My walk in the scientific/evangelical world – Who am I?

First, a little history. While I was working towards my doctorate in Bioengineering at the University of Washington, my husband and I attended a Presbyterian church in Seattle. Young and newly married, we chose to help in Sunday School, and found our niche teaching second graders there for almost 10 years. During that time I was very involved in the scientific world and surrounded by a university community that had a real appreciation for science. Wrapped up as I was in the lab, focusing on my dissertation, and living in a climate of serious inquiry and study, I was unaware of any significant disconnections between science and faith. Science was actively integrated with faith from the pulpit of our church, and in turn, we always loved to bring little bits of science into our lessons—even to the point of using sediment deposits in the Black Sea as evidence of a regionally-based ‘flood’ event thousands of years ago during our lessons about Noah’s ark. No one complained.

As I loved research, I continued to work in a lab at UW once I finished my PhD. But I also had two babies while completing my dissertation, and eventually found it challenging to balance work and family. When my husband was relocated to San Diego, I took that difficult uprooting as an opportunity to step back from labwork and spend more time with preschoolers. Leaving life at a fast-paced urban research university for the relaxed and resort-like coastal suburbs of San Diego County was another kind of culture shock, compounded by the fact that we found looking for a new church to be particularly hard. After some consultation with friends of friends, we stepped out of our Mainstream Protestant comfort zone and visited a Calvary Chapel.

There was certainly an adjustment period (eventually we stopped doing a double-take every time we saw the board shorts and flip-flops on Sunday morning – even on the stage!), but over time we were able to plug into a dynamic evangelical community. We found the vibrant, Christ-centered church to be a great place to make deep and lasting connections with the people, both through small groups and by serving in Children’s Ministry. Making a personally quite revolutionary decision to fully step away from the busy life of a researcher, I found a new calling when I took on a part time job leading the church’s 2nd and 3rd Grade program.

A surprising disconnect in the faith community

I now find myself spending my weekends with over a hundred kids and volunteers, and it has been a great adventure. However, it has also been through this ministry that I discovered first hand the uncomfortable disconnect between science and the evangelical church. At first it was just a few throw-away comments from fellow believers in church: dismissal of museum exhibits, eye-rolling at the ancient geology of the Grand Canyon, etc. Of course, I had heard rumors of such thinking, but I was a little surprised to find it to be so common in the Evangelical community. Many people I knew were rejecting large swathes of science outright. Sometimes I give out prizes to the kids in my class—trinkets and other insignificant plastic things that kids love—and some of the items I had in our “prize box” were “dino eggs with dino facts.” To my amazement, these items brought on complaints from parents because of their reference to the age of the dinosaurs some 65 million years ago.

Meanwhile, my husband—an environmental engineer with a background in Geology—was serving at the church with older kids. In his class he often heard that favorite question from Christian kids, “How do the dinosaurs fit into the creation story?” But the only answer he’d ever heard in response was the explanation that dinosaurs were obviously on the ark, and somehow became extinct after the flood. He is the most easy-going person ever, but he was taken aback by this wholesale dismissal of geologic history and by the lack of a more nuanced discussion of Scripture. At that point we began to ask around, and learned that, yes, this is a common way of thinking in evangelical circles.

These attitudes about science and the Bible seemed especially prevalent among the many home schooling families in our community. More than half of my church coworkers homeschool or send their kids to Christian schools. Several of these wonderful folks were homeschooled themselves, and very few attended secular universities. Many of the children and families that I minister to each week are also homeschooling families, and for the first time I became troubled by what they were learning about science and the natural world. I attended public school and secular universities both for undergraduate and graduate studies, and (after much thought and discussion) we chose to send our own kids to public schools, not least because we want them to have great training in science and math. While we are fortunate enough to live in a community with challenging public schools well equipped to prepare kids in those areas, I want the same for homeschooled kids, as well. All Christian young people should be able to both excel in science and grow in their understanding of the God of Scripture, whether they’re taught in institutional settings or at home. I only wish I could better trust available homeschooling science curriculum materials to achieve that end.

Is there cause for concern? Does it really matter?

One can correctly argue that Jesus’ incarnation and resurrection are the central beliefs and values of the Christian faith. In the end, does it matter what we teach our kids about origins or the age of the Universe? What harm is there in these black and white beliefs held by good people doing good things?

I believe that it does matter, for several reasons:

1. We have generation of Christian young people who are not trained in scientific principles that will allow them to meaningfully contribute to fields such as cosmology, geology, biology, etc. Our universities especially need an evangelical presence!
2. Thoughtful, scientifically-minded people—both young and old—will be pushed AWAY from the evangelical community. I know that I could not attend a church that dismisses scientific evidence in order to fit nature’s narrative into preconceived ideas, or one where scientists are actively mocked.
3. The faith of homeschooled and other Christian kids can be challenged when they have their first college classes on geology, evolutionary biology, etc. Many will reach a point where they think they have to choose between their faith and what the scientific world tells them about the created order.
4. Simply, evangelicals are in danger of looking a bit ridiculous to reasonable and educated people when they appear so fearful of science, making it easier for non-Christians to dismiss the gospel message.

