Walker seemingly stumbled, "For me, I am going to punt on that one…I'm here to talk about trade, not to pontificate about evolution." Recognizing that answer might indicate indecisiveness, his team later released a statement saying he believes, “faith and science are compatible.”
Unlike Walker, Dr. Robert Jastrow was a rocket
scientist. Jastrow earned a PhD in
theoretical physics and joined NASA when it was formed in 1958. He was the first
Lunar Exploration Committee chairman and the Chief of its Theoretical Division.
He was later the founding director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies until
he retired in 1981. After NASA, he
became a Professor of Earth Sciences at Dartmouth
College, the Founder and Chairman Emeritus of the George C. Marshall Institute, and
Director Emeritus of Mount Wilson Observatory and Hale Solar Laboratory.
Jastrow’s view on understanding creation is,
"the curtain drawn over the mystery of creation will never be raised by
human efforts, at least in the foreseeable future." Donald Rumsfeld famously said, “As
we know, there are known knowns. There are things we know we know. We also know
there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not
know…”
How do we deal with the “known unknowns?” Typically, we develop theories to explain them: Creation – The Big Bang Theory; Man – The
Theory of Evolution; Summer and Winter – Climate Change. But theories are just that, theories. Jastrow theorized that science can’t explain
the universe without the supernatural.
Although Jastrow was an
"agnostic, and not a believer,” in an interview with Christianity
Today, Jastrow said "Astronomers now find they have painted
themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that
the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds
of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the
earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they
cannot hope to discover. That there are what I or anyone would call
supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven
fact."
There are some things you have
to understand to believe. In other cases
you have to believe to understand. For most Americans the explanation
“In the beginning God created…” was enough.
George Washington, our founding father and first President reasoned it
this way, “It is
impossible to account for the creation of the universe, without the agency of a
Supreme Being. It is impossible to govern the universe without the aid of a
Supreme Being. It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being. Religion is as necessary to reason, as reason
is to religion. The one cannot exist without the other. A reasoning being would
lose his reason, in attempting to account for the great phenomena of nature,
had he not a Supreme Being to refer to.”
Like Washington, Jastrow
unifies God and the astronomical in his book, The Enchanted Loom: Mind in
the Universe by explaining, “The
details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical
accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced
suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and
energy…For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the
story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is
about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he
is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for
centuries."
The “mountain of ignorance" may not be the end of
the bad dream for those that deny the Creator.
The book that Jastrow claimed got the creation account right, thousands
of years before the astronomer, also declares that, “every knee will bow and
tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”
For those that deny the Creator, that confession could create
quite a problem.
