The first approach naturalists took to dealing with the great variety of animals was to sort them into groups, such as vertebrates (including fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals) and arthropods (insects, crustaceans, arachnids, and more), but between and within these groups there are many differences. What makes a fish different from a salamander? Or an insect from a spider? On a finer scale, clearly a leopard is a cat, but what makes it different from a domestic tabby? And closer to home, what makes us different from our chimpanzee cousins?

The key to answering such questions is to realize that every animal form is the product of two processes--development from an egg and evolution from its ancestors. To understand the origins of the multitude of animal forms, we must understand these two processes and their intimate relationship to each other. Simply put, development is the process that transforms an egg into a growing embryo and eventually an adult form. The evolution of form occurs through changes in development.

Both processes are breathtaking. Consider that the development of an entire complex creature begins with a single cell--the fertilized egg. In a matter of just a day (a fly maggot), a few weeks (a mouse), or several months (ourselves), an egg grows into millions, billions, or, in the case of humans, perhaps 10 trillion cells formed into organs, tissues, and parts of the body. There are few, if any, phenomena in nature that inspire our wonder and awe as much as the transformation from egg to embryo to the complete animal. One of the great figures in all of biology, Darwin's close ally Thomas H. Huxley, remarked:

The student of Nature wonders the more and is astonished the less, the more conversant he becomes with her operations; but of all the perennial miracles she offers to his inspection, perhaps the most worthy of admiration is the development of a plant or of an animal from its embryo. -- Aphorisms and Reflections (1907)

The intimate connection between development and evolution has long been appreciated in biology. Both Darwin, in The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871), and Huxley in his short masterpiece, Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863), leaned heavily on the facts of embryology (as they were in the mid-nineteenth century) to connect man to the animal kingdom and for indisputable evidence of evolution. Darwin asked his reader to consider how slight changes, introduced at different points in the process and in different parts of the body, over the course of many thousands or a million generations, spanning perhaps tens of thousands to a few million years, can produce different forms that are adapted to different circumstances and that possess unique capabilities. That is evolution in a nutshell.

For Huxley, the nub of the argument was simple: we may marvel at the process of an egg becoming an adult, but we accept it as an everyday fact. It is merely then a lack of imagination to fail to grasp how changes in this process that are assimilated over long periods of time, far longer than the span of human experience, shape life's diversity. Evolution is as natural as development. [SNIP]

While Darwin and Huxley were right about development as key to evolution, for more than one hundred years after their chief works, virtually no progress was made in understanding the mysteries of development. The puzzle of how a simple egg gives rise to a complete individual stood as one of the most elusive questions in all of biology. Many thought that development was hopelessly complex and would involve entirely different explanations for different types of animals. So frustrating was the enterprise that the study of embryology, heredity, and evolution, once intertwined at the core of biological thought a century ago, fractured into separate fields as each sought to define its own principles.

Because embryology was stalled for so long, it played no part in the so-called Modern Synthesis of evolutionary thought that emerged in the 1930s and 1940s. In the decades after Darwin, biologists struggled to understand the mechanisms of evolution. At the time of The Origin of Species, the mechanism for the inheritance of traits was not known. Gregor Mendel's work was rediscovered decades later and genetics did not prosper until well into the 1900s. Different kinds of biologists were approaching evolution at dramatically different scales. Paleontology focused on the largest time scales, the fossil record, and the evolution of higher taxa. Systematists were concerned with the nature of species and the process of speciation. Geneticists generally studied variation in traits in just a few species. These disciplines were disconnected and sometimes hostile over which offered the most worthwhile insights into evolutionary biology. Harmony was gradually approached through an integration of evolutionary viewpoints at different levels. Julian Huxley's book Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942) signaled this union and the general acceptance of two main ideas. First, that gradual evolution can be explained by small genetic changes that produce variation which is acted upon by natural selection. Second, that evolution at higher taxonomic levels and of greater magnitude can be explained by these same gradual evolutionary processes sustained over longer periods.

The Modern Synthesis established much of the foundation for how evolutionary biology has been discussed and taught for the past sixty years. However, despite the monikers of "Modern" and "Synthesis," it was incomplete. At the time of its formulation and until recently, we could say that forms do change, and that natural selection is a force, but we could say nothing about how forms change, about the visible drama of evolution as depicted, for example, in the fossil record. The Synthesis treated embryology as a "black box" that somehow transformed genetic information into three-dimensional, functional animals.

The stalemate continued for several decades. Embryology was preoccupied with phenomena that could be studied by manipulating the eggs and embryos of a few species, and the evolutionary framework faded from embryology's view. Evolutionary biology was studying genetic variation in populations, ignorant of the relationship between genes and form. Perhaps even worse, the perception of evolutionary biology in some circles was that it had become relegated to dusty museums.

Such was the setting in the 1970s when voices for the reunion of embryology and evolutionary biology made themselves heard. Most notable was that of Stephen Jay Gould, whose book Ontogeny and Phylogeny revived discussion of the ways in which the modification of development may influence evolution. Gould had also stirred up evolutionary biology when, with Niles Eldredge, he took a fresh look at the patterns of the fossil record and forwarded the idea of punctuated equilibria--that evolution was marked by long periods of stasis (equilibria) interrupted by brief intervals of rapid change (punctuation). Gould's book and his many subsequent writings reexamined the "big picture" in evolutionary biology and underscored the major questions that remained unsolved. He planted seeds in more than a few impressionable young scientists, myself included.

To me, and others who had been weaned on the emerging successes of molecular biology in explaining how genes work, the situations in embryology and in evolutionary biology were both unsatisfying, but they presented enormous potential opportunities. Our lack of embryological knowledge seemed to turn much of the discussion in evolutionary biology about the evolution of form into futile exercises in speculation. How could we make progress on questions involving the evolution of form without a scientific understanding of how form is generated in the first place? Population genetics had succeeded in establishing the principle that evolution is due to changes in genes, but this was a principle without an example. No gene that affected the form and evolution of any animal had been characterized. New insights in evolution would require breakthroughs in embryology.

Today’s blog was an excerpt taken from the Introduction of Endless Forms Most Beautiful, (c. 2006), which was a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Academy of Sciences Communication Award, as well as being a Discover magazine and USA Today “Top Science Books of the Year.” Learn more here.

In tomorrow’s blog, we move to the concluding chapter, where Sean Carroll summarizes some of the most exciting lessons learned from research in Evo Devo.

Editorial Policy: The editing for these excerpts involves removing the odd sentence or two—indicated by putting [SNIP] at the appropriate point(s)—and sometimes inserting annotations where warranted [also enclosed in square brackets] to provide background information.

So, I’ve decided to try a slightly different approach for the next while—one that has these sorts of folks in mind. From time to time, you can still expect those more in-depth, technical articles, or perhaps a discussion of some new research that makes the popular press, or even an analysis of some new argument from the IDM or RTB. These will be breaks from the new routine, however. For the most part, we’re going to stick to the basics, much like you would if you took an introductory evolution course at a university. Don’t worry, though: this course doesn’t have any prerequisites! All that’s needed is a willingness to learn.

What you can expect

The goal of this course is straightforward: to provide evangelical Christians with a step-by-step introduction to the science of evolutionary biology.  This will provide benefits beyond just the joy of learning more about God’s wonderful creation. An understanding of the basic science of evolution is of great benefit for reflecting on its theological implications, since this reflection can then be done from a scientifically-informed perspective. From time to time we might comment briefly on some issues of theological interest (and suggest resources for those looking to explore those issues further), but for the most part, we’re going to focus on the science. For folks interested in the interaction between science and Christianity, I heartily recommend Ted Davis’ recent series as a fabulous introduction to the topic.

You can also expect a slow, patient pace. Since this course is intended for folks with little or no background in biology, we’re going to take our time to make sure no one gets left behind. This might be frustrating to folks who already know a fair bit about evolution. Hopefully even more knowledgeable readers will learn some new and interesting details along the way—but the goal will primarily be to help folks who are less well versed in evolution increase their understanding.

You can also expect a survey of many different areas that have some bearing on evolution. We’ll examine geology, paleontology, biogeography, genetics, and a host of other topics in order to provide a “big picture” overview. This broad-brush approach means that any given individual post will not necessarily be “convincing” to folks who have doubts about evolution. Think about assembling a large jigsaw puzzle: placing any individual piece, on its own, doesn’t convincingly demonstrate what the overall picture will show. This course will be like that. Each topic we cover will put a few pieces in place here and there, slowly building towards the final overall picture.

Since evolution is an active science, this process will also highlight where there are “missing pieces” that are still being sought by scientists. All of this is well and good, since the purpose of this course is not so much to convince anyone of the validity of evolutionary theory, but rather to inform readers about the nature and scope of evolution as a scientific theory in the present day. My goal is to provide readers with a basic understanding of what evolution is and how it works. Given that as the primary goal, if one finds the scope of the evidence ultimately convincing (or not) is somewhat beside the point. The intent here is to provide readers with information they can use to make their own, informed decision.

How you can help

First and foremost, you can help by spreading the word about this series to folks you think would be interested in learning more about evolution in a non-threatening environment. Secondly, you can help me by asking questions in the comments. One of the challenges of being a specialist is having the ability to put oneself in the shoes of someone just starting out. What might seem obvious to me may not seem obvious to you, and I hope you’ll feel that no question is too basic or too simplistic. If you’re wondering about something, it’s almost guaranteed that other folks are, too! So, please don’t be shy. I’ll do my best to answer questions in the comments, though I hope that some of our more skilled commenters will (respectfully!) help out here, as well. Finally, you can help by letting me know what broader areas of evolution you find confusing. I have my own ideas about what areas of evolution are commonly misunderstood, but I’d love to hear from readers about what areas they find difficult to understand. I’ll use this input to shape the topics I will cover as we go forward.

Getting started

In the next post in this course, we’ll dive into the course content by introducing two key areas: how scientific theories work in general, and how evolution in particular works as the current organizing theory of modern biology. 

Despite having been raised since birth in the Church of the Nazarene, I never encountered the ideas of Young Earth Creationism until I was almost 17. That's not to say that my church teachers accepted evolution, but none of them seemed to have a problem with the age of the earth. Much has changed in our church during the last 40 years.