Exploratory Efforts –Communicating God’s Revelation in Nature

Despite these experiences and concerns, my overall impression of the evangelical community’s perspective on science is that in most areas, everything is fine. But it seems that sensitivity around a few points—particularly origins, the age of the earth and climate change—limits open discussion even of more general scientific issues, and as wonderful as they are, our pastoral staff rarely invokes natural wonders to illustrate doctrine, whether speaking to adults or kids.

As a Christian, a scientist and an educator, I particularly want the kids I work with to know that it is good to wonder about the world around us and say “God Did It – But How?” More than that, I want them to know that they do not have to be afraid of the answers to those questions. So I ask myself, “Is there anything I can do?” As it turns out, I’ve concluded that there are ways that I (like any of us) can help, even if the efforts are incrementally small at first. Our church hosts a tremendous summer camp that teaches kids Bible stories and worship, but also gives children a chance to choose an “elective” and learn more about subjects like art, music, cooking, a sport, or science. Each summer more than 1,000 kids attend this outreach at our church campus, and I was privileged this past summer to be able to “coach” science and write up a fun science curriculum that dovetailed with the various Bible stories the kids were hearing.

The practice of science became a wonderful avenue for sharing God’s love and the Salvation Story whether I pulled ideas for experiments directly from the Bible (such as creating, testing and optimizing sling shots like David) or used the stories more allegorically; extracting DNA from strawberries (always a hit with kids) illustrated our uniqueness in God’s eyes, while creating a solar music box demonstrated the beauty of living in God’s light vs. hiding in the darkness. I found that this was an excellent place in which to bring young Christians (and non-Christians) into an understanding and appreciation of basic scientific principles in conjunction with communicating spiritual truth. My hope is that those lessons will open their eyes to further inquiry as they grow up and move on through junior high, high school, and—for some—beyond.

In the end, I was inspired to write out a preliminary curriculum, combining scriptural lessons with science experiments. This effort led me to co-author Wonders In Our World: Insights From God's Two Books, a book that further explains the complementarities of God’s Two Books – the book of nature and Scripture. While materials like these can be used in church settings such as the summer camp at our Calvary Chapel, my hope is that they will become a resource for Christian families all year long—especially for those homeschoolers I love so much. A full curriculum may still be a ways off (perhaps I’ll have more to share about that in a future post), but in the meantime, I’m honored to be able to draw on both Scripture and science to share my joy in Christ and his creation.

Keeping History Safe

In the cold morning air with the sun not yet over the ridge, the place to begin preparation for summiting Mount Darwin is to ponder the reasonableness of miracles. Many Totalizers would like to ban miracles from university consideration and inquiry. Trouble is: human history is awash with credible people reporting miracles.

Modern academic tradition tends to try and maintain order. For historians it behooves us professionally to avoid accounts of alleged spiritual events. We find comfort in a little logical gymnastics that keeps history safe for us to wander in, a deceptively formulaic avoidance method that helps us avoid what people are telling us about extraordinary events in the past.

David Hume popularly articulated this logical gymnastics in an essay titled “Of Miracles” that was eventually printed in Enquires Concerning Human Understanding (1748). “I flatter myself,” Hume triumphantly proclaimed, “that I have discovered an argument . . . which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures.”

His everlasting check on superstition begins with a circular argument that because miracles can’t happen, a reasonable person should not even listen to reports of them. Hume taught that though the normal job of a historian was to listen to the testimony that comes down to us from the past, there is a point at which you can close your ears. Hume knew that historical testimony can get wild, so he came up with a way to domesticate the wildness, a way to make history a zoo rather than allow it to be a jungle. His “Of Miracles” has been tremendously influential in the discipline of human history over the last two hundred and fifty years, not because his ideas are strong, but because his ideas are useful. Get rid of “superstitious delusions,” and the discipline of history can be turned from a safari into a form of home economics. Hume’s domestication of history is seductively simple. Instead of following the Aristotelian tradition of linking the credibility of hard-to-believe testimony to the credibility of the testifier, Hume recommended disregarding the testifier and focusing only on the testimony. This effectively removed the persuasive power from hard-to-believe testimony. Miracles need the credibility of an eyewitness in order to have persuasive power. Hume cut the power source from the unwanted testimony.

Essentially, Hume adopted the modeling technique that Darwin later used and is best seen in Global Positioning System (GPS) units. Hume recommended gathering testimony from the past and every region to create a general model of what humans generally experience. Using this mass of information, one should generalize standards of common experience. Now if anyone reports a miracle, the alleged event can’t be true because it does not conform to the generalized standards of common experience. (Of course, Hume had already refused to allow that any reports of miracles could be used even to generalize common experience.) It’s tricky. Its logic is circular. But it works to weed out awkward, quirky information. It is as if a domineering GPS unit created a sphere to serve as an abstraction for the earth, then insisted that the earth can’t have wobbling poles and flattening in the upper latitudes because the sphere in the GPS shows it can’t be true. Given a useful and trustworthy GPS, don’t listen to a scientist who might tell you something different than what the GPS tells you.

