You misread that text. The Bible is not The Word, logos.
The Holy Spirit is The Word.
Wisdom, who speaks in the book of Proverbs, is The Word.
John is not writing about the Bible in that passage. There was no Bible other than the Greek and Hebrew Old Testament at the time. He's writing about God, and saying that Jesus is the Word who became flesh, and is therefore God.
Your statement "The words in the Bible are God" makes a graven image out of the Bible, an idol. The Bible is not God. God is God. Men wrote the Bible inspired by God, but that inspiration is not at all the same thing as John being God, nor the product of his pen being God.
This is really the dividing line between Protestant and Catholic Christianity since the mid-1500s.
And it is why Catholicism does not have a problem with evolutionary science so long as evolutionary science does not assert theology. It is why Fundamentalist Protestantism cannot accept evolution. It is also why Catholicism and Fundamentalist Protestantism can only tolerate each other in silence, but cannot agree on basic theology. You just wrote that the Bible is God! To Catholic eyes and ears, that is pure idolatry, the worship of a graven image. The Bible is absolutely not God, not in any sense. It is inspired by God, yes. A man is actually made more directly by God than the Bible is, because there were no human hands standing between God and the product the way there is with the Bible. We would be wrong to worship any particular man (other than Jesus) even though every man is the product of the direct handiwork of God. And we are absolutely wrong if we go so far as to worship the product of human hands, the Bible, inspired by God though it may be, as though IT were God.
It's a book. An instructive, useful, helpful, wonderful book. But it is not NECESSARY to the faith. Indeed, Christianity survived and thrived and grew for centuries without one. The Bible is written tradition. Important tradition. Sacred tradition. The inspired word of God. But it most absolutely is not in any sense The Word. The Word is GOD. The Bible's just a book. Not God. A man is closer to God than the Bible is, because a man is the product of the hands of God, but the Bible is the product of the hands of man inspired by God. One step versus two steps of separation.
It's important not to denigrate the Bible, of course, but it's absolutely impossible NOT to denigrate the Bible when speaking to someone who makes the BIBLE - a mere BOOK, a tradition, a secondary product of the Christian Church and Jewish Temple - into GOD! Of course anything that puts the Bible in its proper, secondary, subordinate, traditional, helpful-but-not-strictly-necessary-at-all place (literacy is not and never has been a prerequisite to salvation, but it IS a prerequisite to being able to decipher the first word of any written text like the Bible) is going to sound like blasphemy to someone who says the Bible is God!
You've nicely framed the issue, and you're right: a natural scientist really CAN'T be a fundamentalist Christian. There is no reason at all why he can't be a Catholic. And indeed, the guy who proposed the heliocentric solar system model, Copernicus, was a Catholic monk, and the guy who discovered genetics, Grigor Mendel, was also a Catholic monk. Galileo, who was also a Catholic brother in the employ of the Church, didn't get in trouble for repeating what Copernicus had already said (Copernicus certainly never got into trouble). Galileo got in trouble because he asserted scientific truth as higher than divine truth. That is obviously absurd, and is a different form of idolatry (calling dumb matter God) from what you propose (calling a book God...Jeez...!)
Catholics can have a beef with science if they want to take Genesis as literally as you do. They are not prevented from doing so by the Church. There are only about 15 passages in all of Scripture that the Catholic Church has ever REQUIRED Catholics to believe a certain way, and the only aspect of Genesis that Catholics are REQUIRED to believe is that there was indeed some moment in which there was the first intentional sin, Original Sin in the Catholic verbiage. That Adam and Eve may have actually been the first exemplars of homo australopithecus as opposed to homo sapiens sapiens, and the flood story of the Bible a distant preserved memory of the flooding at the end of the last ice age which did indeed inundate much of the world, but certainly didn't cover the top of Mt. Everest...Catholics are free to think whatever they want about this, because it's not important to salvation WHAT people believe about anthropology. What is important is that there is actually an intelligent, purposeful, creator God (HOW he went about creation is interesting to speculate on, and the ancient Jews certainly did in their legends, recorded in Genesis, but it is not necessary to salvation), there is sin, good and evil, and God became flesh in Jesus, literally, and salvation from our sins is found in following him. THAT is what is essential in the Bible.
Given that no agreement is possible on the degree of authority of the Bible, with Catholics me calling it a book inspired by God and you calling it God!, the best we can do is to understand that we each think the other in severe error, and yet can hope for the salvation of our souls through Jesus Christ. We must part in disagreement about science and about the Bible, because there is no way to rectify two fundamentally different theological views of God. But we can part in peace. So, may the peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be upon you for all of your days, Amen.
Absolutely True!!!
And when that Word speaks - things happen!
The problem is that it DOES!!!
Oh, it CLAIMS that it doesn't, but there is no other reason we have these C vs E threads; is there? ;^)
Indeed!