I first encountered Creationist thought during high school in 1974 when I read the book Scientific Creationism² by Henry Morris, the acknowledged father of the modern Creationist movement. This book explained how the earth was created about 6,000 years ago during six 24-hour days, how all of the fossil-bearing rock layers were deposited during Noah's Flood, how biological evolution was impossible, how scientists had conspired to make up theories that denied the evidence of Creation, and how true science confirmed a literal reading of the book of Genesis. Each chapter addressed an issue as a simple choice with only two answers (e.g., Evolution or Creation?, Accident or Plan?, Old or Young?, Apes or Men?), and those choices were summarized in the conclusion with the following statement:

"There seems to be no possible way to avoid the conclusion that, if the Bible and Christianity are true at all, the geological ages must be rejected altogether."³

With a high-school level understanding of science and theology, I was convinced by this "either-or" argument and, to my knowledge, became the first Young Earth Creationist in my local Nazarene church. I knew the enemy and the enemy had a name. It was Evolution.⁴

After high school, I enrolled at Olivet Nazarene University. Initially, I had no goal in mind other than possibly studying science. I was placed in the Chemistry program and spent the first year getting required courses out of the way. One of those required courses was Old Testament Bible, during which I frequently argued with the professor whenever ideas were presented that didn't support a literal reading of Genesis or a Creation event only 6,000 years ago. By the end of my freshman year, I felt led to change my major to a combined Geology-Chemistry degree. I had always loved collecting minerals, rocks, and fossils and dreamed of a career where I could travel to remote mountains and wild places. But geology also presented another challenge. I had heard that the geology professor didn't necessarily believe the earth was young.

I remember going to that first Geology class armed with every available Creation Science argument, ready to do battle for the faith. Yet despite my preparation, it was for naught. I found myself walking the same path as the earliest geologists, who, starting from a perspective of a Biblical Creation about 6,000-years in the past, saw evidence in the rocks for so many different events and environments, which convinced them the earth was much older than a few thousand years. I saw how rock layers could be grouped into larger "geologic ages" based on their depositional environment and fossil content with boundaries defined by major environmental changes or an extinction event. I was shocked to discover that these geologic ages had been identified and named, not by God-denying Evolutionists, but mostly by Christians and even ministers who saw their work as glorifying to God. Not only were the geologic ages real and the earth older than 6,000 years but the fossils within them told a story of change: starting in the oldest rocks with strange creatures unlike anything seen today, followed in order by the earliest appearances of fish, amphibians, reptiles, mammal-like reptiles, dinosaurs, birds, and placental mammals and with the youngest rocks containing fossils of extinct animals that closely resemble those extant. Thus, the rocks even supported one of the lines of evidence used by Charles Darwin in his argument for descent by modification (now called evolution).

Although I was fascinated by geology and had found a scientific field that I loved, my faith was in shambles. Based on what I had believed and read in the Young Earth Creationist literature, if the geologic ages were real, if the earth was old, if evolution had happened then the Bible was false, Christianity wasn't true, and Christ's death on the cross was meaningless. So what was left? I felt betrayed and seriously considered leaving the church. In retrospect, two factors kept me from leaving: (1) the support of a strong Christian family (and a young lady soon to be my wife) that gave me the freedom to question without condemnation; and (2) the strong witness of my Olivet geology professor, who had not only faced all of the same scientific evidence but was one of the most Christ-like men I had ever met. But before I could move on, I had to recognize that I had been snared by a false dilemma and that the Bible didn't need to be read as a scientific treatise on how to create a world. That was a time of turmoil and what I needed most was theological support that would allow me to reconcile what I read in the Bible with what I saw in the rocks.

Yet, in another way, I was fortunate. I had only lived with this false dilemma for three years before having to deal with scientific evidence that shook my faith. Unlike my own youth, today many young people in our churches have been inculcated since birth with these either-or statements through Sunday School, VBS, homeschool textbooks, and church-sponsored schools. How much harder is it for these students to study sciences like geology, astronomy, anthropology, paleontology, or biology and still preserve a faith that has been supported by a false dilemma? I have seen students break down into tears as they stood on an outcrop of rock and saw evidence that contradicted what their church had taught them. I have comforted my own daughter when she was told by a Sunday School teacher that she couldn't be a Christian if she accepted evidence for evolution. I have talked with scientists who were once raised in a church and are now bitter agnostics because the church "lied to them" about science.

My hope in these discussions is not that we all come to the same scientific or theological understanding of evolution or age-of-the-earth issues but that we can move away from the false dilemmas forced by an exclusive and rigid mode of Biblical interpretation. God is too great and majestic to be confined in man's theology. We have to allow Him to inspire and even surprise us from all of his Creation and not just from the Bible.

Notes

1. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/False_dilemma
2. Henry M. Morris, Scientific Creationism (General Edition) (San Diego, CA: Creation-Life Publishers, 1974).
3. Morris, p. 255
4. For many Christians today, the term evolution doesn't just refer to the concepts of common ancestry, descent with modification, or natural selection; it has been expanded to include issues with the age of the earth, geology, cosmology, nuclear physics, paleoanthropology, and a host of other scientific ideas that are perceived to be in opposition to Young Earth Creationism. As one wag put it, "Evolution is all the science I don't believe in."

These are tough questions, and Arends provides some helpful insight on how she’s handled them with her own kids.

The commercials will hopefully be airing on television in the near future, but we wanted to give our blog readers a sneak peak! They’re a great introduction to our work here at BioLogos, and we encourage you to share them through email, Facebook, Twitter, blogs, Tumblr, Pinterest, or any other website you can think of!

“Mightily Hands On”, featuring Jeff Schloss and Alister McGrath (0:30)

“Beethoven Symphony”, featuring NT Wright (2:30)

Belief in God in an Age of Science

Introducing John Polkinghorne

An Englishman of Cornish descent, John Polkinghorne was born in 1930 in the coastal town of Weston-super-Mare, southwest of Bristol in North Somerset. Although his parents had three children, an older sister died in infancy and his older brother, who served in the RAF Coastal Command during World War II, died when his plane was lost over the North Atlantic on a stormy night in 1942. Effectively an only child from that point on, his family nurtured him in their Christian faith, leading him to say a few years ago, “I cannot recall a time when I was not in some real way a member of the worshipping and believing community of the Church.”  (From Physicist to Priest, p. 7)

At the same time, his gift for mathematics did not go unnoticed, resulting in several years of study at Trinity College, Cambridge (where Isaac Newton had lived and worked in the seventeenth century). As an undergraduate, Polkinghorne studied applied math rather than pure math, a typical choice for someone interested in physics. There, he formed a close friendship with a classmate, Michael Atiyah, who would be best man at his marriage in 1955 to another mathematics student, the late Ruth (Martin) Polkinghorne. Later knighted, Sir Michael was President of the Royal Society in the early 1990s, the same period when Polkinghorne was president of Queen’s College, Cambridge.

​Sir Michael Atiyah (Source)

Polkinghorne was particularly inspired by the course in quantum physics taught by Paul Dirac, whom he has described as “undoubtedly the greatest British theoretical physicist of the twentieth century,” an opinion with which it is hard to disagree. For Polkinghorne, Dirac’s lectures were simply unforgettable: “so profound was the material, and so closely structured was the argument, that one was carried along enthralled by the experience.” (From Physicist to Priest, p. 26)

Paul Dirac (Source)

Remaining at Cambridge for graduate study, Polkinghorne worked under the Pakistani physicist, Abdus Salam, who later became the first Islamic scientist to win the Nobel Prize, which he shared with Americans Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg for contributions to unifying the electromagnetic force and the weak nuclear force. Then he did postdoctoral work at Caltech with Murray Gell-Mann, another future Nobel laureate for his work on quark theory, and attended the famous lectures by yet another future Nobel laureate, the late Richard Feynman.

After Caltech, Polkinghorne taught briefly at Edinburgh before returning to Cambridge, where he was soon elected to a new professorship in mathematical physics. Quantum mechanics (QM) is his specialty; his writings on both QM and its interaction with theological ideas are numerous. His book, The Quantum World, has sold more than 100,000 copies, and when Oxford University Press wanted a book on this topic for their highly successful series, “A Very Short Introduction,” it was Polkinghorne who wrote it. His former students include Nobel laureate Brian Josephson, “the most precociously brilliant undergraduate that I ever taught,” and Martin Rees, who was until recently President of the Royal Society.

Although Polkinghorne has never won a Nobel Prize, in 1974 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, the highest honor in British science. Three years later, at the top of his scientific career at age 46, he astonished his colleagues by announcing a decision to pursue ordination as an Anglican priest; two years later, he resigned his chair at Cambridge to enter seminary. Partly, he felt played out. As a former physics student myself, I do not find his diagnosis hard to accept: “In mathematically based subjects you do not get better as you get older. Somehow one needs mental agility more than accumulated experience, and it becomes progressively harder for an old dog to learn new tricks. It is unlikely that most people do their best work before they are 25, but most do before they are 45.” Or, to put it more succinctly, “I simply felt that I had done my little bit for particle theory and the time had come to do something else.” (From Physicist to Priest, p. 71)

Nevertheless, he also felt a genuine call to the ministry, for “Christianity has always been central to my life” and ‘becoming a minister of word and sacrament would be a privileged vocation that held out the possibility of deep satisfaction.” (From Physicist to Priest, p. 73) After seminary, Polkinghorne served as a parish priest for many years and later as canon theologian of Liverpool Cathedral. He was knighted in 1997—although, as an ordained minister, he declines to use the title, “Sir John Polkinghorne”—and was awarded the Templeton Prize in 2002. It has been altogether a life well lived for the kingdom of God.

Looking Ahead

I’ll return in about two weeks with a summary of Polkinghorne’s basic attitudes toward science and religion, which (in his view) have a “cousinly” relationship. In the meantime, readers are invited to read Zeeya Merali’s essay, “The Priest-Physicist Who Would Marry Science to Religion,” from the March 2011 issue of Discover magazine, and “An interview with John Polkinghorne,” by philosopher Paul Fitzgerald.

References

John Polkinghorne, From Physicist to Priest: An Autobiography (2008).

