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Former N.C. governor tells church the two need not be in conflict
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Published: August 31, 2009
CHARLOTTE - For centuries, they waged war. It was religion vs. science.
Their battles ranged from 17th-century Italy, when the Catholic Church sentenced Galileo to house-arrest-for-life for saying the earth orbits the sun, to the Bible Belt in the 1920s, when Tennessee science teacher John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution.
Militants on both sides are still shouting away, but another, more nuanced voice can also be heard today: that of the scientist who believes in God.
On Sunday, former N.C. Gov. Jim Martin -- son of a Presbyterian minister and a longtime chemistry professor -- argued that science and religion are compatible, not contradictory, and that faith must evolve along with our understanding of nature.
"I believe the God of Abraham and Moses... was the creator of the universe and all forms of life," Republican Martin told about 230 people at Charlotte's Covenant Presbyterian, his church for 16 years. "I do not believe it was done in six days."
Six periods of time is more like it, Martin said, starting 4.5 billion years ago. And though one-time seminary student Charles Darwin's theory of evolution continues to be dismissed by many evangelical
Christians, Martin called it "the best understanding we have available. You can't be a biologist unless you subscribe to that."
Martin , who lives on Lake Norman, said in an interview that maybe God didn't intend his revelation to stop with the last book in the New Testament.
"Did God want a creature to evolve -- us -- that would have the capacity to look back... and understand how we got here?" said the former Davidson College professor, who got his Ph.D. in chemistry from Princeton University. "I think that's very credible, and comforting."
The Christian scientist most in the news these days is Dr. Francis Collins, who also has N.C. connections. The former director of the Human Genome Project and now President Obama's nominee to head the National Institutes of Health, he got his M.D. from UNC Chapel Hill in the 1970s.
He was an atheist when he arrived in North Carolina. After talking with patients about their faith and reading books by Christian defender C.S. Lewis, a former atheist himself, Collins joined Carrboro United Methodist Church.
"Some scientists didn't want him named (to head the NIH)," Martin told the church crowd. "Not because of his science, but because he wrote this book." At that, Martin held up -- and recommended -- Collins' "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence of Belief."
Martin, who headed the research lab at Carolinas Healthcare System in the 1990s, said there's no proof that the world was created in 4004 B.C. -- a calculation made in 1654 by Archbishop James Ussher, who counted backward from all the "begats" in the Bible.
But, said Martin, the first creation account in Genesis does track well with findings by geologists and paleontologists -- if the Bible's definition of a "day" can be stretched to mean billions of years. Birds pop up too soon in the biblical account, he said, but the progression -- with things beginning in the seas, with plants, then unicell organisms, then complex animals. -- is on target scientifically.
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