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.

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. 

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. 

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).

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.

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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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.

Here I want to clarify a few misconceptions about randomness before moving on, in future posts, to describing other biological processes that make use of it.

Misconception #1

Randomness is like “God of the Gaps”. With time, advancements in science will allow us to make accurate predictions in previously “random” systems.

Isaac Newton’s famous three laws of motion, described in his 1687 classic Principia Mathematica, have empowered physics students for centuries. Using these and Newton’s universal law of gravitation, you can predict the trajectory of everything from pool balls to planets. By the early nineteenth century, the idea of a “clockwork universe” was firmly established, and scientists believed that with time, science would be unlimited in its predictive power.

Although it could be true that we live in a “clockwork universe,”¹ two developments in the twentieth century shattered our hopes of having a fully predictable universe. The first was quantum mechanics, which describes how things work at an extremely small scale. One of the major discoveries in quantum mechanics was Werner Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle,” which holds that the more certain one is about the location of a particle, the less certain in principle one can be about its momentum, and vice versa. At the quantum level, then, our predictive powers are ultimately limited.

Another discovery that destroyed all hope for a fully predictable universe was chaos. Mathematically chaotic systems are those which are extremely sensitive to changes in their initial conditions. Even fully deterministic systems can exhibit chaotic behavior and act in unpredictable ways. Consider a famous function, the logistic map²:

I know equations make people nervous, but stay with me! This one does some fascinating things. Here’s how it works: start with some initial value for x at time t = 0, and plug that in for x(t). Let’s start with = 0.2. R is just some constant value; let it be 2. Now we use the function to calculate the outcome in the next time step, t = 1:

We can use this value as input for the next step, and repeat this process over and over to find the output at each time point.

What happens? The answer is plotted in the figure below on the left. If we follow along the x-axis, which represents time, we see that the value of x goes toward 0.5 and stays there forever.

What if we start with the same , but increase R to 3.1? Following the same process as before, we get a very different result! The middle graph shows that the outcome oscillates between two values over time.

If you make R = 4, the function does something very strange. In the right-most plot, the function still fluctuates up and down, but it begins to look irregular. And if we change the initial condition, , just slightly, from .20 (blue solid line) to 0.2000000001 (red dotted line), we see they are virtually the same until somewhere around t = 14. After that point, they exhibit completely different behavior.

Several observations can be made here. First, the same equation can produce three different classes of behavior, simply by changing R and . These classes are called fixed-point (left), periodic (middle), and chaotic (right). Below the values of R that lead to chaos, the system is not sensitive to the initial value of . Over time, the system will either become a flat line or oscillate.

When R is greater than approximately 3.569946, however, the system becomes chaotic, and the outcome is extremely sensitive to changes in the initial value of . What this means is you would have to know the value of to infinite precision to predict its long term behavior. Since this is impossible in any kind of real-world application, the detailed behavior of a chaotic system is impossible to predict.

If this is true even for a simple, completely deterministic equation, how much more difficult is it to predict the behavior of a more complicated chaotic system, like a hurricane! Even the poor weathermen here in San Diego get it wrong sometimes, and the weather here doesn’t change very much.

So, between the uncertainty principle in quantum mechanics, and the sensitivity of chaotic systems, we now know that we are fundamentally limited in our predictive power––not just temporarily. Whether the systems we study are truly indeterministic is another (interesting) question, which of course has implications for divine action.

Misconception #2

Randomness means anything can happen, and all possibilities are equally likely.

People often think randomness means the outcome is completely open-ended, but you can’t roll a 7 on a 6-sided dice, nor draw a red marble from a bag of blue ones. Even random processes function according to rules. (The logistic map in the last section is another good example.)

Sometimes, the word random is used to mean unbiased. If you want to know who will win a political election, you make sure to poll a random sample of people, not just those hanging around a Tea Party rally. But the word random doesn’t have to mean that all possibilities are equally likely. When maternal and paternal chromosomes get together during conception, they exchange long sequences of DNA in a process called recombination. We now know that recombination happens more often in some places of the genome than others, but the specific sites where it will occur in a given embryo are impossible to predict. So recombination is random in the sense that it is unpredictable, but not in the sense that all outcomes are equally likely.

Misconception #3

Randomness always leads to disorder.