To illustrate why the debate about origins isn’t simply a matter of science versus religion, imagine living in a culture where there is a similar debate about the weather. The Bible clearly teaches that God governs the weather. Many Bible passages proclaim that God causes rain and drought (see Deut. 11:14-17; 1 Kings 8:35-36; Job 5:10; 37:6; Jer. 14:22). Writers of Deuteronomy, the Psalms, and Jeremiah refer specifically to storehouses of rain and snow (see Deut. 28:12, 24; Ps. 135:7; Jer. 10:13).

What causes the rain? Most of us were taught that water evaporates from the ground level, rises to where the air is cooler, and condenses into water droplets that form clouds. We learned how cold fronts and warm fronts and low pressure systems bring rain. When we watch meteorologists on television, we hear that scientists now use sophisticated computer models to help them understand and predict the weather a few days in advance. Their ability to understand meteorology is especially important for farmers, airline pilots, military personnel, and coastal residents. Every year scientists develop increasingly accurate computer models of the weather.

Now imagine that debates arise about what should be taught in schools about the weather. Imagine that prominent scientists write popular books about meteorology that state, “From our scientific understanding of the causes of wind and rain, it is clear that no divine being controls the weather.” Imagine that a professional organization of science teachers writes a set of guidelines that state, “Students must learn that all weather phenomena follow from natural causes; weather is unguided and no divine action is involved.” Meanwhile, other people insist that these scientific explanations of rain and wind must be wrong because the Bible clearly teaches that God governs the weather. These people write books and give public speeches saying, “Atheists have invented their godless theories about evaporation and condensation. But we can prove that their so-called scientific theories are false and that the Bible is true.” They go to churches and teach, “If you believe what these scientists are saying about the causes of wind and rain, then you’ve abandoned belief in the Bible.” They petition school boards and courts to require that science classrooms also teach their “storehouses” theory of the weather as an alternate explanation to evaporation and condensation.

If you lived in a world with that sort of debate going on, would you be content to see it simply as a conflict between science and religion? Would you be willing to agree wholly with one side or the other?

Fortunately, we don’t have such debates about what causes the weather. The majority of Christians say that when it comes to the weather, both science and the Bible are correct. God governs the weather, usually through the scientifically understandable processes of evaporation and condensation. And the majority of atheists today would also agree that having a scientific explanation for the weather, by itself, neither proves nor disproves the existence of God. So there are no court battles about what science classrooms should teach about the weather. Debates about creation, evolution, and design have some similarities to the above example, but in many ways they are more difficult. The questions about how to interpret Scripture are more challenging, and these debates raise more theological issues. Still, a good place to start in making sense of these debates is to remember that more than two options exist; it is not simply a choice of science or faith.  

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Christians in Agreement

When Christians discuss creation, evolution, and design, it is easy to focus immediately on areas of controversy and disagreement. We think it is important to start by pointing out certain areas on which nearly all Christians agree. Christians generally agree about the fundamentals of God, God’s Word, and God’s world in the five areas.

God created, sustains, and governs this universe.

This truth is confirmed in the first line of the Apostles’ Creed, one of the ecumenical creeds of the church which many Christians recite every week: “I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth.” Christians believe that God created all things from nothing, bringing them into being through his Word, his Son (John 1:1-3). God continually sustains the whole universe, governing all creatures according to his providential care.

The God who created this world also reveals himself to humanity.

God has revealed himself at various times and in multiple ways throughout history, including the written Scriptures and the Incarnation. As it says in the first verses of the book of Hebrews,

In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom also he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven. (Hebrews 1:1-3, NIV)

The God who created this world is also our Redeemer.

We belong to God because he created us, but when humanity turned from God he bought us back. He redeemed us through the incarnation, life, suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

The Bible is authoritative and sufficient for salvation.

God inspired its human authors and ensured that the Bible truthfully teaches what he intends. The Holy Spirit testifies in our hearts that the Bible’s message is from God, not merely human writing. Christians accept the sufficiency of the Bible for establishing our core beliefs and practices; all that we need to know for salvation is taught there. God certainly can use various means— including the natural world—to teach us new things. But these new things should be compatible with, not contradictory to, what God teaches in Scripture.

God is sovereign over all realms of human endeavor and has given human beings special abilities and responsibilities. Theologian Cornelius Plantinga puts it this way:

God’s creation extends beyond the biophysical sphere to include the vast array of cultural possibilities that God folded into human nature. . . . God’s good creation includes not only earth and its creatures, but also an array of cultural gifts, such as marriage, family, art, language, commerce, and (even in an ideal world) government. The fall into sin has corrupted these gifts but hasn’t unlicensed them. The same goes for the cultural initiatives we discover in Genesis 4, that is, urban development, tent-making, musicianship, and metal-working. All of these unfold the built-in potential of God’s creation. All reflect the ingenuity of God’s human creatures—itself a superb example of likeness to God. —Cornelius Plantinga, Engaging God’s World, 2002.

Applying this idea to the natural sciences, we conclude that God has graciously given humans the ability and responsibility to study the natural world systematically. As with all human endeavors, we do it imperfectly. We must seek to do it as God’s imagebearers, in gratitude for God’s gifts.

Christians in Disagreement

Christians have always agreed about who created everything, but in the last few decades they have often disagreed about how God created everything. These disagreements are over two basic questions:

• As we study God’s Word, what is the best way to understand passages that talk about God’s acts of creation?
• As we study God’s world, what can we reliably conclude that it tells us about its history?

Some Christians describe themselves as young-earth creationists. They believe that the best interpretation of the book of Genesis is that the earth is only a few thousand years old and was shaped by a global flood. Young-earth creationists hold a range of views about how to interpret Scripture, the extent to which scientific data indicates a young universe, and the extent to which it indicates at least an appearance of long history.

Other Christians describe themselves as old-earth creationists. Some believe that in the best interpretation of Genesis 1, the events on each day actually describe several long epochs of scientific history. Others believe that the best interpretation of the book of Genesis does not imply anything about the age of the earth one way or the other and that drawing conclusions about the age of the earth from Scripture is reading into it something it was never intended to teach.

Some old-earth creationists describe themselves as evolutionary creationists. They believe that the best understanding of the scientific data—in conjunction with the best interpretation of Scripture—implies that God governed and used evolutionary processes in the unfolding of creation. Other old-earth creationists describe themselves as progressive creationists. They believe that science and Scripture both indicate that God used not only natural processes but also some miracles along the way, particularly in the history of life. Arguments for Intelligent Design are usually, though not always, used to support versions of progressive creation.

In the remainder of the book Origins, the Haarsmas expand on these topics, investigating different Christian positions in detail.  Stay tuned for more excerpts in future posts.  Next week, we’ll feature an excerpt on the reliability of historical science.

Excerpt frompages 13-14 and 24-28 of Origins:Christian Perspectives on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design (Grand Rapids, MI: Faith Alive Christian Resources), 2011. Reprinted with permission.  To purchase a copy of the book, call1-800-333-8300 or visit www.faithaliveresources.org.

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Transitional Fossils

Some time ago, the Discovery Institute’s Casey Luskin commented on the human origins exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution, suggesting that palaeoanthropologists use evolutionary theory to describe the progression of the human lineage even when they don’t have transitional fossils with which to work. He writes:

What's ironic, however, is that if you ask the question How Do We Know Humans Evolved? the answer you’re given is, “Fossils like the ones shown in our Human Fossils Gallery provide evidence that modern humans evolved from earlier humans.” So whether you find fossils or you don’t, that’s evidence for evolution.

Indeed, it has become an article of faith for those espousing both the young earth creation (hereafter YEC) model and many who hold to the intelligent design model that transitional fossils do not exist and therefore evolution has not taken place. Support for this position usually entails attacking the weak areas of the fossil record, where burial processes have left us little with which to work, or the creation of straw men arguments in which transitional fossils are defined in such a way that none could ever be found. Often this centers on the concept of “missing link,” a term that is habitually used in the popular press and young earth creation and intelligent design literature when referring to fossil remains but which has little to no meaning for biologists or palaeontologists. As Ahlberg and Clack (Ahlberg and Clack 2006) write:

But the concept has become freighted with unfounded notions of evolutionary ‘progress’ and with a mistaken emphasis on the single intermediate fossil as the key to understanding evolutionary transitions. Much of the importance of transitional fossils actually lies in how they resemble and differ from their nearest neighbours in the phylogenetic tree, and in the picture of change that emerges from this pattern.

Contrary to common misconceptions, the fossil record does not record one single lineage for any family of organisms but rather a series of branches, with many related species coexisting synchronously. Darwin hypothesized that the evolutionary record reflected this bushiness and drew such a diagram in his journal. At the time, though, he had little in the way of fossil evidence to back up this position. Much has changed since his day.

An analogy for understanding this “bushiness” was best described by Prothero and Buell (Prothero and Buell 2007). They suggest that the reader consider his or her own genealogy. You and your siblings are the direct descendents of your parents and, while you are similar to them, each of you has different characteristics not shared with them as well as characteristics that you do share. Your parents have siblings as well (your aunts and uncles), and your grandparents are their last common ancestors. These siblings have their own children (your cousins), who have different and similar traits relative to their parents. They are broadly recognizable as being related to you (“oh, I see you have Aunt Edna’s nose”) but three or four generations out, they will become less and less so. These are the “nearest neighbours” that Ahlberg and Clack describe. In this analogy, each of these cousins represents a transitional form from what was (your grandparents) to what will be down the road.

For example, no one would confuse a frog with a salamander but if you trace the fossil record of each back in time, eventually you encounter a fossil, Gerobatrachus hottoni which was recently discovered (Anderson et al. 2008) that is best described as a “frogamander,” having the basal characteristics of both frogs and salamanders. Had we seen such an animal at the time, it is likely we would not have found it remarkable because it would have resembled the species around it. One lineage eventually diverged into frogs, salamanders and other amphibians. Most (just like Darwin proposed in his tree diagram with the little hatch marks at the tip of many branches) went extinct.

Taxonomy and the Beginnings of Human Origins

All life is classified based on a system devised by Carolus Linneaus in 1735 in his remarkable work Systema Naturae. This system gives all recognized species an individual place based on a system of hierarchy. The study of classification is known as taxonomy. A taxonomic ranking for humans would be this:

When a fossil is excavated, the first thing that the palaeontologist does is make a taxonomic assessment of where it fits in a sequence of known fossils. Traits that are shared with other like species or genera are referred to as primitive traits. Examples of this in humans are five fingers and the presence of three arm bones. We share this with all mammals. Traits that are new or are not shared with other like species are referred to as derived traits. Examples of this in humans are the skeletal changes in the pelvis and the foot to allow for walking upright. We do not share these with any other primates.

