What it implies is that the Big Bang and religion are not two opposing viewpoints. You can say 'maybe the priest wasn't religious anymore', but that is a minority assumption. If he is a priest, it is most likely that he was religious. That is the simplest view. And if he is, it shows that religion and science have not always been, nor needn't always be, opposed (in fact, that 'opposition' is just a construct of the last 100 years. After all, some of the deepest thinkers of history, say in ancient Greece, were deeply religious, even while they questioned religion itself.)
The reason I said that is because someone said, instead of believing in God, that they believe in the Big Bang. But that means nothing. I believe in God, but also in the Big Bang.
You can't do stuff like that without opening a big can of worms. When you start picking and choosing which parts of the Bible you want to take literally, and which parts you want to construe as figurative, a big logical gap opens up: The Bible itself does not provide for such freedom of interpretation, so on whose authority do you declare parts of it to be literal and others not?
If the creation story is not literal, then what about Christ's virginal birth? What about his resurrection? What about the sun standing still in the sky? The five loaves of bread and two fish? Healing the sick? Heaven and Hell? The Trinity itself?
Reasonable minds would look at this book and see all sorts of fibs and make-believe. But the devout cannot give in to that temptation, at least not very much, because it undermines their own worldview. And so good people like you tend to get caught in between...compelled to be reasonable, yet bound not to be.
So, even though religious figures have always been capable of making scientific discoveries, such as was discussed above, they are always constrained in the end. The Big Bang theory, to the extent that it does tread upon Scripture--and it does, unless you are willing to take a big plunge about the Bible's literal veracity--this theory is irreconcilable with the creation story. That the main reason why these scientific fields like cosmology and biology are controversial at all.
The Bible has always allowed such interpretation. I suppose you're not familiar with its construction and origins, but its existance is due to selectivity.
It is irreconcilable in the same way that the Babylonian stories are irreconcilable as well. I know exactly where my beliefs come from. I know full well that the dogma I hold to has been picked and chosen by scholars and theologians througout the ages. Why don't we Lutherans have books 13 and 14 of Daniel, after all? Why not Esdras, or the Book of Jubilees? Maccabees? They DO exist, but were removed. And heck, why not the, oh, Book of the Nazarenes, and multiple other Gnostic works (the famous 'Book of Judas' was nothing new, after all. Those works have been around since the second century AD)? The construction of the Bible as it stands is a very long and convoluted story. Some people will in fact say that what now stands as orthodox Christianity is merely the heresy that won.
Yes, Lord J, the devout can give into that temptation of being discerning. In fact, I was talking the other day to a friend of my father who is a pastor (and a very devout one at that) about pre-history and all that, and he put on a serious face, imitating an old-fashioned preacher, saying 'young man, this isn't what the Bible says. If you start thinking like this, it is the path to paganism!' It was a joke, of course. In my circles, we're careful about what we take literally, in the same way that one must be careful about taking ANY literature literally. Why not, and how do you know what to trust? A perfectly good question. It is less what story, or what event to trust, rather than what meaning or intent to trust. This isn't anything new at all, though. Here I'm referring mainly to the Old Tesament (specifcially the Creation account and the like.)
You see, when Plato tells his stories, whether about Atlantis, or Socrates, or whatever, those aren't true. They're lies, when it comes right down to it. Atlantis never was, and likely as not that is not Socrates speaking, but Plato himself using Socrates as a figure (in the selfsame way that the book of Ecclesiastes uses Solomon as the proverbial wise teacher, though the books itself was written inter-testamentally, hundreds of years after his time.) Any philosopher or techer will tell lies (or better to name them stories) to get the point across. The logical or historical veracity of these stories in literature is meaningless. The intent of what it is saying is what we cling to, and where the importance lies. I can bring up countless examples from all of history and mythology. Say for example the contradictions between Sophocles and Homer on the points of the Theban saga: the former has the hero gouging out his eyes, the latter speaks of him dying in battle. But does this suddenly make Sophocles untrustworthy? Well, maybe on 'historical' grounds, but it was never meant to be a historical account. In fact, he varies the facts knowingly to suit the story, to bring across his point and idea. That is the exact same thing you must apply to the Bible. If you were to judge it like a history book, you are doing so out of ignorance, not dissimilar from the people who take it to be fact out of ignorance. Yeah, the sun stood still over the valley of whatever; and the sun went dark when Atreus killed his brother's children, too! Factuality aside, there's a powerful story and meaning in each.
And that is the mistake you are making. You are treating the Bible as a supposed 'handbook to history' (okay, so some Christians might take it as such, but they are mistaken.) But it isn't history at all. It's literature, and is as true as Hamlet is, as true as Oedipus is. If you would judge the Bible on its historical veracity, I would ask you to kindly apply the same measure, and thus the same scorn, to Homer, to Hesiod, and most every other work of literature that has 'lied' about the facts. The dilemma you have run into is looking at these things with a purely modern mind. You have it all out of context. Things in ancient days were not written to be 'factual accounts' as we have now. Our understanding of what makes history comes from the likes of Herodotos, from the Greeks, and our idea of 'truth being in the facts' is very modern. If you really want to understand the literature, you must look at it as it was written. Truth is not always in the facts. It can be in ideas. And THAT is what is at work there, and that is why things like the Big Bang do not contradict the Bible. Much of the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, amounts to a truth of ideas; the Big Bang is the truth of fact and history.
Now, in all that there are certain things that I have chosen to believe that seem absurd to you. That orthodox dogma I know is one that is selective, but I know where it comes from, and know where it stands amongst other things. This is particularly to the New Testament, which has the virtue of being unconstrained by the more mythical and eastern styles that exist in the Old. The New has the virtue of being built off the Greek Hellenistic foundation which is inherently more rational than the eastern. It too, however, is in some measure a product of its times. Philisophically, Paul speaks much like a Stoic, after all. Many of the sketchy moralistic comments are, likewise, products of typical feeling of the era - whether Greek, or Roman. It was able to advance on a few (the advent of Christianity, for example, brought into disfavour the old Roman tradition of a woman who had been raped killing herself because of her shame), but could not be too radical on all fronts. I know precisely where my beleifs stand in the context of things, and know that I have conciously CHOSEN to believe certain things, which is a far cry from being blind.
However, I would still warn you against thinking yourself reasonable in the face of irrationality. 'Science' itself is not pure, and much of what you know is in fact taken on faith. Have you tested the speed of light yourself? How do you know it is constant: because Einstein said so? How about Evolution? Have you tested this? Have you proven what is and what is not yourself? Of course not! These things are a matter of faith. You place your trust in teachers (or, maybe, your ability to be systematic in approaching it; yet one can a systematic theologian as well.) It is not much different than what the religious believe when it comes right down to it. To stand by anything like that too strongly is religious zeal of a fashion. Because, as much as you might not like this, people cannot ever be wholly reasonable. Even science has its dogmas, and even you have your blind faiths. That is what it is to be human, Lord J. When you believe in the Big Bang, you believe in an event one hundred million lifetimes ago, that we can only barely see the echoes of - never the event itself, only the results. Is that not faith? And if the extrapolation backwards seems reasonable, remember the manifold theories that have seemed reasonable that have been disproven. There is very much less reason in the human mind than you think, and if it is dangerous to have blind faith in God, it is equally dangerous to have blind faith in ones self, or humanity.
Eyes always open.
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