently reading a book where in it the author recalls a conversation she had with her daughter, who was then eight years old, about God and science. I felt that the author did a nice job in explaining the difference between the two.
What I most wanted to communicate to Emma at the moment she confronted me with the conflict between science and religion was my appreciation of her question. I told her that both ideas - the monkey idea and the Adam and Eve idea - were true, but in different ways. Her question was not an "either/or" question but an "and/also" question.
"God does exist," I told her, "but God is so different from science that we can't use the same parts of our mind to understand them. If we wanted to prove to people that there was no God we could say, 'How could Noah fit all those animals in the ark? What kept the predator animals from killing the gentle herbivore animals? How come Noah and his wife didn't jump overboard to escape the smell?' It's easy to make the story sound silly. If we think literally about the story of Noah, or Moses and the burning bush, or the parting of the Red Sea, we can use science to make fun of the idea of God.
"But God and science aren't in a competition," I continued. "To teach about science we use the laws of logic and instruments like a microscope. To teach about God we use different laws, like the Ten Commandments, and we use stories instead of instruments to show how the laws work. To test and measure God we use the part of our mind that sees beauty in nature and goodness in people.
"As far as I know, the world was created through a process that took billions of years," I said. "And yes, humans did evolve from apes. But the story of God making the world in six days isn't about using chemical tests to date the age of rocks so we can figure out how old the world is. The story of creation is there to remind us of the laws of living: that working hard is important, that resting is important too, and that we should always try to do things carefully and in the right order. The story of the parting of the Red Sea is about how hard it is to leave and go somewhere new even if the old place was terrible. The story of the burning bush is about being ready and willing to hear the voice of God at unexpected times in unexpected places. God wants us to follow the examples in these stories, and that's why they are written in the Bible.
"We can't think of the world around us as God's science laboratory," I told Emma. "Have you noticed the way that, every single time, night follows day and the seasons follow each other in perfect order, the way the ocean has waves and fish have scales and it's never, ever the other way around? Did you know that the wings of some moths have markings that look like an owl's face, so that predators will stay away from them? If you think about it, all of these things can be explained in the 'and/also' way, as parts of science and parts of God's amazingly great design. Science teaches us about the patterns and systems all around us. Science makes God's incredible world credible.
"Rabbi Rembaum at our synagogue says that science tells us how things work and Torah teaches us why it's important. Other people say that science gives us a map to the stars and religion gives us a map to heaven. Religion teaches us how to be good people and how to take care of the two big gifts God has given us: the gift of life and the gift of the great wide world." For that moment, Emma understood.
(pp. 241-243)