Transitional fossils in the human fossil record are distinguished at both the genus and species level. This group includes the extinct genera Ardipithecus and Australopithecus and the current genus Homo. All species except Homo sapiens are extinct. Much of the recent study of early humans focuses on the transition from Ardipithecus (‘Ardi’) to Australopithecus (‘Lucy’ and similar fossils) and from Australopithecus to Homo, the genus that led eventually to us. While each of the australopithecine species identified in the fossil record has derived characteristics that separate them from their ancestors and from each other, only one led to the genus Homo.

In future posts, I will describe the evidence for human evolution and why this evidence is compelling. It suggests that we have had a long, varied history filled with great leaps of change, crushing defeat, and eventual expansion into all areas of the globe.

Notes

Ahlberg, P. & J. Clack (2006) A firm step from water to land. Nature, 440.

Anderson, J. S., R. R. Reisz, D. Scott, N. B. Frobisch & S. S. Sumida (2008) A stem batrachian from the Early Permian of Texas and the origin of frogs and salamanders. Nature, 453, 515-518.

Prothero, D. & C. Buell. 2007. Evolution: What the fossils say and why it matters. Columbia Univ Pr.

Many things we have learned contradicts much of what we previously thought about the mind.  For example, it is quite common and sensible to believe that we come into the world with minds that are essentially “blank slates,” and that what we know is written on those slates by experience alone.  But that view appears to be wrong.

The human mind consists of a variety of distinct and interacting mental tools, each of which comes pre-loaded with some quite specific content and some processing algorithms.  For example, it is now clearly demonstrated that human beings are naturally endowed with what we might reasonably describe as innate beliefs and innate cognitive processors.

On the belief side, developmental psychologists have identified numerous domains of understanding that are native to us, such as folk physics, folk biology, folk psychology, agency detection tendencies, and so on. What these discoveries seem to show is that our minds are pre-disposed to come to think about the world in very specific ways—ways that are determined by the kinds of minds we have.

So it looks like from birth, or rather through a regular and maturationally natural process, we have dispositions for form beliefs in the following domains.

“Folks Physics”:

• Objects move on inertial paths
• Objects cannot move through other objects
• Objects must move through space
• Objects must be supported

“Folk Psychology”:

• Agents act to satisfy desires
• Agents have beliefs

“Folk Biology”:

• Animals bear young similar to themselves
• Living things need nutrients

In addition to these innate dispositions toward certain kinds of beliefs, we also seem to have cognitive mechanisms that dispose us to crunch sensory inputs in specific ways. We might call these “innate cognitive processors.” Examples of these would include things like contagion avoidance and agency detection.

Contagion avoidance is a natural aversion human beings share to things like dead bodies, animal waste and vomit, rotting food, etc. These things “gross us out” from a very early age.  Indeed, the aversions we have towards them pre-date any data we might come to possess that would lead us to judge them dangerous.  We are also repelled by them in ways that are independent of other aversive stimuli like smell (that is, you can’t explain this aversion by noting that people are scared off because of an unpleasant odor since studies show that the aversions are independent of that).

A second processor is our Agency Detection Device. Here, psychologists have identified a cognitive processor that seems to pre-dispose us to form beliefs in the reality and presence of (sometimes invisible!) agents under certain conditions. In these cases, when we look for the cause of certain events, motions, sounds, or structures, we are disposed to think that it was caused by a someone rather than by a something. Our ADD appears to be hypersensitive.  It is very good at detecting agency, and in fact is more likely to generate false positives than false negatives.  This is often referred to as our hypersensitive agency detection device (HADD), and may be reflected in manifold attributions of ghosts, fairies, forest spirits, and even personalities of machines!

In sum, psychologists have shown that our initial presumption about the contents of our mind was wrong. Our minds are not blank slates, but processing devices that come endowed with a complex operating system.

Many are quick to point out that this should not be surprising.  When we look across times and cultures and find very similar beliefs concerning the nature of physical, biological, and psychological reality, those similarities cry out for some explanation. Since these diverse individuals have a very wide range of experience, something other than, or in addition to, common experience would seem to account for the similarities of belief. And so it is natural to conclude that there is some fundamental similarity among human minds that explains it. And recent empirical evidence has in fact confirmed this conclusion.

One type of belief that is pervasive across times and cultures is religious belief.  One is thus led to wonder whether those sorts of beliefs are among those that we are naturally disposed to believe.  One New Zealand religion scholar, Joseph Bulbulia, argues that the emerging consensus is yes: “The view of mind expressed by Descartes as composed of innate understandings given in advance of any experience has been thoroughly vindicated after sixty years of cognitive psychology. It may be that Descartes will be shown correct on another score, namely that knowledge of the Divinity is imprinted on every mind [as well]”

Bulbulia’s remark invites us to entertain three key questions:

• Is there any evidence that we are naturally disposed to religion?
• How do we explain the origin of these dispositions?
• What are the implications of such explanations for belief itself?

These will be explored in the next post.

More Than One Christian View

Many parents and pastors are wondering what to tell their children about creation and evolution. While Sunday school classes often cover Genesis 1 around kindergarten (with kids coloring pictures of what God created on each day), most curricula do not address science again before kids leave for college. Yet issues of creation and evolution can be addressed in age-appropriate ways throughout Sunday school. Elementary school children already learn about idol worship from other Old Testament stories, so teachers have an opportunity to contrast Genesis 1 with the idol-rich creation stories of other cultures. Middle school students can be given basic tools for considering creation and evolution such as the contrast between the “how” questions answered by their science lessons in school and the “who” and “why” questions answered in Scripture. Middle and high school students can find role models by reading the testimonies of scientist Christians.

Youth need to be encouraged to discuss their questions and doubts, while affirming core beliefs. When asked why they left the faith, scientists often mention that the church was not open to their questions and told them to “just believe.” Churches can demonstrate openness to questions by teaching youth about multiple Christian views on an issue. Students need to hear that some Christians accept the science of evolution and others do not, and have a conversation about the reasons why. Too many young people have struggled when they felt they had to choose between clear scientific evidence and the beliefs they grew up with. Even when parents and leaders are unsure about evolution, they can help students by saying, “While I have concerns about evolution, I’ve heard that some Christians accept the science of evolution while still believing in the God of the Bible.”

Difficult issues like origins cannot be addressed in a single event. People need time to ponder the issues, and spaces to talk it through. One church did a six-week sermon series, with parallel curricula for all ages in Sunday school, so that families could work through it together. Another church did a sermon series and discussion group for adults for four weeks, to prepare parents before a four-week series for the youth group. Other churches encourage small groups to read a book on science and faith and discuss a chapter a week. (Since all authors have their favorite view, I recommend discussing at least two books from different authors to learn about multiple Christian positions.)

More Than Evolution

In our science-saturated culture, evolution is not the only science topic the church should be considering, and not even the most important. With church members encountering the latest medical advances as patients and family members, a discussion on bioethics would be very relevant. Since young people are usually the first to use hot new gadgets, they should be considering the appropriate Christian use of technology . As the issue of climate change becomes more pressing every year, churches need to talk about it, and not avoid it because it is so political. The Evangelical Environmental Network offers many resources for churches, emphasizing ways that creation care benefits the poor and the unborn. One group of churches, with the help of Calvin College, joined together to clean up the local creek that drains the watershed in which the parishioners live, work, and worship. Many of the congregants were not even aware of the size of the watershed or the pollution level in their own creek. This was a hands-on opportunity for all ages, directly caring for their own corner of God’s green Earth.

More Than Controversy

With so many issues to discuss, Christians can easily get the feeling that science is always attacking the faith. It is essential to balance such conversations with positive responses to God’s creation. After all, the primary response to the natural world in the Bible is to praise the God who made it. The first time I led an adult Sunday school class on creation and evolution, I was amazed how much the participants appreciated simply ending each session with a Psalm reading or creation hymn. Thoughtful frowns turned into relaxed smiles as the group remembered our unity in Christ and the centrality of God as the Creator.

Creation themes can be incorporated throughout worship. One church asked the congregation to submit their favorite creation photos at the end of the summer (from backyard flowers to National Parks), then wove the images into a worship service with creation songs and readings from the Psalms. In addition to flowers and mountains, modern science has revealed incredible glories that can inspire our praise and reflection. Several contemporary Christian musicians have begun to artfully incorporate the wonders of the natural world into their music; Chris Rice sings of “cratered moon and Saturn’s rings,” and Third Day praises the “God of wonders beyond our galaxy.” In one church, an elder brought in modern science when leading the congregation in prayer with these words: “Creator God, out of nothing you created all that is. You hurled the galaxies through time and space. . . . The universe is your hourglass, the continental drift your minute hand, the Grand Canyon your second hand. You are infinite.”

Preachers can incorporate science in the same way they make references to movies, current events, or best-selling books in sermons. To notice these connections, take some time to encounter science: read the science section of the New York Times, visit a local science museum, or ask scientists in the congregation about their work. A visit to a planetarium might give a new appreciation for the vastness of the universe, which could illuminate a sermon on the vastness of God’s forgiveness in Psalm 103:11–12. Pastor John Van Sloten learned about the neural networks in the brain and incorporated it into a sermon on the vine and the branches of John 15.

Preachers are understandably concerned about avoiding scientific errors when preaching, but this should not prevent engagement with science. Some pastors do their own research to get the details right because they enjoy digging into a science topic. Other pastors bring in a scientist (live or by video) so that they do not have to explain the technical material themselves. Others play to their strengths by choosing topics with fewer technical details, such as the Christian motivation for doing science or exposition of Bible passages relevant for scientific questions. Many of the questions Christians have are really about biblical interpretation and Christian theology, areas where the pastor is an expert. Minor technical errors made in good faith are forgivable, but a sermon that argues that mainstream science is wrong on some point can be devastating for the faith life of teenagers who are learning the correct science in school.

