The Evolution of Faith

Dr. Collins, a geneti­cist who strong­ly believes in Christ, lec­tured on “God and the Genome” ear­li­er this week. As a geneti­cist, he strong­ly believes in evo­lu­tion. Watch­ing the Chris­tians on cam­pus respond to his pre­sen­ta­tion has been fas­ci­nat­ing.

A few thoughts:

1) I real­ly wish Chris­tians on all sides of this debate would real­ize that oth­ers are doing the best that they can with the knowl­edge that they have. As they update their knowl­edge, they update their views. For the most part, peo­ple on all sides real­ly do love God and truth. In Philip­pi­ans 1:18 Paul makes the point that he even gives thanks for false teach­ers: “But what does it mat­ter? The impor­tant thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached. And because of this I rejoice.” In like man­ner, learn to rejoice in those who dif­fer from you on this issue.

2) On the Bible side of things, I wish more Chris­tians knew just how many dif­fer­ent options there are for inter­pret­ing Gen­e­sis 1 — google for “Frame­work Inter­pre­ta­tion”, “Gap The­o­ry”, “Day-Age View”, and “The­is­tic Evo­lu­tion” to get start­ed. In the end you’ll like­ly con­clude that some of the options are fair­ly implau­si­ble, but they are all worth con­sid­er­ing. For the record, I’m fond of the Frame­work Inter­pre­ta­tion. The idea that Gen­e­sis 1 might not be a chronol­o­gy of cre­ation isn’t some sort of knee-jerk reac­tion to Dar­win­ian ideas. Way back in the 4th cen­tu­ry Augus­tine was look­ing at the text and say­ing, “Some­thing com­plex is going on here.” For a good sum­ma­ry of Augustine’s per­spec­tive, read The Con­tem­po­rary Rel­e­vance of Augus­tine.

3) On the sci­ence side of things, I wish more Chris­tians were open to the idea that sci­en­tists have good rea­sons for the things that they say. There is no vast anti-Bible con­spir­a­cy. Sci­en­tists are look­ing at reams of data and try­ing to syn­the­size it rea­son­ably. That does­n’t imply that every sin­gle claim sci­ence makes is proven true in the long run, but it does mean that we should take sci­en­tists very seri­ous­ly when they tell us there is over­whelm­ing evi­dence that the earth is bil­lions of years old and when we dis­cov­er that there has been con­sen­sus with­in the sci­en­tif­ic com­mu­ni­ty about this for a while now. If you’d like to do a lit­tle more dig­ging on the sci­ence side, these three web­sites are pret­ty good places to start: Sci­Bel

is a fun lit­tle web­site with engag­ing arti­cles, the Fara­day Insti­tute

legal­ly blondes online

has some short but stim­u­lat­ing papers on essen­tial top­ics, and the Amer­i­can Sci­en­tif­ic Affil­i­a­tion has a huge col­lec­tion of arti­cles from a vari­ety of per­spec­tives.

I’ll wind this down by quot­ing from an email I sent to my stu­dents last night.

1) There are two sources of data for Chris­tians — the Word and the world.
2) Facts from the two realms don’t con­tra­dict one anoth­er, but the inter­pre­ta­tions we use to arrange those facts often do.
3) We’ve almost always got more inter­pre­ta­tive options than we real­ize (this is true of both sources of data).

And while I’m talk­ing about sci­ence and faith, I’d like to rec­om­mend an arti­cle about Galileo’s dis­pute with the church. The full sto­ry is some­thing you’ve like­ly not heard before: The Myth of Galileo down­load dia­mond dogs dvd .