In the Face of Evidence

Today's video features Michael Lloyd. Please note the views expressed here are those of the author, not necessarily of The BioLogos Foundation. You can read more about what BioLogos believes here.

Today's video features Dr. Michael Loyd, Tutor in Theology at St. Paul's Theological Center, and is courtesy of filmmaker Ryan Pettey, director/editor of Satellite Pictures.

In today's video, Rev. Dr. Michael Lloyd talks about how being created in the Image of God transcends survival of the fittest and how what we believe (or don't believe) as Christians speaks volumes about our worldview and it's ability to be expanded.

Transcript

I actually think that though evolution is often seen as the enemy of religious faith, and the Christian faith in particular, that actually, in a number of ways, it points beyond itself. And it’s much more than, not less than, but more than a survival capacity.

Something quite remarkable has happened and that suggests to me, in itself, that evolution is not hopeless. The cellist in Sarajevo who, at the heart of the troubles, used to go out into the old Olympic area with his cello and play unaccompanied Bach cello suites to say to the people of violence “That’s not what’s real. This is what’s real. This is what matters. This is what human beings are for.” And I find it meshes suspiciously well with human beings being made in the Image of a God who is the creator, and therefore creative, and that is just who we are that is just part of our being.

I think one needs to tend very carefully to the things that one wants to be true, and wants not to be true, both for a positive and a negative reason. The things we want, and don’t want to be true, tell us a very great deal about ourselves. Now some of that is really good. On the other hand, sometimes when we hang on to those things in the face of evidence, in the face of arguments, that may tell us something negative about ourselves. It may tell us that we are refusing to allow our worldview to be expanded. It’s limiting me because we are growing and, therefore, we need to get bigger clothes as well.

And it’s often the niggling, annoying things, the things we actually want to deny and shut out, that are things that can actually improve, [and] enlarge our worldview. Now as a Christian, I obviously believe that my worldview is incredibly finite. That the truth is always going to be bigger than we are aware of, than we are able to encompass, that we will ever grasp. And if that’s the case, if life is partly about getting a bigger and bigger view of the world and of life and of God, then anything that niggles us into a bigger view has got to be good, so we need to attend to that.

The dangers of getting trapped in ones old way of seeing are huge. And actually the awkward annoying things that we don’t want to believe, that we don’t want to accept, are our friends because they will crack open an unsatisfactory inadequate view of life and give us a slightly less inadequate one.

Commentary written by the BioLogos editorial team.