Beyond Sunday morning worship and preaching, science can show up in many areas of church life. During a youth camping trip or church picnic, include a nature walk concluded with praise. After a winter evening worship service, invite a local amateur astronomer to set up a telescope in the parking lot to show people the moon and planets. Convert a vacant lot near church into a community garden, so kids can experience firsthand how God provides food from the Earth.

More Than Programs

In all these activities, remember that views on science are “caught” more than “taught.” Congregants will naturally pick up on the attitude of the pastor or ministry leader, whether skeptical of science or celebrating science as the study of God’s creation. Visitors will pick up on this too, so these attitudes are part of being a church that welcomes and ministers to scientist Christians . Recently I was invited to speak at a church on the expansion of the universe and the possibility of a multiverse. Several enthusiastic young people in attendance had clearly caught the love of science from the church leaders who planned the event. One girl came up afterward with her dad, both of them marveling at God’s creation. They were amazed not just with the particular things I had discussed, but with the way in which God has embedded wonders at every level of understanding. Everyone can marvel at the starry skies, school kids can learn about the planets and asteroids, and scientists with PhDs can study dark matter and string theory. No matter how deep we look, we keep discovering more and more ways that creation declares the glory of God.

For Further Reading

For more resources on a full range of science topics, visit the The Ministry Theorem collection at http://ministrytheorem.calvinseminary.edu/. You will find sample sermons, curricula for children and adults, worship resources, essays by a dozen scientist Christians, and much more.

"Homeschooling has broadened so much, and now includes many Christian groups who have never adopted Young Earth Creationism," said homeschool pioneer Susan Wise Bauer, a history professor at Virginia's College of William and Mary. "Also, there are a lot of younger evangelicals who have come to a different way of understanding Genesis, while still holding [on to their] evangelical roots."

Textbook providers are beginning to respond to the increasing demand for integrated science materials, and organizations like Test of Faith and the American Scientific Affiliation have responded to the needs of homeschooling parents by helping to create new resources and evaluate existing ones. The BioLogos Evolution and Christian Faith grant program is supporting projects to develop homeschooling resources, at Bryan College and at Wheaton College.

Read the full story at Christianity Today. 

These were just a few of the questions that motivated us at BioLogos to commission a survey of pastors on origins.  In 2012, the Barna Group conducted 743 telephone interviews with pastors from across the US, from churches big and small, and from all Christian denominations.  This comprehensive, in-depth survey provides a fascinating analysis of views held by clergy today.   In the coming month, we’ll be digging deeper into the survey results, but for now, here are some key highlights:

#1: Pastors hold a diversity of views on origins.

Overall, while a slight majority of the pastors surveyed fall under the label of Young Earth Creationism (54%), sizeable portions of clergy accept Progressive Creation (15%) and Theistic Evolution (18%).

The numbers varied widely based on a number of factors, however. Pastors of mainline churches were most likely to accept Theistic Evolution, while non-Mainline, Charismatic, and Southern Baptist pastors were overwhelmingly Young Earth Creationists. Pastors of larger churches were also more likely to accept Theistic Evolution.

Regionally, the highest percentage of YEC pastors was found in South, while the highest percentage of pastors accepting TE was in the Midwest. Pastors from the western states were the least likely to accept TE.

#2: Most pastors think science and faith questions are important.

Regardless of their views, the majority of pastors surveyed feel that the Church needs to look at how it handles issues of science. 72% of pastors with YEC views and 73% of pastors with TE views agree with the statement that “the Christian community needs to take a serious look at its understanding of science and human origins in order to maintain its witness in the world.” (The numbers are slightly lower for pastors who hold to Progressive Creation and who are uncertain).

Similarly, 66% of YEC pastors and 61% of both TE and Progressive Creation pastors agree that “younger adults today are more concerned than ever about whether faith and science are compatible.”

#3: Clergy think disagreements on science and faith harm our witness (but for different reasons).

Clergy across all three viewpoints feel that disagreements are harming the Church’s outreach, but they differ in how they view that harm.

YEC pastors overwhelming agreed (85%) that “Christian disagreement on matters of creation and evolution is compromising our witness to the world.” However, a majority of TE pastors disagreed with the statement (63%).

Conversely, a majority of TE pastors (63%) agreed that “The church’s posture toward science prevents many non-Christians from accepting Christianity,” while a majority of YEC and Progressive Creation leaning pastors disagreed (59%).

#4: Pastors aren’t avoiding science.

The majority of pastors think that addressing issues of science for their congregations is an important part of their work. Of those surveyed, 72% felt that addressing science issues in the local community was somewhat (51%) or very (21%) urgent. When asked about science on a national and global level, even more pastors felt that addressing science issues is important (43% somewhat and 46% very). Furthermore, 79% of pastors included scientific themes in at least one sermon in the past year, and 40% had included them in at least ten sermons.

The majority of clergy across all four viewpoints also agreed with the statement “Just as scripture should influence human interpretation of science, science should also inform our understanding of scripture.” The numbers were highest for TE pastors and those who are uncertain (81% and 72%, respectively), though over half of YEC and PC pastors also agreed (52% and 65%, respectively).

Finally, although YEC’s are more reluctant than other pastors to say “science should inform understanding of scripture, they strongly agree (84%) that “The Christian community needs a greater commitment to showing how young earth creationism is consistent with science.”

#5: However, they are concerned about evolution for biblical reasons.

Over half of pastors said they had “major concerns” about the idea that God used evolution. The main reasons for that concern were that the idea “undermines the authority of Scripture” (64%), “views portions of the Bible as non-literal, like Genesis” (62%), “raises doubts about a historical Adam and Eve” (61%), and “raises questions about how and when death and sin entered the world” (59%). However, 26% of pastors saw no concern with the idea that God used evolution.

#6: The majority of clergy accept parts of scripture as symbolic.

60% of the pastors surveyed felt that “some portions of the Bible are symbolic, but all that it teaches is authoritative.” Clergy whose views fall under theistic evolution and progressive creation were more likely to accept this statement (79% and 73% respectively), but a sizeable number of YEC pastors (40% among the core followers and 49% among those leaning towards YEC) also agreed with the statement.

#7: Clergy are concerned that changing their views on origins might compromise their ministry.

Over half of pastors (58%) who fell under the YEC category agreed that “If you publicly admitted your own doubts about human origins, you feel you would have a lot to lose in your ministry.” 41% of pastors in the Progressive Creation group also agreed with the statement. Pastors who were uncertain or who fell under the Theistic Evolution group were less concerned, with only 26% and 17% respectively agreeing with the statement.

That may seem strange. Many people wouldn’t start with the Bible when talking about a scientific theory. But I’m a theologian, and I take the Bible with utmost seriousness. Talking about the Bible is a natural place for me to begin, both because the Bible was principally important in my youth, and because it remains so for me today.

I don’t mean to snub science. Science is important too. I read a lot in the sciences, and I think the evidence supporting the theory of evolution is strong. I try to take this and other evidence with great seriousness.

But the real story – for me – starts with the Bible.

Centrality of Scripture

Fortunately, my parents were committed Christians. Our family was one of those “attend-church-three-times-a-week-and-more” families. My parents were significant leaders in our local congregation, and I began following their footsteps early in life.

I doubt I missed more than a handful of Sunday school classes before I was twenty years old. And I always attended Vacation Bible School – even winning Bible memorizing competitions on occasion. (John 11:35 was my friend!) I participated on youth Bible quizzing team for a while too.

While growing up, I don’t recall anyone telling me that the Bible was the inerrant Word of God. But my passion for Scripture and my Evangelical community inclined me toward that position. Scripture was central in my life.

Besides, I wanted a failsafe foundation for my beliefs. And how could I convince my Mormon friends to become Christians if the Bible was not true in every sense, including literally true about what it said about the natural world? Witnessing to God’s truth seemed to require that I believe the Bible was without error on all matters, including matters related to science.

An Inerrant Bible?

My view of the Bible began to change when I went to college. It wasn’t that a liberal Bible professor brainwashed me away from the positions of my youth. Instead, I started reading the Bible carefully and the work of biblical scholars. I began to think it important to love God with my mind in a more consistent way.

And then I took a class in koine Greek, the language of the New Testament. In this course, I discovered several things. First, we have differing English translations of the New Testament, because the biblical text allows for a number of valid translation options. (When I later took Hebrew class, I found the diversity of valid translations even greater!) Second, we do not have access to the original biblical manuscripts/autographs. Our Bibles come from later manuscripts, the earliest of which are not complete. And, third, the oldest texts we have differ in many ways – although most differences are minor.

I also discovered discrepancies in the Bible. For instance, in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus curses a fig tree and it withers immediately (21:18-20). But in Mark’s version of the same story, the fig tree does not wither immediately and the disciples find it withered the next morning (11:12-14; 20-21). Mark says that Jesus heals one demon-possessed man at Gerasenes (5:1-20), while Matthew says there were two demon-possessed men involved in that same miracle (8:28-34). Jesus tells the disciples to take a staff on their journey as recorded in Mark 6:8, but Matthew says Jesus told the disciples not to take a staff (10:9-10). Jesus says Jonah was three days and three nights in the whale's belly. Then, making an analogy with his own death, he says the Son of Man will be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth (Mt 12:40). But Jesus was not dead three days and three nights!

I mention only a few of the many internal discrepancies. Once I discovered a few, I noticed more. This, of course, made me question whether I should say the Bible is inerrant in all ways.

What’s the Bible For?

I’m persistent. I don’t settle for easy answers, ignore problems, or appeal to mystery at the drop of a hat. I want to give a plausible account of the hope within me.

My quest for better ways to think about the Bible prompted me to read theologians and Bible scholars from the past and present. What I found surprised me! I had assumed believing the Bible is inerrant in all ways was the traditional position of Christians throughout the ages. I assumed it was the position of my own Christian tradition. I was wrong.

Few if any great theologians argued the Bible was absolutely inerrant. Augustine did not affirm inerrancy in this way. Thomas Aquinas didn’t. Neither did Martin Luther or John Wesley – a least in a consistent way. And I discovered through reading and conversations that those considered the leading biblical scholars and theologians today also reject absolute biblical inerrancy.