The circularity of this argument has been noted ever since Hume first proposed it, but Hume was a good writer and said what a lot of people wanted to hear. Miracles are impossible so miracle reports can’t be true. Don’t even listen to reports of them.

Balancing Likelihoods

Also embedded in Hume’s essay is the awkward “rule of logic,” most often called “Balancing Likelihoods.” By combining math and logic in an odd way, Hume’s “Of Miracles “ offered another way for historians to avoid thinking about miracles. Balancing Likelihoods has many names but is probably best stated by David Hackett Fischer, in his Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, as “the rule of probability:”

“[A]ll inferences from empirical evidence are probabilistic. It is not, therefore, sufficient to demonstrate merely that A was possibly the case. A historian must determine, as best he can, the probability of A in relation to the probability of alternatives. In the same fashion he cannot disprove A by demonstrating that not-A was possible, but only by demonstrating that not-A was more probable than A. This is the rule of probability.”

This seems to be practical but is impossible. Balancing Likelihoods, in the way described by Fischer, cannot be used by historians in any normal practice. It is a talisman to keep history mentally safe from the wildness that is reported to exist. Logicians, especially mathematicians, have long criticized intellectual constructions like this. The “probability” that Fischer writes about is seemingly mathematical, but the math is simply implied to give a sense of strength to human feelings.

Before Hume wrote “Of Miracles” probabilistic logic had been advancing rapidly and there was a great hope that mathematical analogies would strengthen human thinking—even Christian apologetics. “Pascal’s Wager,” the most famous mathematical apologetic from the seventeenth century, equated eternal salvation with mathematical infinity and then applied it to a gambling formula. Antoine Arnauld, in The Port-Royal Logic (1662), and John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Discourse on Miracles (1706), carried probabilistic math and logic into the handling of reported miracles. A half-century later, however, Hume reacted against Arnauld and Locke’s teachings that mathematical analogies could help in the discussion of the credibility of miracles. Hume insisted that to handle a reported miracle, a historian had to create two separate ratios, pro and con, for believability. The ratios were then to be weighed against each other. This is Fischer’s “rule of probability” quoted above. In the language of Hume’s era, this was proclaimed as the “calculus of good sense.”

Lorraine Daston, in Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (1988), offers an excellent study of Hume and the many eighteenth-century mathematicians who wanted to help bring rigorous quantitative thinking to what today would be called the humanities. Daston writes that by the 1840s, mathematicians realized that “the ‘calculus of good sense’ had become antithetical to good sense,” and that today most of what these early probabilists were trying to do is considered “patently absurd.”

In 1901, one of America’s preeminent philosopher-mathematician-logicians, Charles Sanders Peirce, wrote three essays attacking the way historians had adopted Hume’s bad logic: “A Preliminary Chapter, Toward an Examination of Hume’s Argument Against Miracles, in its Logic and in its History,” “Hume’s Arguments Against Miracles, and the Idea of Natural Law,” and “On the Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents especially from Testimonies.” Peirce showed that historians are in error when they talk of judging testimony by balancing probabilities because “in a scientific sense, there are no ‘probabilities’ to be judged.”

Probability, Peirce wrote, “is the ratio of the frequency of occurrence of a specific event to a generic event.” A testimony “is neither a specific event, nor a generic event, but an individual event.” Peirce further pointed out that what people were justifying by claiming Balancing Likelihoods was really simply relating “what they prefer to do” to what they don’t prefer. “Likelihood is merely a reflection of our preconceived ideas.”

Historians like me who teach in universities about the reasonable credibility of Jesus’ resurrection need to be students of Peirce not Hume on the subject of assessing the credibility of reports that come down to us from ancient history. Dealing wisely with reports of events verging on the incredible is just part of the normal job of being grounded in the social study of our complex human past.

“Come to history as a doubter,” Richard Marius advises in a historical methods manual. “Skepticism is one of the historian’s finest qualities. Historians don’t trust their sources. . . . Nothing is quite so destructive to a historian’s reputation as to present conclusions that prove gullibility.”

But Marius is wrong. In practice, historians have to trust more than doubt. In practice, historians, especially ancient historians, can’t rely on doubting. Historians have to be close listeners, discerning listeners, wise listeners, who sometimes have to make harmonies and stretch for belief.

Quantum Leap: How John Polkinghorne Found God in Science and Religion

In the film Nacho Libre, Jack Black plays a preposterous worker in a Mexican orphanage with a secret life as an incompetent professional wrestler. There is a scene where Black and his scrawny wrestling partner assess their competition – two vicious-looking men in the opposite corner. It appears to Black that his life as a wrestler will end immediately in serious injury. He says to his partner, in a horrible Spanish accent, “Pray to the Lord for strength.”

His partner immediately replies, in only a slightly better accent, “I don’t believe in God. I believe in science.”

While that bit of dialogue appears in a comedy film, it echoes statements made in serious conversations throughout the world. Conventional wisdom seems to say that one either believes in God, or one believes in science. There is no third option.

