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It is a commonplace among scientistically minded skeptics of Christianity that any accurate, reliable, and useful description of the world ought to be expressed in proper scientific language. The Bible, most obviously in the Genesis accounts but elsewhere as well, clearly fails this test. Ergo, the Bible, Christian theology, and by implication the entire Christian religion is unworthy of the serious thinker.

Christians (and Jews, to be sure) have responded to this charge in various ways. Some have said that the Bible's main message is not about the physical world, but about theology and ethics and worship and the like. It would therefore be absurd to condemn the Bible by the demands of completely different disciplines aimed at completely different explanatory goals. (Non-overlapping magisteria—NOMA—is one version of this argument and it has been deployed by thinkers as diverse as Pope John Paul II and the late Harvard biologist Stephen Jay Gould.)

I belong to the crowd who maintain that there is considerable truth to NOMA, but the separation it poses isn't as stark as is usually suggested. The opening chapters of the Bible do deal with physical phenomena, after all, so how does Biblical language properly connect, if it does, with cosmology, paleontology, and so on?
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