Francis Collins (Human Genome Project), Kenneth Miller, John Polkinghorne — serious scientists who are devout Christians and accept the scientific consensus. The conflict is between a specific interpretation of Genesis and science, not between Christianity and science. Augustine warned against this in the 5th century.
Key claims
—Francis Collins (Human Genome Project director): no conflict between Christian faith and the scientific evidence
—Augustine (5th century) warned against reading Genesis in a way that makes Christians objects of ridicule to those who know the natural world
—The conflict is between a specific interpretation of Genesis and science — not between Christianity and science
—Young Earth Creationism, Old Earth Creationism, Evolutionary Creationism — Christians have held a range of positions for centuries
—Genesis is theological literature engaging ancient Near Eastern creation accounts — its purpose is who made creation and why, not how
The perceived conflict between science and Christianity — particularly between evolutionary biology and the Genesis account of creation — is one of the most common intellectual stumbling blocks for Christians who grew up in communities that taught Young Earth Creationism and subsequently encountered the scientific consensus. The collision can feel catastrophic: if Genesis is wrong about creation, maybe the whole Bible is wrong about everything.
This is a real crisis for many people. It deserves honest engagement.
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The scientific consensus is not a conspiracy
The scientific consensus on the age of the universe (~13.8 billion years), the age of the earth (~4.5 billion years), and biological evolution as the mechanism by which the diversity of life developed over deep time — is not a conspiracy or a liberal agenda or a secular attack on Christianity. It is the conclusion of independent lines of evidence from astronomy, physics, chemistry, geology, genetics, and paleontology, developed over 150 years by scientists of diverse personal beliefs, many of whom were and are Christians.
Francis Collins, who led the Human Genome Project and went on to direct the National Institutes of Health, is a devout Christian who accepts the scientific consensus on evolution entirely. He writes in The Language of God (2006) that he finds no conflict between his faith and the scientific evidence — and that the extraordinary complexity of the genome, far from undermining his faith, deepens his awe at the God he believes created life through an evolutionary process.
Kenneth Miller — the biologist whose testimony was decisive in the Kitzmiller v. Dover case that prevented intelligent design from being taught as science in public schools — is a Catholic who accepts evolution entirely and argues that the evidence for it is overwhelming. John Polkinghorne, a Fellow of the Royal Society and one of the most distinguished quantum physicists of the 20th century, is an ordained Anglican priest who has spent decades arguing that science and Christian faith are compatible.
The idea that an intellectually serious Christian cannot accept the scientific evidence for the age of the universe and the fact of evolution is simply false. Many of the most intellectually serious Christians alive today accept both.
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The question of how to read Genesis
The critical question is not "science or Genesis?" — it is "what kind of literature is Genesis, and what is it trying to say?"
Genesis 1 was not written as a scientific description of the mechanism of creation. It was written as a theological account of the meaning of creation — who made it, why, and what it says about the Creator and about human beings. The ancient Near Eastern cultures in which Genesis was composed produced other creation accounts — the Enuma Elish, the Atrahasis epic — that Genesis is consciously engaging. Against those accounts, which present the universe as the battleground of competing divine powers and human beings as slaves made from the blood of a slaughtered god, Genesis presents a different picture: one God, who creates by speaking (suggesting sovereign authority rather than struggle), who declares creation good, and who makes human beings in his own image and for relationship with himself.
This theological content — the message of Genesis — is not threatened by the scientific evidence for the age of the universe or the mechanism of evolution. The conflict is between a specific interpretation of Genesis (as a literal scientific account of a 6,000-year-old creation in six 24-hour days) and the scientific evidence. The interpretation, not Genesis itself, is what collides with science.
Christians have held a range of positions on Genesis for centuries — not as a concession to secular pressure but as the result of serious theological engagement with the text:
Young Earth Creationism: God created the universe approximately 6,000–10,000 years ago, in six literal 24-hour days, as Genesis describes. The scientific evidence for an older universe and for evolution is either wrong or has been misinterpreted. This position takes the text most literally but requires rejecting the scientific consensus across multiple independent fields.
Old Earth Creationism (Progressive Creationism): The universe and earth are the age the scientific evidence indicates. God created life in stages over this long period, with specific creative acts producing the diversity of life. Evolution as an unguided process is rejected, but the age of the universe is accepted. Figures like Hugh Ross hold this position.
Evolutionary Creationism (Theistic Evolution): The universe and earth are the age the scientific evidence indicates, and life developed through the evolutionary process that biology describes. God is the author and sustainer of this process — it was not unguided, even if the specific mechanisms are those that biology identifies. This is the position of Francis Collins, John Polkinghorne, and many other serious Christian scientists. BioLogos is the major organization advocating this position.
Framework Hypothesis, Day-Age Theory, Analogical Days: Various interpretive approaches that take the literary structure of Genesis seriously and find ways of reading the "days" of creation that are not 24-hour periods while maintaining the theological content of the text.
The point is not that all of these positions are equally correct — they are not. The point is that Christians have always recognized that the question of how to read Genesis is a genuine hermeneutical question, and that the answer is not obviously "six literal 24-hour days at the cost of rejecting all convergent scientific evidence." Many of the greatest theologians in Christian history — Augustine, for example — read Genesis in ways that did not require a young earth.
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world... and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation.
Augustine, writing in the 5th century, was warning against reading Genesis in a way that would make Christians objects of ridicule to those who knew the natural world better. His point is not that Scripture is wrong — it is that a literalistic reading of Genesis that conflicts with well-established knowledge of the natural world damages the credibility of the faith unnecessarily.
The conflict between science and Christianity is real — but it is primarily the conflict between a specific interpretation of Genesis and the scientific evidence. The conflict between science and the core of Christian faith — the resurrection of Jesus, the existence of God, the moral argument, the hard problem of consciousness — is not resolved by science against faith. As Why Not Atheism Foundation Section 03 establishes, the deepest questions that science raises point toward rather than away from Christianity.