Carthage College Intellectual Foundations Panel Talk
I’m speaking on the revamped Intellectual Foundations panel series for Carthage College next month. The idea is to share more publicly the kind of discussions we have in our classes. The first panel is based on the text of Genesis, and is entitled “Must we choose between science and religion?” I’ve approached it, naturally, as an intellectual historian. Below I have posted the script of what I intend to say, more or less.
Opening
Genesis isn’t science. But science isn’t just science. It’s a story—one that began with a theological revolution. Genesis 1 isn’t a failed textbook; it’s a manifesto. It’s also not just a myth. It’s a cultural artifact—one that radically reimagined humanity’s relationship with nature. Unlike its Ancient Near Eastern neighbors, where creation emerged from divine bloodbaths (see: Marduk vs. Tiamat), Genesis presents a world spoken into order by a transcendent God. No cosmic wars, no gods to appease. Just a deliberate, rational act.
This isn’t primitive science. It’s subversive theology. The sun and moon, worshipped as gods across the ancient world, are demoted to “lamps.” Humanity isn’t slaves to capricious deities, but image-bearers entrusted with stewardship. Genesis strips creation of divinity to reveal it as a gift—a cosmic temple where God dwells, and we serve as priests.
This matters because how we narrate creation shapes how we treat creation. In Babylon, humans were slaves to temperamental gods; in Genesis, we’re stewards of a “very good” world. The sun isn’t a deity—it’s a tool. Rivers aren’t gods—they’re resources. This desacralization wasn’t a license to exploit, but a call to responsibility.
Science’s Debt
Modern science owes much to this worldview. Early scientists like Newton and Kepler assumed nature was lawful because they believed in a Lawgiver. The universe wasn’t a capricious deity—it was a coherent text to decode. The “Two Books” metaphor—Scripture and Nature as twin revelations—drove curiosity without exploitation. These earlier scientists believed nature was lawful because a Lawgiver exists; intelligible because our minds mirror His; contingent because it’s a gift, not a given.
Compare this to ancient China. Taoists and Confucians studied nature for millennia—inventing gunpowder, seismographs, star charts—but never sparked a Scientific Revolution. Why? Their cosmos was a self-regulating organism, cyclical and eternal. No Creator meant no reason to seek universal laws. Only the Christian West, haunted by Genesis’ logic—creation as a free act of a rational God—dared to dissect the world like a text.
So yes—Genesis clashes with modern science if read literally. But literalism misses the point. Science itself is a fruit of Genesis’ imagination. The very idea that nature obeys laws, that humans can discern them, that the universe is good and ordered—these are theological claims.
The Faustian Bargain
But somewhere along the way, the metaphor got edited. The Industrial Revolution recast nature as a machine, and science as its operator manual. Lynn White Jr. famously blamed Christianity for the ecological crisis, but that’s a half-truth. The real shift came when science divorced itself from ethical frameworks and married profit. Corporations didn’t just adopt science—they co-opted its language. “Progress” became synonymous with extraction, and “dominion” morphed into domination.
But here’s the twist: the same theology that birthed science also birthed its crisis. Liberal Protestants in the 19th century, eager to marry faith and progress, reduced God to a “spirit of innovation” and creation to a resource. Capitalism became a liturgy—Eugene McCarraher calls it “the enchantment of growth”—and science its high priest. Rivers became “hydroelectric potential,” forests “carbon sinks,” animals “commodities.”
Zygmunt Bauman names this era “liquid modernity”: a world where truth melts into power, and science becomes a tool of control. Big Tech’s surveillance, agribusiness’s monocultures, Big Oil’s denialism—all justified as “progress.” We mastered nature so thoroughly, we forgot why we sought mastery.
Genesis vs. the Spreadsheet
Here’s where Genesis might offer a corrective. Its vision of stewardship—imago Dei as caretakers, not conquerors—stands in stark contrast to what historian Carolyn Merchant calls the “death of nature.” Modern science, in its corporate incarnation, often reduces the world to a spreadsheet: forests are “carbon credits,” animals are “data points,” and humans are “consumers.” Genesis, meanwhile, insists creation has intrinsic value. It’s not a ledger, but a gift—one that demands reciprocity, not just ROI.
Even secular environmentalism echoes this intuition. When we speak of “saving the planet,” we’re invoking a sacredness Genesis embedded in Western thought. The irony? The same text accused of licensing exploitation might hold the key to a sustainable vision of science—one that sees nature as a partner, not a patent.
When we secularized science, we kept the fruit but poisoned the roots. We marvel at quantum physics while ignoring its metaphysical mystery: Why is nature comprehensible? Why is there something rather than nothing? Science can’t answer these questions—but Genesis does.
The Paradox of Literalism
Read literally, Genesis clashes with cosmology. But literalism misses its genius. This isn’t a Bronze Age “how-to” guide—it’s a polemic against ideologies that reduce the world (and humans) to a resource. The ancients feared chaos; we’ve normalized it. Climate change isn’t just a chemical equation—it’s the collateral damage of a story that forgot creation’s value.
Science doesn’t need Genesis to function. But without narratives that root humans in ethical relationships with nature, science becomes a tool of what Wendell Berry called “the tyranny of the profit motive.”
Closing Thought
Genesis won’t fix the climate crisis. But its subversive anthropology—humans as stewards, not stockholders—challenges us to ask: What story is driving our science? Are we narrating nature as a machine to mine, or a mystery to honor? The answer might determine whether we survive our own ingenuity.
We stand at a crossroads. The climate crisis isn’t just a failure of policy—it’s a failure of story. We’ve treated the world as a machine to hack, not a gift to cherish.
The solution isn’t to worship Genesis or abandon science. It’s to recover the sacramental vision that birthed both: to see creation not as a battlefield or a warehouse, but as a communion of creatures. Every equation, every experiment, every theory is part of a story—one that began with a divine whisper, “Let there be light,” and ends with us answering: How will we steward the gift?
Science maps the mechanics of the universe. Genesis maps its meaning. We need both—or we’re left with a world that’s rich in data, but starved of wisdom.
After all, even the best science needs a better story.
James C. Ungureanu 
One is reminded of Einstein’s comment at the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in September, 1940: “science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.” Well done, James!