We don’t believe that at all, and neither does the deep thinker we profile in this book. We hope you won’t either, when you are finished reading. Much has been written about faith and science – the history of supposedly major conflicts and minor harmonies between the two; the rational and irrational accounts from people who read just one of the two books set before us – the Bible and the Book of Nature; the condemnation and condescension of one group toward the other. There is a lot of diatribe, but not much dialogue.

We illuminate this issue by writing about John Polkinghorne. We chose this strategy because it involves a story. What we offer is not a conventional biography of John Polkinghorne. We didn’t read his correspondence, interview his family members, students and colleagues, search data bases for public and private records. Instead, we wrote the story of John Polkinghorne, probably the most significant voice in this generation’s conversation about science and religion. But we also unfold some bigger issues. How do we know Truth? How does a leading scientist think about the more mysterious aspects of faith -- prayer, miracles, life after death, resurrection? How should people of faith approach science, especially when new scientific discoveries appear to contradict their religious beliefs? To get at those questions, we tell the story of John Polkinghorne.

We conducted many interviews with Polkinghorne. Wherever the book shows a quote from him without an endnote, it came from a personal interview. The interviews occurred from 2007-2010 in the following locations: Quincy, Massachusetts; a monastery in Venice, Italy; the President’s Lodge at Queens’ College (while the president was away) in Cambridge, England; the chapels at Trinity College, Queens’ College, Trinity Hall and Westcott Seminary – all in Cambridge; the parlor of Queens’ College; the Senior Combination Room at Queens’ College, under both his own portrait and that of the Queen; the study in his home in Cambridge; the sitting room in his home; walking from the vicarage to his old parish church in Blean, England; in his car to and from Blean; at the Good Shepherd Church in Cambridge; and in pubs throughout Cambridge.

As if to cosmically underscore the need for this book, when we approached Passport Control at London’s Heathrow Airport for a final series of interviews with Polkinghorne, the officer asked why we were coming to England.

“For a conference at Oxford,” we said.

“What’s the conference about?” he said.

“God and Physics,” we said.

“God and Physics, eh?” He paused and looked at us. “Which side are you on?”

Exactly.

Those interested in reading more from John Polkinghorne should view the BioLogos sponsored video, "An Afternoon with John Polkinghorne," which can be found here.

John Polkinghorne remembers the day when some of his colleagues thought he had lost his mind. He was already famous as a physicist for his work in helping explain the existence of quarks and gluons, the world’s smallest known particles. He was a member of England’s Royal Society, one of the highest honors bestowed on a scientist –Isaac Newton is also a member. His students at Cambridge University had likewise moved into leading roles in scientific research.

It was the end of the academic year, and he and some other professors had gathered in his office for a brief meeting. At the conclusion, they gathered their papers, ready to leave.

“Before you go,” Polkinghorne said, “I have something to tell you.”

The tiny audience settled back into their chairs.

“I am leaving the university to enter the priesthood. I will be enrolling in seminary next year.”

There was stunned silence in the room for several seconds, then murmuring, some of it kindly supportive. The lone Scotsman in the audience, an atheist, was both wistful and wary: “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said. Others later wondered if John Polkinghorne was committing intellectual suicide.

His decision brought to light a much larger question that has been discussed for centuries, well before Darwin and Dawkins: “What Is the Relationship Between Faith and Science?” In the years following this decision to leave the physics world, where he specialized in one kind of unseen realities, and enter the spiritual world where he explored other unseen realities, Polkinghorne has become one of the most significant spokesmen for making the relationship between faith and science one of harmony, not conflict.

He has written more than 30 books on theology and science (and the relationship between the two), served on national boards to determine ethical standards for scientific research, and was knighted by the Queen for his contributions in ethics and science. He is the founding president of the International Society for Science and Religion. He was awarded the Templeton Prize – the highest honor given in regard to the relationship between science and religion. He has studied and lectured on most continents, at the most prestigious locations, including Yale, Princeton, and the Smithsonian Institution, and appears regularly on documentaries regarding the beginning of the universe, Albert Einstein, C.S. Lewis, and countless other topics. He was featured recently on The Science Channel in the U.S. for the program Through the Wormhole, narrated by actor Morgan Freeman.

While much is made in the popular media and some religious circles that one is either a person of science or a person of faith, he has never seen how the two could be in conflict. As both a physicist and a priest, he embraces and embodies both.

One thing that did not change when he moved from academia to ministry was that both involved a quest for truth. In both science and religion he moves from evidence to interpretation to motivated belief or conclusion – a process he calls “bottom-up thinking.”

After serving as a parish priest just up the hill from the Canterbury Cathedral, Polkinghorne returned to the world of academia in Cambridge – first as the dean of chapel, and ultimately as president of Queens’ College until he retired. He continues to study, write and administer the sacraments.

