6. Summary - the Bible

This is what the Bible text tells us about how we got here:

• Our earth had a beginning.
• At one stage in our planet's history, it was uninhabited and covered with water.
• Life then appeared on our planet in stages, with man appearing last of all.

We should bear in mind that there are differences of opinion about how long all this took. It may surprise us, but that's about all the Bible text actually tells us about the start of everything

7. Bible and Science conflict?

We will now look at the observable facts in Science and see if they conflict with the Bible text. The table below summarises what we have seen:

Observable facts from Science	The Bible text
'Red shift' in light coming from space. Background radiation in universe. Animals in fossil record appear fully functional. The cell is always complete and fully functional.	Our earth had a beginning. At one stage in our planet's history, it was uninhabited and covered with water. Life then appeared on our planet in stages, with man appearing last of all.

The fact that the light coming from the universe is different from that which comes from our sun, and that there is a background radiation, doesn't conflict with the Biblical statement that the universe had a beginning.

If we accept the scientists' belief that the red shift means our universe is expanding, this would agree with the Bible statement that the universe had a beginning. The observable fact that the fossils and the cell appear fully formed agrees with the Bible statement that life appeared fully formed in stages, with man last of all.

If we consider time periods for the start of things, there is no conflict if we restrict ourselves to observable facts. When we think carefully about it, all the dating methods are based on assumptions. The oldest objects of known age are only a few thousand years old. We have no object which says, 'I am 40 million years old - use me as a calibration sample'. So we don't have all the facts. Remembering what we saw in the examples from medical history, if we don't have all the facts, we can reach wrong conclusions. In dating methods we don't have all the facts either, so our conclusions could be wrong. We can see that, whatever view we take of the Bible text regarding time periods, there is no conflict with science because there are no observable scientific facts to enable us to check our theories.