Why the Debate Between Evolution and Creation is Unnecessary

So tonight is the TOTALLY EPIC, EARTH SHATTERING DEBATE between Bill Nye and Ken Ham on whether creationism or evolution is the one, true story of the mankinds' beginning.

I'm not watching tonight.

I'm not watching because I don't think the ideas of creation and evolution are incompatible.

I've laid out previously why I think creationism is a mistaken idea. In short, I think the creation story as laid out by the Book of Genesis is allegorical, a story told to explain our existence in the context of all creation and God. I think the ideas and themes contained therein are much, much more important than whether or not the Garden of Eden was in modern day Iraq or Iran. The story of Adam and Eve was one created by a people long, long ago to help them understand their existence in a world before science. It was a world before Galileo and Darwin and da Vinci.

God created a rational, ordered universe. He made it that way because he wanted us to understand the universe, to understand what is going on around us. He created laws of nature and physics. He gave us the ability to understand those laws. Who is to say that God didn't use natural phenomena like the Big Bang or evolution to create life on earth? We think hundreds of billions of years sounds so long, but to a God outside of time, it is but a blink of an eye. I think God absolutely used these methods to create our earth, and gave us the ability to discover that and understand it.

As progressive Christians, we are doing ourselves a disservice by allowing a debate between these worldviews. As we are called to always do as followers of Christ, we should be uniters. We should bring together these two supposedly incompatible worldview and show people that they can coexist. We should show them Christianity doesn't require us to reject science, and being a believer in science doesn't require us to reject faith. The two are always in harmony, and the idea that they aren't is a danger to our faith.