On the contrary, randomness often leads to exquisitely ordered and complex outcomes. In my next post, we'll watch a simulation of viral self-assembly from individual proteins bouncing around in a jar. You could repeat the simulation a thousand times and always get the same result, even though the particular assembly pathway would look different each time. That is, if the starting materials are present and the conditions (temperature, pH, etc) are right, you will always get a beautiful, highly symmetric virus. Random motion is the mechanism used to search “solution space” for a favorable outcome.

Fractals provide another great example of patterns emerging from randomness. Fractals are chaotic patterns with the same basic property: no matter how much you “zoom in,” the overall structure is maintained. Clouds, trees, crystals, and snow flakes are naturally-occurring fractals.

You can construct a fractal like the Sierpinski triangle shown at left by rolling a die and following simple rules.³ If 100 people in a room independently rolled a die 100 times and followed the rules, they would all have different sequences of rolls, but all would end up with the same pattern!

Thus, for many random processes, the fine details may be unpredictable along the way, but the macro-level outcome is foreseeable.

Summary

“Randomness,” when taken to mean unconquerable unpredictability, is inherent in many processes created by God, from hurricanes to viral assembly to genetic recombination to antibody production. Randomness means that the details of the future are unpredictable, and will stay that way regardless of scientific progress. That said, randomness is constrained by rules and often leads to complex patterns and macro-level order. More misconceptions about randomness no doubt lurk in all our minds, leading to suspicion when we hear phrases like, “evolution is random.” But hopefully, this post can help to clarify some of the confusion.

Notes

1. Philosophers of physics still debate whether there is some underlying deterministic structure to the universe, or whether events at the quantum level are indeterministic. See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/determinism-causal/#QuaMec. In either case, we are fundamentally limited in our ability to make predictions about the outcomes of quantum events.
2. The logistic map is one of the best-studied equations in dynamical systems theory. The particular values used in the figure were taken from Melanie Mitchell’s excellent book, Complexity: A Guided Tour, and were created using MATLAB.
3. Thanks to Isaac Yonemoto for pointing this out.

Writer David R. Wheeler writes that, “For homeschooling parents who want to teach their children that the earth is only a few thousand years old, the theory of evolution is a lie, and dinosaurs coexisted with humans, there is no shortage of materials. … This staunch rejection of modern science tends to characterize today's leading homeschool textbooks.”

But homeschooling evangelicals who embrace modern science are becoming more vocal about it, writes Wheeler, regardless of the “inevitable criticism” that comes with making that choice.

So where can these parents go to find textbooks that are both scientifically sound, yet still allow for God as the author of creation?

 Wheeler notes that one publisher in Grand Rapids is attempting to fill the gap, and also cites BioLogos’ Evolution and Christian Faith grants program as a promising source of materials that can help reframe the conversation for Christian parents.

Read the full article here!

DOUG LAUFFENBURGER: It could look like a lot of things. One way to envision what I mean is to put yourself back a hundred years. For instance, in 1913, an electronic computer was unimaginable. But using physics, quantum physics, leading to semiconductors and devices like that, people figured out over the next 20 to 30 years how you could build a machine to do calculations and so forth. And then, of course, all sorts of thing happened…

We’re roughly at that stage with biology, even though it seems like things are more imaginable because—and we don’t have to go strictly century by century here—because we can already guess the way some things might change, whereas in 1913 there was no inkling, really, as to what would happen in the computer revolution.

So, to enumerate some of the things that are conceivable—let’s just start with computers, because we were just there.

There’s a notion that computers get faster and cheaper by making their logic gates smaller, and how you improve a design with physics keeps bumping up against how you make these little units smaller. Well, using biology, the solution seems self-evident—you just line up the pieces of DNA, and if you put the right pieces of DNA in the right places, the resulting parts are so much smaller than the things we can do with physics. You can imagine, even though it’s just a theory now, computers continuing to become many times smaller and cheaper—and be made via environmentally benign manufacturing processes—through biomolecular construction.

Now that’s exciting from one point of view, but from another, it’s not that revolutionary, because you’re just using DNA as a piece of physics. It’s not really biology—it’s merely a biological molecule being used to make better physics.

For a different example, if you think about the way we make things, the way we manufacture plastics, gasoline, energy—we have to do all that using chemistry, and to make that chemistry happen, we have to input a lot of energy—in fact, one of the most costly industries in terms of energy usage is the energy industry. You have to put in so much energy to refine petroleum and things like that. And to make plastics, ceramics—things of that nature—is also very energy intensive, and it’s also where a lot of pollution comes from, because you’re mixing together all these chemicals that really didn’t want to be mixed together. You get what you want, but you get a lot of byproducts, toxins, etc.