I did find a few teachers who said the Bible was inerrant. But when I read their explanations of the Bible’s discrepancies and their views about the differences between the oldest manuscripts, I found they stretched the word “inerrant” beyond recognition. Their meaning of “inerrant” was nothing like the usual meaning. And it was certainly not what most Evangelicals meant when they called the Bible the inerrant Word of God.

Perhaps even more important was my discovery that great theologians and biblical scholars of yesteryear believed the Bible’s basic purpose was to reveal God’s desire for our salvation. Many giants of the Christian faith could agree with John Wesley who said, “The Scriptures are a complete rule of faith and practice; and they are clear in all necessary points.”

The necessary points of Scripture refer to instruction for our salvation. They indicate that, as the Apostle Paul puts it, Scripture is inspired and “useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16-17). The purpose of the Bible is our salvation!

I also discovered Christian leaders over the centuries did not feel required to search the Bible for truths about science. In fact, they sometimes used allegorical interpretations that seem silly to me now. The vast majority of Evangelical scholars with whom I talked also didn’t think the Bible has to be inerrant about scientific matters.

After my studies, I came to believe that the Bible tells us how to find abundant life. But it does not provide the science for how life became abundant.

Tomorrow, Tom will discuss what his evolving view of the Bible has to do with evolution.

There’s a serious point in my playful invocation of Pilgrim’s Progress. Like many of the most complex human endeavors — parenting, farming, becoming a Christian — the life of a scientist is not just an “occupation,” something that occupies us for a while and might then be followed by something entirely different. Being a scientist is as much about being as doing, as much about a particular way of being formed as a person as it is a set of activities or even skills. Training in science is induction not so much into a particular worldview (though it includes absorbing plenty of the kind of cognitive presuppositions that that word suggests) as it is a kind of posture or stance toward the world, toward one’s work, and toward one’s fellow human beings, both scientists and non-scientists. And the life of a scientist is a journey, one freighted with ultimate concerns and laden with values. It is a journey into a set of virtues, the habits and dispositions that make one a person of a particular kind of character.

When we talk about faith and science, we tend to focus on the cognitive content of both endeavors, the truth claims and worldviews that animate these two crucial dimensions of modern human life. These are important matters, and I don’t at all mean to diminish them. At the same time, there are inevitable limits to what any pastor can do to constructively integrate the knowledge content of science — so vast and rapidly expanding that even scientists cannot pretend to be expert in anything but a tiny portion — with the content of Christian faith. But there is another way to approach faith and science which I believe might well be more within reach of most pastors, and more essential to their job description than being deeply literate in the latest scientific discoveries and theories — and that is simply to attend to, and prayerfully support and encourage, the scientific life itself as a vocation that can reflect the image of God and be a place for working out one’s own salvation.

So here is what I wish our pastors — and fellow Christians — knew about the life of a working scientist.

Delight and Wonder

If there is one personality characteristic of the vast majority of scientists I have met, it is delight. There is something about science that attracts people who are fascinated and thrilled by the world. To be sure, any given scientist is delighted by things that you and I may find odd or indeed incomprehensible — the intricacies of protein folding, the strata of Antarctic ice cores, or the properties of Lebesgue spaces (and no, I have no idea what that last phrase really means). But the specificity of their delights is one of delight’s secrets: like love, delight is always most potent when it is particular. It is certainly possible to find lawyers who are delighted by law (I have one friend who can go on at great length, with enthusiasm, about corporate bankruptcies), dairy farmers who are delighted by cows, or lumberjacks who are delighted by trees — but I dare say your chances are much better that when you meet a scientist you will find that they are delighted with the tiny part of the world they study day to day. (At least when they are not frustrated with it — which we’ll examine below.)

In many scientists, delight is matched by wonder — a sense of astonishment at the beautiful, ingenious complexity to be found in the world. This is not the “wonder” that comes from ignorance — “I wonder how a light bulb really works?” — but a wonder that comes from understanding. Indeed, as we progress further into humanity’s scientific era we have been able to disabuse ourselves of a mistaken early-modern notion: that the more the world became comprehensible, the less it would be wonderful. That turns out not to be true at all — ask a scientist. Wonder grows as understanding grows. Indeed, wonder only grows if understanding grows. If we replace our childhood awe of lightning with an explanation like, “It’s nothing but a transfer of voltage across a highly resistive material” (an example of what G. K. Chesterton wittily called “nothing-buttery”) perhaps the world will seem like a less wonderful place. But those who actually pursue knowledge of lightning — of electromagnetism or cloud formation or weather systems or climate — end up being more in awe of the world than they were as children. This is surely one of the remarkable features of our cosmos: the more we understand about it, the more we are in awe of its beautiful elegance and simplicity, and at the same time its humbling complexity.

To be sure, many if not most scientists do not see this wonderful world in the way that most Christians would hope for. For us, wonder is a stepping-stone to worship — ascribing our awe for the world to a Creator whose worth it reveals. For many scientists, wonder is less a stepping-stone than a substitute for worship. Yet they stop and wonder all the same.

Intellectual humility

I doubt that humility is among the first traits most people think of when they think of scientists. And indeed, some scientists (like some academics and intellectuals generally) exhibit a combination of confidence in their own intellect and limitations in their social skills that makes them seem abrasive if not arrogant. A few have made a public career of intellectual overreaching, not least in matters of science and faith. But in my experience (and certainly, let me stress, in the case of my own wife!) this is much more the exception than the rule. If intellectual humility is essentially a willingness to admit what you do not and cannot know, science cultivates humility like few other pursuits can — because in few other pursuits do you so often find out that you were wrong.

Even though we tell the story of science through its high points — the discoveries and confirmed theories that won Nobel Prizes and launched new eras in technology — the actual practice of science, for nearly every working scientist, involves far more failure than success. This is especially true for experimental science, the kind that requires the most direct interaction with recalcitrant reality. On most days, in most labs, the data do not add up, Matlab has an untraceable bug, the laser is on the fritz, and all the cultures have been contaminated when the undergraduate research assistant sneezed. And while each of these everyday setbacks requires immense amounts of patience and persistence to overcome, they are only the quotidian version of the perplexity that begins early in the study of science. Every scientist, in the process of their training, has had to repeatedly discover that their intuitions about the world are simply wrong, or at least incomplete. Even great scientists have come up against the sheer oddity and unpredictability of the world — Albert Einstein, for example, never fully accepted the uncertainty at the heart of quantum mechanics, something that is now universally accepted by physicists.

This regular confrontation with the limits of one’s own knowledge and skill is not to be taken for granted. The other divisions of the academy, the social sciences and the humanities, deal with matters of such variability and complexity that it is often difficult to say conclusively that anyone, or any theory, is entirely wrong. Marx’s and Freud’s grand theories may not seem nearly as plausible as they once were, but there are thousands of people following their lines of thought without losing the respect of their intellectual peers. But Ptolemaic cosmology or Lamarckian evolution now have, simply, no followers. They have been proved wrong beyond a reasonable doubt (although Lamarck’s ideas, interestingly, turn out to have a grain of truth in a way very different from what he expected). Who is likely to be more intellectually humble — someone who early in her training, and daily in her work, learns that her assumptions have been wrong, or someone who can always argue his way out of any intellectual predicament? It is perhaps no accident that “grade inflation,” in which undergraduates’ grades ratchet ever upwards in a nod to the consumer realities of the modern university, is much less pervasive in the sciences, where you can’t cajole your way into an A. The honest, and humbling, truth is that there is likely more intellectual humility in the average physics laboratory than in the average theology classroom.

For more from the "What I Wish My Pastor Knew" series, visit The Ministry Theorem.

Wilkinson identifies a number of themes found throughout the Bible that can help us understand the Creator God in a more complex and fulfilling way—as, in Wilkinson’s own words, “a Creator God who is worthy of worship, enjoyment, and trust.”

The full article can be found here.

As is the case in many fields, astronomers are trying to settle questions that the general public thinks little about, often because laypeople are still coming to grips with much more basic questions such as Did the universe appear—poof—all at once or did it evolve into its present state?

These are questions where science crosses into—and sometimes crosses swords with—religion. For many who take an anti-evolutionary stand as a matter of spiritual principle, the word evolution should not be applied to anything having to do with creation, cosmic or otherwise. Yet, if an evolving universe implies a beginning (and it does, for relativistic reasons), science has taken a tremendous leap toward rapprochement with Christian faith on the matter of creation. Traveling backward in time with their shrinking subject, cosmologists can only watch the cosmos disappear at the beginning, pointing to a universe that came out of nothing—a universe that wasn’t there.

No one need ask: “Were you there?” Chuck Steidel has tapped into nature’s own motion picture of past events, now showing in the present. Anyone who cares to view it can now see for himself what was and wasn’t there, at various stages of the deep past.

While other astronomers at first assumed that larger telescopes would be necessary before finding truly primeval galaxies, Steidel began finding dozens of them—and today, thousands of them. His method, called ultraviolet dropout, is based on the fact that intergalactic hydrogen gas absorbs the ultraviolet light of the most distant galaxies, causing them to disappear when seen through an ultraviolet filter. Steidel identified early galaxies that are present in pictures of the cosmos when viewed through red and green filters, but that aren’t there when viewed through an ultraviolet filter.

Visual evidence for a universe that isn’t there starts with the observation of galaxies that aren’t there.

“The way that people have looked for these in the past tended to be looking for particular, spectacular fireworks of stars going off all at once,” Steidel told me. He was only 32—a young-looking 32—and could have passed more easily as a student than as a professor as he talked with me in his Caltech office, surrounded by Hubble Deep Sky images. “So they were looking for relatively rare events, using narrow-band filters tuned to find an emission line that comes from hydrogen atoms. And you have to have the filter exactly tuned to that wavelength to see it.”

“And I’ve heard it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack,” I offered.

“It’s much more difficult.”

“So rather than try to find something that stands out you’re trying to find something that drops out?”

“That’s correct. It’s a very simple technique, where we take pictures through different filters, very deep images of the sky with CCD detectors, and we take three filters, and we look for objects that are present through two of those filters, and they completely disappear in the third. And the reason they disappear is because they’re at a high redshift.”