I met Rev. Polkinghorne at a theology conference in Boston in 2007, at the suggestion of an editor who had an idea for a book. The idea was to make the book biographical in form, so that the world could read about the life of this very fascinating man and important thinker. But the book would be bigger than that, too. It would use Rev. Polkinghorne as a launch-point to then discuss bigger questions about the relationship between science and faith. How can a scientist really believe in miracles? How, or why, does a scientist pray? And how could a physicist possibly believe in the Resurrection of Jesus? Behind these questions is, essentially, this one: Aren’t science and faith fundamentally at odds with one another? The answer is no, and the reason is that John Polkinghorne embodies the relationship between the two. I interviewed him at his home in Cambridge several times over the next few years, as well as in Venice, where he was lecturing at a God and Laws of Nature conference at the Venice Institute, and at Oxford, where the entire God and Physics conference was dedicated to Polkinghorne’s work and to commemorate his 80th birthday.

The resulting book, Quantum Leap: How John Polkinghorne Found God in Science and Religion, by Dean Nelson and Karl Giberson, will be released by Lion-Hudson Press of Oxford, in 2011.

The book captures Polkinghorne’s views on the big cosmic questions regarding Evil, the Trinity, Evolution, the Big-Bang Theory, Adam and Eve, Intelligent Design, Atheism, the Resurrection, Salvation, Eternity, and other issues that seem to pit science against faith.

Atheists, especially those in the present realm who sell millions of books, have a faith of their own, Polkinghorne says. It may be faith in selfish competition, in Marxism, or in freedom to live as one pleases without responsibility, but there are often elements of faith, nonetheless. Sometimes the faith is in those who proclaim to not have a faith.

A theme that emerges in both his writings and in personal conversation with Polkinghorne is the phrase “But that’s not the whole story.” Science, life, God, the universe, are always surprising us with something else, or Something Else, he says. So after all these years of research and reflection, Polkinghorne is comfortable with the posture that there is always more. To everything. Looking at the world both through the eye of faith and the eye of science improves the vision over what using just one eye or the other would provide, he says.

He appeared recently at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, where I teach with Darrel Falk of BioLogos. He gave a 30-minute lecture on the relationship between faith and science and then let me interview him for 30 minutes. The interview has the feel of a couple of old friends talking.

“He doesn’t do all the work for you,” said one of his former parishioners. “He’ll discuss things with you and then say, ‘You can do some of this thinking yourself, you know.’”

That’s our hope as you watch this program – you’ll hear some things that will make you want to think more deeply. Because there’s always more to the story.

(I must add an immediate qualification to this brief history: Francis Collins did not work on this project after he moved to the NIH. As is often the case with co-authored works, the authors played different roles. Francis’s contribution was to get the whole FAQ project started and work closely with the original writers and editors on the first round of material, most of which ended up on The BioLogos Forum.)

The Language of Science and Faith shares and even embodies the very inspiration that launched BioLogos—the desire to help people find answers to “Genuine Questions” about relating scientific accounts of origins to their faith in God as creator. As our many visitors to this site know, the “pre-history” of BioLogos was Francis Collins’s publication of The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief in 2007. The book went on to become a bestseller and even now, almost 4 years later the book continues to be near the top of the best-selling books in its area. As I write these words a few days after Christmas, it is #1 on the “science and religion” list at Amazon, a powerful testimony to both the importance of this topic and the winsome writing style and testimony of its author.

The Language of God told the story of how Francis found harmony between his science and his Christian faith. He is a world-class scientist—leading the Human Genome Project to a successful completion and going on to become the head of the National Institutes of Health, where he presently works. But he is also a committed believer. His story moved readers who were wrestling with questions of faith and science, and seeking the place of rest that Collins had found in his own journey.

Letters and emails poured in, asking Francis for wisdom and insight. Readers wanted to dig deeper. Many asked questions not addressed in The Language of God. Soon Francis was buried in a pile of “Frequently Asked Questions.” Addressing these questions individually was simply not possible, but many of them were passionate and came from people with real struggles. Ignoring them was not an option. BioLogos was Francis’s response to this felt need.

Not surprisingly, the BioLogos website launched with a series of FAQ’s in which various experts helped BioLogos staff writers address key issues in their fields—from biblical studies and theology to the history of science, from biology to physics, and everything in between. The experts included such leading thinkers as Denis Alexander, Jeff Schloss, Owen Gingerich, Darrel Falk, Alister McGrath, Ernest Lucas, Ron Numbers, and Ted Davis.

The FAQ format requires short, stand-alone answers to work well, and it became apparent that there would be value in a more systematic treatment of these issues. The mission of The Language of Science and Faith is to survey these same issues but in a more wide-ranging way that is only possible in a book. By rewriting all of the original material, adding fresh material where needed, and working with the editors at InterVarsity, I have tried to create a coherent and consistent style that will help readers stay with the themes as they unfold.

The book groups topics thematically, allowing a reader to get a global sense of the issues connected to each topic. Throughout the book, we built carefully on each topic, hoping to take the reader by the hand, so to speak, from one topic to the next in a way that would let them dig steadily deeper without feeling like they were getting in over their heads.