Well, people have started to realize that a lot of this work can be redone through the use of biology. You can turn corn into fuel or plastic, and you can make magnetic or electrical storage devices out of biological units (viruses can pattern the crystals, so instead of using mixtures of toxic chemicals, you just pull the viruses with the right properties together). Right on this tabletop, you could make materials that by current manufacturing processes would otherwise cause a great amount of environmental hazard.

As for another exciting development—well, to preface, one of the problematic things about modern agriculture is the necessity of using fertilizers (there are insecticides to be concerned about, too), but fertilizer manufacturing is terrible for the environment. You have to make fertilizer out of ammonia and that’s a horribly polluting and energy-intensive manufacturing process. What you could potentially do, instead, is program into bacteria the genes that take nitrogen out of air, turning it into organic nitrogen then just scatter the bacteria onto the field—and you wouldn’t need to make ammonium using the current very caustic processes.

These are the sorts of things I mean—and we haven’t even touched on medicine, yet. People tend to think about medicinal advances, first, but before you even get to medicine, you can think about energy, manufacturing, materials, and agriculture. In 50 years, we should be able to do things in ways we don’t do them now, that will be cheaper, less toxic, less polluting, more efficient, and so forth.

ER: A lot of people are nervous about the idea of “programming” life. Can you respond to this fear as a Christian?

DL: As a Christian, I would say that God gave humankind dominion over the earth, to do good things—he gave us minds, a passion for understanding how things work, and then he put in this world all these fascinating processes, which, if we figured them out, we could do good things, could feed more people—could feed more people without causing extensive damage to the environment. And cure disease and injury. And the list goes on. I think all that is good, and that God would be pleased that we would be using His creation to live better—I’m not saying more luxuriously, but more happily, contentedly, with each other.

ER: But back to the topic—advances using biology in the next century. You had just mentioned medicine…

DL: So, yes, there’s also medicine. Now, obviously, in thinking about this, the use of stem cells comes to immediately the fore. There are a lot of diseases out there that you really do need to correct using cellular processes. Right now, we try to make these corrections through chemistry. For instance, we give you a pill, and that pill should interfere with something that’s going wrong in your body—and yet it’s really never adequate to just interfere with something that goes wrong in the body, because you don’t really set it right just by getting in the way of it.

The opportunity with stem cells is that you can say, “I’ll replace the cells in the body that are doing something wrong with cells that are actually doing it right again.” If you program cells to be neurons, heart cells, or bone cells, you can regenerate properly functioning physiology. Rather than, say, replacing a hip with a metal part, you could regenerate the bone, itself, or you could regenerate neurons in Alzheimer’s patients. Never in the past has medicine been able to regenerate a proper physiology; it’s only tried to replace it with an inadequate surrogate, or minimize how much damage a disease is doing. With the use of stem cells, you can actually imagine returning the body to its proper physiology.

A different use of stem cells is to generate human tissue in the laboratory for better studies of human physiology and pathology and improved testing of drug effectiveness and toxicity.  This will be a major advance over animal models, because of the significant disparities between animal physiology and human physiology.

A key point to emphasize is that there are different kinds of stem cells, which involve big differences in potential concerns. For Christians, clearly, stem cells derived from embryos present a tremendous ethical issue. Fortunately, a good proportion of stem cell technologies can be pursued using stem cells from adult tissue. These cells can be stimulated to develop into certain tissue-specific physiological behavior, or can now even be “re-programmed” to become quite similar to the more broadly flexible stem cells derived from embryos but now not requiring the embryonic source. Happily, the days of reliance on embryo-derived stem cells appear to be over for purposes of beneficial technologies.

We also should consider genomic medicine, and what’s attractive about that field is that with the way we do medicine now, which is chemistry-based—say you have a disease, and we might give you a pill to correct it—well, the biggest problem with that is that while I think this pill will help ameliorate your condition, maybe it won’t. Maybe that drug only works in ten percent of the patients and not ninety percent.

For example, consider cancer. You’ve got a particular kind of cancer, and we prescribe a certain treatment… well, hopefully you’re among the lucky ten percent, and you’ll be in much better shape in two or three years. If you’re not, then we’ve wasted your time. In fact, we’ve probably hurt you rather than helped you, because we’re using chemistry to interfere with things, and even though we might be reducing the damage of some things, we’re probably causing toxicity elsewhere in the system, because that same chemistry is also interfering over there.

