I just read this article and wanted to know if this or the rest of the article in any way contradicts Genesis?I
[If this dual-orbiting planet hypothesis gets confirmed, researchers suggest it would lend credence to a theory that our moon was created when a planet-sized object, sharing a similar orbit to Earth’s eons ago, possibly crashed into our home world.]
aolnews.com/2011/03/01/kepler-spacecraft-finds-2-planets-sharing-same-orbit/?icid=main%7Chtmlws-main-n%7Cdl1%7Csec1_lnk3%7C204156
It does not conflict with Genesis any more that plenty of other things science confirms, like the fact that the Earth was not originally covered with water before dry land appeared, and that grass and trees did not exist before the sun and moon were set in the firmament. If we can accept that trees did not come into existence in 24 hours, on the day before the sun and moon came into existence, then surely we can accept that the moon was formed when a Mars-sized protoplanet smashed into the Earth. If we wanted to stick to a
literal interpretation of Genesis (which the Church does not ask us to do), then we might as well never read anything about geology, astrology, cosmology, or any other scientific field that touches on the origins of things. (Are atoms and molecules even
Biblical?)
If you can find Pope Benedict’s short book
In the Beginning, it is very readable and deals with a number of these issues. He says, in part:
Do these words, then, count for anything? In fact a theologian said not long ago that creation has now become an “unreal” concept; that if one is to be intellectually honest one ought to speak no longer of creation but rather of “mutation and selection.” Are these words true? . . .
One answer was already worked out some time ago, as the scientific view of the world was gradually crystallizing; many of you probably came across it in your religious instruction. It says that the Bible is not a natural science textbook, nor does it intend to be such. It is a religious book, and consequently one cannot obtain information about the natural sciences from it. One cannot get from it a scientific explanation of how the world arose; one can only glean religious experience from it. Anything else is an image and a way of describing things whose aim is to make profound realities graspable to human beings. One must distinguish between the form of portrayal and the content that is portrayed. The form would have been chosen from what was understandable at the time – from the images which surrounded the people who lived then, which they used in speaking and in thinking, and thanks to which they were able to understand the greater realities. And only the reality that shines through these images would be what was intended and what was truly enduring. Thus Scripture would not wish to inform us about how the different species of plant life gradually appeared or how the sun and the moon and the stars were established. Its purpose ultimately would be to say one thing: God created the world.
. . .
But this does not imply that the individual passages of the Bible sink into meaninglessness and that this bare extract alone has any value. They, too, express the truth – in another way, to be sure, than is the case in physics and biology. They represent truth in the way that symbols do – just ask, for example, a Gothic window gives us a deep insight into reality, thanks to the effects of light that it produces and to the figures that it portrays.
I would like to seize upon two elements here. The first is that the biblical creation account is marked by numbers that reproduce not the mathematical structure of the universe but the inner design of its fabric, so to say, or rather the idea according to which it was constructed.
You can read some further excerpts
here. I am inclined to agree that the Bible was not intended to serve as a technical treatise on the geology and prehistory of the Earth.