The book begins with the evidence for evolution and the great age of the earth. As readers of this blog know very well by now, this evidence is compelling and must be taken seriously. In fact, it is the strength of this very evidence that requires books like this and projects like BioLogos. If the evidence was weak and piecemeal, then we could simply withhold assent and maintain a more traditional view. But the evidence does not let us do that, and we make this case in the first two chapters.

Once we accept this evidence, the questions emerge and are the subject of the next two chapters, which look at ways to relate science and religion in general, and science and scripture in particular. Unless a harmony can be found, there can be no “coming to peace with science” as BioLogos president Darrel Falk titled his wonderful book on this topic. We believe, of course, that harmony can be found, and we lay out that case. But this leads to another question: If harmony can be found so readily, why is Darwin’s theory of evolution so controversial?

The controversy surrounding Darwin’s theory is a complex sociological and cultural problem, which we unfold in a chapter. From atheists who want evolution to be a weapon against religion, to biblical literalists who want the Bible to be a weapon against evolution, there is no shortage of people with agendas to create controversy.

The constant presence of controversy creates the impression that this discussion is an endless quarrel. This is far from true, and we include a chapter on the fine-tuning of the universe to make exactly that point. The many features of our universe that are fine-tuned for life do not explain themselves and, while we caution against leaping to the conclusion that “God is the explanation for fine-tuning,” we do suggest that the universe appears to have the sort of deeply rational, purposeful character that a Christian would expect, even before looking at it from the perspective of science.

The final chapter, titled “The Grand Narrative of Creation,” offers a speculative look at the scientific creation story through biblical and theological lenses. We suggest, tentatively, that the affirmations Christians want to make on behalf of Genesis resonate nicely with what science has discovered about origins.

The Language of Science and Faith does not seek to break new scholarly ground. Our target audience is the evangelical church—the tens of millions of Bible-believing Christians who are prepared to engage contemporary science, rather than simply reject it. We were thus quite thrilled when Dr. Joel C. Hunter -- pastor of the Northland Church in Longwood, Florida, an enthusiastic participant in our New York Workshops, and one of America’s religious leaders -- gave us this endorsement for the cover of the book:

"As a pastor, I am constantly searching for resources that will guide people to the fullness of God. I care that my congregation be attracted toward God's artistry, moved by his majesty and intellectually challenged by his sovereignty. This book is at the top of my recommendations both as an evaluation of theories of creation and as a devotional that prompts us to revere the Creator."

Over the course of the next few weeks, I will be offering reflections on the development of this book, some excerpts, as well as exploring some of the themes of the book in greater detail.

Be sure to bookmark the new landing page for The Language of Science and Faith to stay up to date with the latest news about the book!

“According to scientific materialism, reality is ultimately impersonal… though this view of existence proved initially liberating in that it released humans from any sense of obligation to an externally imposed system of morality, it has also proved profoundly and literally dispiriting. If the conscious realities that comprise our personhood have no lasting existence, if life and mind are nothing more than unintended ephemera of the material cosmos, then, as the existential philosophers have recognized, our lives can have no lasting meaning or ultimate purpose. Without a purpose driven universe, there can be no ‘purpose-driven life.’”¹

Meyer, then, seems to be highly motivated to articulate an apologetic to counter the purposeless he sees in “materialistic” explanations.

In contrast, adopting an EC/BioLogos – type approach means being willing to give up an anti-evolutionary apologetic. Accepting that God created through what we observe as a natural process deflates any attempt to argue for His existence based on natural phenomena that science has yet to explain. For a dyed-in-the-wool presuppositional apologist, this is madness. Still, we’ve been here before. Preaching a “crucified Messiah” had what can only be described as negative apologetics value for Paul: it was foolishness for Gentiles and a serious stumbling block for Jews.

With these thoughts in mind, I was pleased to meet author Rachel Held Evans² at the BioLogos conference earlier this month. (You can see her thoughts on the meeting here). Rachel grew up in Dayton Tennessee, home of the infamous Scopes Monkey trial of 1925. Rachel attended Bryan College (named in honor of William Jennings Bryan, the prosecutor that convicted schoolteacher John Scopes of teaching evolution); she is the daughter of a Bryan professor; Kurt Wise was one of her instructors. In short, she grew up in a world firmly devoted to anti-evolutionary Christian apologetics.

Evolving in Monkey Town is the story of how cracks begin to appear in the façade of Rachel’s comfortable world, with its ready answers for difficult questions. Eventually, most of what she has known comes crashing down around her, leaving her to sort through the pieces and reevaluate what being a Jesus-follower is all about.

Her descent into doubt is a poignant section of the book:

“On the outside, I embodied all the expectations I had for myself going into college. I was confident, articulate, ready to change the world. But on the inside, something different was happening. I started to have doubts.

You might say that the apologetics movement had created a monster. I’d gotten so good at critiquing all the fallacies of opposing worldviews, at searching for truth through objective analysis, that it was only a matter of time before I turned the same skeptical eye upon my own faith.”