So the value of genomic medicine is to get enough information about you through sequencing your genome that we can say, “Ah, for you this particular pill is not a good idea; it will actually do more damage than good. But for your brother, it’s likely to work, and the ratio of benefit to harm is much better.” This is the reason genomic medicine is more imminent—it’s what’s closest on the horizon to being realized—because we can use the same drugs we have now, we’ll just be using them more effectively. At the moment, we can sequence genomes, and we do have these treatments that help, and it’s just a matter of matching up these two technologies.

Now, on the other hand, when you think about genome sequencing, you can find out all sorts of things, and you have to decide, “What if I learn something negative?”

EDITOR’S NOTE: Join us next week as we continue the conversation about genomic medicine, bioengineering, and being a Christian in science.

This series is based on Ross Hastings’ presentation at the Vibrant Dance of Science and Faith Symposium in Austin, TX., October 26, 2010. The overall intent is to provide a biblical and theological basis for healthy and fruitful dialogue on the theology and science of origins. In today’s post, Dr. Hastings points out that unity among believers, especially in discussing potentially divisive issues, is a foundational theological truth.

The complete essay can be found here.

Christians are One as Jesus and the Father are One

Let us begin with some profound words about truth seeking written by Thomas Merton:

We make ourselves real by telling the truth. … To destroy truth with truth under the pretext of being sincere is a very insincere way of telling a lie … A man of sincerity is less interested in defending the truth than in stating it clearly, for he thinks that if the truth can be clearly seen it can very well take care of itself. Fear is perhaps the greatest enemy of candor.¹

My own interest in theology and science arises out of a curiosity to know the truth that takes care of itself in every realm of reality, and that sets us free. It is motivated by the presupposition that all truth is God’s and that all truth concerning the creation of the universe and its reconciliation is centered in the God-Man Jesus who said, “I am the truth” (John 14:6).

My interest in science and faith and their integration comes also out of two vocations in which disbelief that this is possible has often been expressed by people I have met, some who are people of faith, and many who are not. I have found, over the years of playing the occasional golf game with people I don’t know, that when, during the round, my vocation as a pastor comes out, they are often terribly embarrassed about the expletives they have been uttering in the round up to that point. When I tell them that I played a lot of rugby and am used to this kind of language, and it’s between them and God anyway, they are not always put at ease.

When I tell them that I have a PhD in chemistry, they are utterly bewildered, and usually say, “How do you put those two things together?” Their reactions epitomize the Enlightenment dichotomization of fact (the realm of science) and faith (the realm of religion), and have energized me towards this science-faith dialogue, and in recent years, back to the question of origins.

The dictum of Augustine and Anslem that the pursuit of truth is always a “faith seeking understanding” prospect has for me been the basis on which I have sought to debunk the scientism of the secularist on the one hand, and on the other hand, to encourage Christians to become aware of science and to embolden fledgling young scientists to pursue truth fearlessly in careers in science.

My interest in Christian unity in the dialogue on origins comes out of having served churches in which all shades of opinion were present and how I, with fellow leaders, have sought to manage this. I want therefore to bring my reflections on the foundations of unity and forward motion towards unity in the context of an exposition of Ephesians 4. I write as a pastor or pastoral theologian and so I shall seek to do so in the manner in which a pastor should, through exposition of the Word of God.

Before looking at this passage however, I want to charge it with the elements of the prayer of Jesus on unity, John 17:20-23. I suspect that Paul may have been conscious of this prayer as he wrote this section of his epistle.

20 My prayer is not for them alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message, 21 that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me. 22 I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one—23 I in them and you in me—so that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

As we eavesdrop here on the inner communion of the Trinity, we get to hear what’s on the heart of the Son as he pours it out to his Father. And what we hear is his deepest desire for the church—its unity.

Jesus defines it as a unity grounded in two unions—that between the Father and the Son (Trinitarian union) and that between believers who are in the Father and the Son (participatory union). The former is brought about by the incarnation or hypostatic union of God with humanity, and the latter in the indwelling of the Spirit, which brings about the regeneration and incorporation of saints into Christ as His church.

There can be no more profound aspect of the gospel than this, one which does not negate the forensic aspect of the gospel, but which precedes it in God’s intention for humanity, and surpasses it. These words about our organic unity in the triune God need to pervade our deliberations.

With this in mind, my next post will look closely at Ephesians 4:1-6 and what that passage has to say to us about Christian unity.

Read his moving speech here.