The high redshift denotes greater distances—and earlier periods, because of the time required for light to reach us from those greater distances. These young galaxies contain young, hot stars, emitting strongly in the ultraviolet. However, ultraviolet radiation from the most distant galaxies is absorbed by a greater amount of intervening hydrogen gas along the way. Today, Steidel uses the 200-inch Hale Telescope at California’s Palomar Observatory to find these primeval galaxies with his ultraviolet dropout technique, then flies to the 10-meter Keck telescope in Hawaii to measure their redshift, which corresponds to their distance and time period.

And what do these galaxies look like?

“We actually think we’re seeing the central bulge regions of galaxies forming,” said Steidel, “that is, the round part in the middle of a spiral or an elliptical galaxy, where you expect all of the star formation to be happening in a relatively small region. And those parts of galaxies we see today are also the parts that we think are the oldest stars in those galaxies.”

“And you’re saying that modern galaxies have the oldest stars in the bulges, is that right?”

“That’s right …. It’s still somewhat controversial. But there isn’t any doubt that we’re finding a number of things that match fairly closely to the number that you would expect to find if you were looking at the progenitors of the present-day, bright galaxies.”

Steidel’s galaxy surveys have shown that galaxies were already arranged in clusters at that early time. But the individual, primeval galaxies lacked the characteristics of today’s spirals and ellipticals. More recently, Steidel has focused on a slightly later period, from about 10 to 12 billion years ago, when star formation appears to peak. If seeing is believing, then, as Steidel says, the universe “has absolutely changed with time.” His methods have helped astronomers identify populations of galaxies at various stages, where their differences from one to another are unmistakable.

In the years ahead, telescopes beyond our obfuscating atmosphere, like NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (collecting six times as much light as the Hubble), may begin to give us glimpses of the “Dark Ages,” when the first galaxies began to form. As our improving technologies bring us closer to the beginning, they will lead people to ponder, once again, what happened before that. 

In my interviews with researchers, I usually bring up such crossover questions when the scientists or their studies naturally suggest them. But I worried that I’d crossed over too clumsily into this territory with Steidel when I asked him what he thought about a universe that appeared to come into being out of nothing.

He hesitated and said, “What happened before, you know, it’s …” and his voice trailed off. 

Finally I suggested: “Something must have happened before.”

“I think about that extremely rarely.”

Shoot, I’d gone too far, I thought.

But then he added: “On the other hand, I do have a very wide appreciation for whatever put things there—because it’s just the greatest thing to go out on the catwalk around the dome, in the middle of the night, and just look up there, or look at a picture of the Hubble Deep Field, and see all the things that are out there, and—you know— it’s a beautiful universe out there.”

Indeed, come to think of it, the way it all came together may be an even more impressive fact to ponder than the fact that at one time, that is, before time, the universe wasn’t there.

Good science has an addiction to theories,¹ and for science to be good science, it must deal with good scientific theories.  What constitutes a good scientific theory?  That is a very involved question, but a user’s view of good scientific theories looks something like this:

1.  A scientific theory is not a guess or suspicion.  For example, “I have a theory about who shot President Kennedy,” reflects the colloquial meaning of the word “theory,” and not the meaning conveyed by scientists when they use the word “theory.”  
2. Scientific theories are convincing explanatory frameworks that efficiently integrate a large body of evidence about the world.  Good scientific theories have the capacity to make sense of a wide range of data that made less sense before the introduction of the theory. 
3. In order to be called a scientific theory, it must have been successfully tested and re-tested many times.²
4. A scientific theory must be falsifiable in order to be truly scientific.  The theory has to live constantly at risk from new data.³ 
5. A theory must have predictive power.⁴  Good theories allow scientists to make predictions based on the theory that, when tested, turn out to be at least roughly correct. 

These are not the only characteristics of a scientific theory, but they probably represent the most important features for practitioners of science. 

If we hold contemporary evolutionary theory to these standards, how well does it do?  Since the inception of evolutionary theory by Charles Darwin in 1859 with the publication of On the Origin of Species, there are four characteristics of evolutionary theory that have endured 150 years of further research:

1. Living species are descendants of other species that lived in the past.
2. These past species lived in populations that underwent gradual transformation so that the individuals in these populations changed their appearance, behaviors, metabolisms, and life histories over long spans of time.⁵
3. New forms of life arose by means of a process called speciation in which one lineage splits into two distinct lineages.  This continual splitting of organismal lineages leads to a nested genealogy of species.  This nested genealogy forms a veritable tree of life, whose root represents the first species to arise and whose twigs represent the millions of species living today.  If you trace back any pair of twigs from the modern species you will find that their histories merge at some node on the tree where the two species share a common ancestor.⁶ 
4. This process of biological change that takes place throughout the advance of geologic time, or evolution, occurs by means of variation in organisms (which we know today is due to genetic mutations) that is acted on by either random genetic drift or natural selection. Those individuals with variations better suited to the current environment leave more offspring, thus changing the average appearance of the population over time and making it a better fit to the environment. This improving fit between organisms and their environment gives the appearance of organisms having been well designed for their milieu.⁷ 

What is the evidence for these aspects of evolutionary theory?  The evidence is actually immense, but I will restrict this discussion to just a few items. 

First there is the fossil record. If life results from a natural process such as biological evolution, then we should observe a progression of fossil organisms that proceed from relatively simple, single-celled organisms in the oldest rocks to more complex, multicellular organisms in younger rocks. When paleontologists examine the geologic column, they perceive that some of the oldest and deepest layers of the geologic column contain fossils of microorganisms, and then marine invertebrates in younger layers above those,⁸ and then much later and higher up in the geologic column fish appear, followed later and higher still by amphibians, and then by reptiles, mammals, and birds.⁹  Thus, the general presentation of the fossil record in the rock record comports exactly with what the theory of evolution predicts. 

However, the fossil story gets even better, because scientists can trace evolutionary trends throughout the fossil record.  For example, horses get bigger, fuse their leg bones and toes into a single bone with a thick hoof and grow the thickness of their tooth enamel;¹⁰ Cenozoic brachiopod shells get narrower, decrease their rib numbers and beak angle;¹¹ diatoms get bigger;¹² and primate fossils reduce the size of their teeth and expand the size of their brains.¹³ 

Additionally, Darwin predicted that there should be organisms preserved in the fossil record that possess features found in two different types of creatures. Such organisms are “transitional forms” that bridge the gap between different types of organisms.¹⁴ However, the fossil record of Darwin’s time provided little evidence of such transitional forms.¹⁵ Therefore, Darwin gambled that future paleontological research would provide sufficient evidence to corroborate his theory. How did this gamble turn out? Since Darwin’s time, paleontologists have discovered transitional fossils that are part fish and tetrapod,¹⁶ part amphibian and part reptile,¹⁷ part dinosaur and part bird,¹⁸ and part reptile and part mammal.¹⁹ Once again, we would predict such paleontological trends and the existence of such transitional fossils if life came about through a process of organic evolution. Clearly paleontological research since Darwin’s time has powerfully vindicated his theory. 

Please join us for part two of this post tomorrow, where we will discuss how signs of evolution can be detected in organisms living today, and how evidence from multifarious scientific fields—not just biology and paleontology—have bolstered the theory of evolution and added to our understanding of how natural selection works.

Notes

1. Ratzsch, Del. The Battle of Beginnings: Why Neither Side Is Winning the Creation-Evolution Debate. Downer’s Grove, WI: Intervarsity Press, 1996. pp. 104–119. 
2. Kitcher, Philip. Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983. pp. 45–54.
3. Ibid, 42–48.  .
4. Ratzsch, Del. Science and Its Limits: The Natural Sciences in Christian Perspective. Downer’s Grove, WI: Intervarsity Press, 2000. pp. 21–24. 
5. Hall, Brian K., and Benedikt Hallgrimsson. Strickberger’s Evolution. 5th ed. Burlington, MA: Jones and Bartlett, 2013. pp. 19–68. 
6. Kitcher, Philip. Living With Darwin: Evolution, Design, and the Future of Faith. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. pp. 43–71. 
7. Futuyma, Douglas J. Evolution. 3rd ed. Sundbury, MA: Sinauer Associates, 2013. pp. 281–343. 
8. Valentine, James W. On the Origin of Phyla. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. pp. 429–464. 
9. Carroll, Robert L. Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1990. 
10. MacFadden, “Horses, the Fossil Record, and Evolution,” 131–158; McFadden, Bruce J. “Fossil Horses from "Eohippus" (Hyracotherium) to Equus: Scaling, Cope's Law, and the Evolution of Body Size.” Paleobiology 12, no. 4 (1986): 355–69.; Prothero, Donald R., and R.M. Schoch, eds. The Evolution of Perissodactyls. New York: Clarendon Press, 1989. ; McFadden, Bruce J. Fossil Horses. Systematics, Paleobiology, and Evolution of the Family Equidae. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993. 
11. McNamara, Kenneth J. “Evolutionary Trends.” In Encyclopedia of Life Sciences (New York: Macmillan Publishers Ltd, 2001), pp. 1–7. 
12. Litchman, E., C. A. Klausmeier, and K. Yoshiyama. “Contrasting Size Evolution in Marine and Freshwater Diatoms.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 106, no. 8 (2009): 2665–2670.
13. Tattersall, Ian. The Fossil Trail: How We Know What We Think We Know About Human Evolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. pp. 89–198. 
14. Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: Penguin Books, 1985. p. 292.
15. Hunt, Gene. “Evolution in Fossil Lineages: Paleontology and The Origin of Species.” Supplement American Naturalist 176 (2010): S61–S76. 
16. Clack, Jennifer A. Gaining Ground: The Origin and Evolution of Tetrapods. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002; Daeschler, Edward B., Neil H. Shubin, and Farish A. Jenkins, Jr. “A Devonian Tetrapod-Like Fish and the Evolution of the Tetrapod Body Plan,” Nature 440, no. 7085 (2006): 757–63; Shubin, Neil H., Edward B. Daeschler, and Farish A. Jenkins, Jr. “The Pectoral Fin of Tiktaalik roasae and the Origin of the Tetrapod Limb.” Nature 440, no. 7085 (2006).): 764–71; Downs, Jason P., Edward B. Daeschler, Farish A. Jenkins, and Neil H. Shubin. "The Cranial Endoskeleton of Tiktaalik roseae." Nature 455, no. 7215 (2008): 925–9. 
17. Carroll, Robert L. Vertebrate Paleontology and Evolution. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1990. pp. 156–216. 
18. Shipman, Pat. Taking Wing: Archaeopteryx and the Evolution of Bird Flight. New York: Touchstone, 1998. pp. 169–244.  
19. Prothero, Donald R. Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. pp. 271–297. 