As her story unfolds, we journey with her as she asks the hard questions: what exactly is orthodox Christianity, and what are merely “false fundamentals”? Does the faith stand or fall with a literal interpretation of Genesis? How can a loving God be reconciled with the genocides He commands in the Old Testament? Is there a place for mystery, paradox and tension when you’ve been raised on a worldview claiming certainty? And after the dust settles, what about this Jesus character, anyway?

What sets Evolving in Monkey Town apart is that it takes the abstract ideas discussed in more scholarly works and incarnates them in a person. Where other books strive to reach an answer, we join with Rachel as she struggles to find a way to live in the questions. This work is significant not because it advances scholarly dialogue on the topics it covers (though strangely, it does that too) but because Rachel is a representative voice that an apologetics-infatuated church desperately needs to hear. How does faith survive when what one took for granted as part-and-parcel of the faith evaporates? Is there a place where those “Already Gone” can come back to Jesus?

What really made this book stand out for me was the refreshing honesty and depth of the story. It drew me in, hooked me early, and it didn’t let go. Most science/faith/worldview/Biblical interpretation books aren’t exactly page-turners (sorry Pete). This one is: I read it straight through in one sitting (it’s over 200 pages) and felt it ended far too quickly. It’s deep enough for the scholar’s shelf and easily engaging enough for the beach. I didn’t think I’d ever put a book in that category. It’s delightfully well-written, funny, and keenly insightful. I laughed, I cried, I bought the T-shirt. If you read one book on the science/faith continuum this summer, this is the one you should read. Y’all get yourselves over to Rachel’s blog and order one.

To read more about Rachel's faith journey, see her recent blog.

Notes

1. Signature in the Cell p. 449.

2. I’ve always enjoyed noting folks who have proper sentences for names. In her case, that’s the best reason I’ve seen for keeping a maiden name as part of a married name!

We all love survival stories, which is perhaps why I like to compare my own faith journey to one--though with considerably less blood and suspense.

You see, my faith shouldn’t be alive. By all accounts, it should have perished the moment I started asking questions about faith and science. All my life I’d been taught that I had to choose—between believing the Bible and believing my science book, between honoring God and embracing evolution. To accept one was to effectively kill the other, I learned. They couldn’t both survive. They were incompatible.

And yet here I am—a girl who loves Jesus and accepts evolution, alive to tell the tale.

Survival stories usually begin in a dramatic setting, and mine is no different. For most of my life I’ve lived in Dayton, Tennessee, home of the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925. Located in the buckle of the Bible Belt, Dayton is not the most convenient place to question a literal interpretation of Genesis. Most people here believe that evolution is part of an anti-Christian worldview, and the wounds from getting called “yokels” and “ignorants” by the press during the trial are still being nursed today.

I attended a small Christian college in town named after William Jennings Bryan, where one of the most popular professors at the time was a leading young earth creationist. This professor often told the story of how, as a sophomore in high school, he had dreams of becoming a scientist, but could not reconcile the theory of evolution with the creation account found in the Bible. So one night, he took a pair of scissors and a newly-purchased Bible and began cutting out every verse he believed would have to be removed to believe in evolution. By the time he was finished, he said he couldn’t even lift the Bible without it falling apart. That was when he decided, “Either Scripture was true and evolution was wrong or evolution was true and I must toss out the Bible.”

Having operated within this paradigm for so much of my life, I experienced a major crisis of faith when I encountered the overwhelming scientific evidence in support of evolutionary theory soon after graduating from college.

On the one hand, I felt betrayed. Pastors and teachers had assured me that science supported a 6,000-year-old earth and that only atheists with an agenda against Christianity believed it was older. And yet everything from the fossil record to biodiversity to starlight to DNA seemed to confirm evolutionary theory as sound, with the overwhelming majority scientists affirming it.

On the other hand, I was afraid to accept undeniable truth I’d encountered. I didn’t want to walk away from my faith. I didn’t want to throw out the Bible. I didn’t want to reject God. But everything I’d been told up to that point led me to believe I had to choose. Doubt is difficult to describe to those who have never experienced it. What’s most frightening about it is how one question leads to another, which leads to another, which leads to another, creating a sort of domino effect out of your skepticism and fear. I lay awake for hours at night, struggling with this conflict between my intellectual integrity and my faith. I begged God to “help me in my unbelief,” but His presence seemed to drift farther and farther away with every seemingly irreconcilable conflict between reason and faith.

I thought for sure my faith was a goner.

The first rescue helicopter came in the form of Francis Collins’ “The Language of God.” A friend recommended it, and it was the first time I’d ever read the work of a scientist so passionately committed to both his Christian faith and accepted science. The fact that it was even possible to be a Christian and believe in evolution gave me hope.

In the third chapter, Collins includes a quote from St. Augustine, who—centuries before Darwin made his landmark observations—warned Christians against interpreting the first two chapters of Genesis too strictly. Said Augustine, “In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.”¹

That was when I realized that my hyper-literalist interpretation of Genesis 1-2 was going down, and it was taking my faith with it.

I couldn’t let that happen.

