Many of you I am guessing, have watched the History Channel's 5-week-long series on The Bible. And perhaps the first couple of weeks you saw many images of Israelites going to war with other tribes. It could actually get quite gruesome with all of the violence and bloodshed. This issue of violence and bloodshed has been quite a stumbling block for faith in God for many and raises a lot of questions.
Figure 1 - Scroll fragment containing Genesis from Dead Sea scrolls
Figure 1 - Artist's conception of Archaeopteryx
In his foundational work, generally known as "The Origin of Species," but seldom (for obvious reasons) cited by its full title, "On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life," Charles Darwin proposed a bold test for his theory when he said:
The greatest challenge for evolutionary biology is to account for the information found in codes in DNA, RNA, proteins, and more recently in the epigenome. 1
In The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow present religion and science as rivals and give the impression that they are irreconcilable. The following quotes present such an opposition, and they reveal an antagonism toward religion in the authors:
Ignorance of nature’s ways led people in ancient times to invent gods to lord it over every aspect of human life. 1