"Anyone approaching the Resurrection accounts in the belief that he knows what rising from the dead means will inevitably misunderstand those accounts and will then dismiss them as meaningless" (p. 243).

In fact, if Jesus' Resurrection were "merely" coming back to life in any way that we might comprehend, then it would be of little significance.

"Now it must be acknowledged that if in Jesus' Resurrection we were dealing simply with the miracle of a resuscitated corpse, it would ultimately be of no concern to us" (p. 243).

So what then does Resurrection mean? For Benedict it represents a new dimension of reality breaking through into human experience. It is not a violation of the old; it is the manifestation of something new.

"Jesus had not returned to a normal human life in this world like Lazarus and the others whom Jesus raised from the dead. He has entered upon a different life, a new life -- he has entered the vast breadth of God himself..." (p. 244).

Because it is something entirely new, it cannot represent a violation of natural law as understood by science.

"Naturally there can be no contradiction of clear scientific data. The Resurrection accounts certainly speak of something outside our world of experience. They speak of something new, something unprecedented -- a new dimension of reality that is revealed. What already exists is not called into question. Rather we are told that there is a further dimension, beyond what was previously known. Does that contradict science? Can there really only ever be what there has always been? Can there not be something unexpected, something unimaginable, something new? If there really is a God, is he not able to create a new dimension of human existence, a new dimension of reality altogether?" (p. 246-7)

Thus, in this view, Resurrection (as with all true miracles) is not contrary to science, but an indicator that science does not (yet?) describe the full expanse of reality. Indeed, some may argue that science itself contains similar "indicators." The 11 (or so) dimensional universe required by some versions of string theory, the multiverse theory of the universe where ours is but one of an infinite array of universes with variable physical laws, quantum entanglements, "spooky" action at a distance, the mysterious emergence of consciousness from inorganic matter -- all push the limits of human reason and imagination, suggesting to some that reality may be far more complex than the human mind can grasp.

For a moment, let us entertain the possibility that Resurrection is as Benedict interprets it: not a violation of natural law but an indicator of something beyond our scientific understanding of the universe. This has interesting implications for understanding how believers and skeptics approach the issue. If Resurrection does not violate science, then science does not necessarily constitute an impediment to accepting the reality of Resurrection. If the difference between the skeptic and believer is not science, then is it just a matter of imagination? The believer imagines greater possibilities for the universe than the non-believer. While this is possible, it seems questionable. To my knowledge, no research has found differences in imaginative abilities between religious and non-religious people. Moreover, contrarian examples easily come to mind: Isaac Asimov was an atheist but hardly lacking in imagination when it came to science fiction. I tend to think that both believers and non-believers can imagine (with varying degrees of effort, I'm sure) the new possibilities implied by Resurrection.

Thus, if it is neither imagination nor science that prompts skepticism about Resurrection, then what is left? I suggest that it comes down to a question of authority: At what point does one allow imaginative possibilities to have authority over how one lives? To the believer, Resurrection has an authority that science fiction does not. Resurrection is not thought-provoking entertainment. It requires far more than just imagining greater possibilities for the universe. It requires a change of life, here and now. Unlike the microscopic hidden dimensions of string theory, the new dimension implied by Resurrection has "broken though" into everyday reality and demands a response -- even if that response is to actively ignore it.

Now, what convinces the believer that Resurrection merits such authority when other imaginative possibilities such as extraterrestrial life or time-travel do not? The answer here appears to be historical commitment. There's no record of people committing themselves to the point of martyrdom to other imaginative possibilities as they have to Resurrection. The earliest example of such commitment being found, of course, in the dramatic post-crucifixion turn-around of the Apostles. Such an astounding change of heart, followed by an unwavering commitment capable of altering human history demands a categorically unique explanation: Resurrection.

The believer's argument, however, remains unconvincing to the skeptic. However impressive they might be, a change of heart and steadfast commitment do not necessarily add up to a new dimension of reality. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Fair enough. So a key question regarding the interpretation of Resurrection is this: Is the post-crucifixion history of Christianity extraordinary? Does it compel the dispassionate observer to concede that a categorically unique event could plausibly be its best explanation?

It ought to be upon questions such as those above that skeptics and believers respectfully engage one another, rather than the simplistic and often acrimonious sloganeering that has increasingly become the norm.

JIMMY LIN: Currently I’m on faculty at Washington University at St. Louis, where I am a research instructor in the pathology department. Also, a year and a half ago, I founded the Rare Genomics Institute (RGI)—a nonprofit that helps find cures for people with rare diseases.

ER: What qualifies as a “rare disease”?

JL: These are diseases like cystic fibrosis and Huntingdon’s disease—diseases that affect less than 200,000 Americans each year. There are over 7000 different rare diseases, and less than 5% of them have any therapy. Altogether, they affect about 25-30 million people.

This creates what we call a “long tail problem”—it’s hard for a top-down research system to create research programs for all 7000 rare diseases. So instead, we are creating a bottom-up platform from which the patients themselves can create research projects and help fund them. We connect patients with physicians and researchers, customize a research program with top medical universities, design the experiment, and then use an online fundraising platform to fund the study through [mostly] friends and family of the patient.

Basically, we create a “foundation in a box.” By partnering with the Rare Genomics Institute, patients and their friends and families who want to study rare diseases don’t have to go through the hoops of creating their own nonprofit or lab—we do that for them. So, instead of creating 7000 different nonprofits, we create a generalized platform from which studies can be conducted.

ER: Who qualifies for care through the Rare Genomics Institute?

JL: Anyone with a rare disease can come to us. The main thing we’re doing right now is diagnosis. When families come to us, they either don’t know the disease that’s affecting them or their child, or they don’t know the gene that’s wrong.

For instance, if a child had a condition that doctors couldn’t identify, his or her parents might come to us for help. What we’d do then is sequence the genes of the mother, father, and child, and compare them to reference genome to determine what mutations each of the parents have. Depending on what the disease is and what the gene causing it is, we can filter out mutations that don’t mean anything using the parents’ genomes—then, after filtering, we can potentially pinpoint the genes that fit the genetic pattern of the disease. This is the first step.

After that, we are building infrastructure to determine the effect of these changes and a way to help. For example, after looking at the literature, we can perhaps design experiments using cells extracted from the patient; this part of the process is different for every disease. Then, if we can determine that there is, for instance, a pathway missing a specific enzyme, we can try using drugs, a bone marrow transplant, or gene therapy to try to put healthy cells into the child… But there’s a variety of diseases, of course, so there’s a variety of different approaches—and we’re just starting to explore these aspects.

ER: How did RGI get started?

JL: It really started when I was in medical school at Johns Hopkins—there was this boy that came to our clinic to be seen. My research was in cancer genome sequencing, and the family had come to our department looking for answers about what was wrong with their son. At that point, the family was almost hopeless—they had gone to so many doctors, run so many tests—I decided I wanted to try to help children like this. That’s when my friends and I decided to start the Rare Genomics Institute.

Currently, there are about 50 researchers associated with the organization, and we are all volunteers. It’s growing much, much faster and been more amazing than we’ve ever imagined—we’re already making an impact. In May of last year, we were able to discover a new disease using the world’s first crowd-sourced, crowd-funded genome. Working with researchers at Yale, we delineated a disease of which our patient was the first identified.

Right now, we’re in the middle of raising funding and hiring staff to make this organization one that is self-sustaining, and to increase its impact even more.

Excerpts from Michael Hickerson Interview

MH: …you call yourself a doxologist. What’s the full term you used in your Jubilee bio?

JL: Medical and scientific doxologist.

MH: How did you decide on that term and what does it mean to you?

JL: I listen to a bunch of teaching by J.I. Packer , who teaches theology at Regent College and is one of the leading thinkers on these things. Interestingly, before any one of his classes, he says “Theology is for doxology,” and then the whole class sings the Doxology together out loud in class. I thought, “Wow, that is so great,” because everybody sometimes learns theology just for intellectual things [instead of for worship].

That’s not just true for theology, it’s for everything: biology is for doxology; chemistry is for doxology. That’s when I started to think, I should consider myself, first and foremost, as a person who praises God in what I do. And then no longer make “Christian” the adjective, right? “Doxologist” is the noun. But then what kind of doxologist am I? So I call myself a medical and scientist doxologist. I would call someone, for example, in the marketplace, a business doxologist. Or, someone who does art, an artistic doxologist. To really have the noun as our identity, and then our vocation as just a descriptor of how we do that.

MH: That’s a great point. A noun is always stronger than the adjective. So, you want that to be the focus, rather than the add-on.

JL: In our current culture, we’re defined by our jobs. It’s having a vocation. I wanted to shift away from that. I didn’t want to be a doctor first and foremost, or a scientist, but one who praises God. And evidently, within science you don’t want to call yourself a Christian Scientist. That’s another religion, so . . .

MH: [laughs] That’s right. I run into that, as well, when I’m teaching or talking about science to Christians. You always run into that stumbling block.

JL: With “scientific doxologist,” people don’t confuse them. You do have to explain what it means. And that gets in a little story actually, on what it means about vocation. It’s a small lesson — a teaching point when you do talk to people about vocation and calling. That’s why I use it.

MH: I guess my final question would be what spiritual practices help sustain you? What helps you stay in contact with God and keep a good foundation?

JL: First, I am interested in many, many different things. I sort of mix it up in terms of spiritual practices. Besides the fundamentals, of course, of quiet time, devotional reading, and scriptural reading, I do theological study because I have to do that academically. I find a lot of time with God through the spiritual disciplines, such as times of solitude — which is very interesting for someone who is in academics to no longer think about ideas but just to be quiet before God — how silence, time to think by yourself, or sitting in silence is also something you should foster.

In terms of spiritual formation, what you really need is definitely a good community of people. I have a very supportive community at my church. I’m the deacon of devotions, so that of course keeps me on track. It encourages me as I, in my own spiritual walk, encourage other people. Fundamentally, I think for all Christians, whether you are academic or no matter your vocation or calling, being in the Word and prayer are the most important things. Doing that and being spiritually fed is what is important.