So like a survivor cutting off his arm to escape from beneath a boulder, I severed my fundamentalist approach to Scripture. (Okay, so it wasn’t really that dramatic. Let’s just say I spent some time on the BioLogos site, ordered “The Lost World of Genesis One” by John Walton, and managed to survive the faith crisis with my love for God and for the Bible intact.)

So why tell my story?

Because I wasn’t alone out there in the wilderness of doubt, and not everyone’s faith survived. I have friends who walked away from their Christian faith right when their gifts and talents could have served it best. They walked away because they thought being a Christian demanded willful ignorance and fear of truth. They walked away because they felt betrayed by their pastors, parents, and professors. They walked away because they believed the lie that they had to choose.

And that makes me angry sometimes.

It seems like for every survival story, there is a story of loss…which is why I believe the BioLogos Foundation is so important. We’ve got to work together to reverse this trend. We’ve got to send out more rescue helicopters to young people around the country who are desperately holding on to what remains of their faith. These are unnecessary casualties of an unnecessary war, and the simple knowledge that faith and science can coexist can be enough to bring a lost soul back from the brink.

My faith shouldn’t be alive.

But it is, and not a day goes by that I am not grateful for the gift of a second chance.

Rachel's book Evolving in Monkey Town is available on Amazon. To hear about Rachel's journey, see our video conversation with her (below).

As an historian of science, I belong to a small, somewhat esoteric club. Although there are dozens of colleges and universities within 75 miles of my own, there are no more than half a dozen faculty with similar expertise at all of those institutions combined. If we focus more narrowly on my particular specialty - the history of science and Christianity - then I am probably alone in Central and Eastern Pennsylvania.

Because we are rare birds, our influence outside of our own nests has usually been minimal, especially when it comes to science and religion - an area that seems to invite comments from anyone and everyone, whether or not they actually know anything about it. Our collective anonymity may now be changing, however, with the publication of a splendid new book from Harvard University Press, Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion. The editor, Ronald L. Numbers, a former president of both the History of Science Society and the American Society of Church History, is a religious agnostic whose scholarship on the history of American religion and science is marked by meticulous accuracy and impartiality.

For a quarter century, Numbers and his colleague at the University of Wisconsin, David C. Lindberg, have led the way in challenging the commonly received view that the history of science and religion is best seen in terms of an ongoing, inevitable conflict, with science winning the war for cultural and epistemic territory. Although the conflict view ultimately derives from the European Enlightenment, its most influential expression was American. This is one of those cases in which you can judge the books by their covers - or, at least, by their titles. In 1874, NYU chemist John William Draper published his History of the Conflict between Religion and Science, and in 1896 the first president of Cornell, Andrew Dickson White, published A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. It is hard to say which one is worse, in terms of its scholarship, but my vote goes to White. Although he was a trained historian, White seems to have consulted primary sources about as often as he watched television. Consequently, his book is chock full of manufactured "facts," invented or misattributed "quotations," and unsupportable interpretations. Draper is not a great deal better, yet both books remain widely influential today, perhaps partly because the shoddy scholarship and outright nonsense they contain is central to the apologetics of contemporary unbelief. Why else would White's contribution to historical fiction be available for free download at infidels.org and Draper's book at positiveatheism.org?

The twenty-five authors in Numbers' book - one for each of the short, pithy chapters - serve writ on the conflict thesis and its legacy. Many contributors, including Numbers and Lindberg, are major players in the history of science, and at least two will be known to many readers who rarely venture into the field: Edward Larson, whose book on the Scopes trial won the Pulitzer Prize in History, and Michael Ruse, a distinguished philosopher and historian who often writes for general audiences. (Full disclosure: I wrote the chapter on Isaac Newton, but I do not mean to imply that I am a major player and my enthusiasm for the book would be undiminished if I had not contributed to it.) Twelve contributors are agnostics or atheists (by their own statements) and eight are Christians, so charges of advancing a clear ideological agenda will not stick. All of us wrote with ordinary readers, not specialists, in mind, making this a truly rare book: where else can you find such authoritative scholarship delivered so accessibly and fairly on such an important subject?

In effect, this book delivers a public obituary for the warfare view, which has been dead among historians for decades - though many scientists, journalists, and others who know far less about the topic apparently missed the funeral. In fact, the real history of religion and science is too complex, with too many important subtleties and significant mutual interactions, to be captured by any simple metaphor - not conflict, not harmony, nor any other single word that comes to mind. The people who actually lived through the events - those we historians call the "actors" themselves - very often saw things quite differently from the ways in which we've usually been told they saw them, or must have seen them.

How will all this go down? Whenever historians engage in debunking popular misconceptions, there are always people who want to shoot the messenger rather than to accept the truth of the message - especially when the truth of a given misconception is important to one's faith commitment. Numerous reviews by people from a range of faith commitments are readily available online; a detailed survey of their content is an exercise I leave to the reader. Those who need the warfare myth acknowledge the evidence but deny its significance; the facts about historical incidents are irrelevant to the logic of the arguments made now, they say, and anyone with half a brain knows that science is always triumphant over religion. Perhaps I ought to be more respectful: those whose minds are made up ought not to be confused by exposure to the facts.