Darrel Falk | The Bridge from Biology to Faith

Darrel:

Cooperation, being able to get along is important in groups where reputation is key. And so if reputation is key, you probably can’t be perceived only looking out for yourself if you’re perceived that way, you probably will not be as successful within that group on a long-term basis. I mean we’re talking hundreds of thousands of generations here. And so with that you cannot succeed at passing on your genes as effectively if you’re totally selfish. And so being perceived as a person who is gentle perhaps, caring perhaps, may well be important in those small groups. Being able to function well in those small groups, on the average, over those 2 million years. 

My name is Darrel Falk. I’m professor Emeritus of biology at Point Loma Nazarene University and the former president of BioLogos.

Jim: 

Welcome to Language of God. I’m your host, Jim Stump.

Darrel Falk is one of the pioneers of this movement for reconciling the science of evolution with Christian faith. He and I both have stories of conflict about science with the broader constituents of the Christian colleges where we worked. His story about that has a happier ending than mine did, and we talk through much of that in this episode. 

Darrel wrote the book, Coming to Peace with Science, in the early 2000s, and that is what disturbed the peace at his institution, Point Loma Nazarene University, but his intention was simply to help students and others who were in need of resources that could help them find a bridge between their Christian faith and the biology they were learning in his classroom. The process of writing the book also led to his meeting Francis Collins and certainly contributed to the founding of our organization, BioLogos, where Darrel served as president from 2010 until his retirement in 2012. 

More recently, Darrel has been involved in a long term conversation with Todd Wood, a scientist who rejects the consensus findings about evolution and the age of the earth. The two published a book called The Fool and The Heretic and have been sharing their story at live events, hoping to provide a model for how to have constructive dialogue with people who disagree with you. 

I sat down with Darrel to hear his story about the early days of genetic sciences, and about his foray into teaching evolution at a Christian college, and about the founding of BioLogos. We conclude talking about what he’s learned from science recently, and how that has helped him think about what it means to be human. 

Let’s get to the conversation. 

Jim:            

Let’s start by going back a ways. What do you remember from your childhood or from growing up that might have inclined you toward wanting to have a career in science?

Darrel:        

I would go back to my childhood from the perspective of, it’s not so much science, it’s more a question of thinking about the Bible and what appeared to be a difference between the Bible and what science seemed to say. And so I was, I grew up in a church, a conservative, evangelical church. They didn’t press a particular young earth kind of view, but nonetheless, it was certainly different than anyone else in the outside community. So my family, my little church of 70 to 100 individuals. And I would frequently recognize that there’s this whole world out there, which looks at things much, much differently than I do as it relates to the Bible and as it relates to the Christian faith.

And so I frequently would be questioning— I remember these as questioning starting when I was 11 or 12 years old—and that was this question of all the religions in the world that I might have possibly been born into including the religion of no religion, how did it happen that I just got born into the right one? And so this was a major concern to me. When I was 12 years old in my social studies class, we studied human evolution. What was I supposed to do with that? And it was a real crisis for me. Even as a 12 year old. After making it through seventh grade, I remember telling some friends that were in sixth grade who I met at church camp, you’ll be lucky if you make it through seventh grade with your Christian faith still intact because you’re going to have this human evolution stuff thrown at you, in your social studies class. And it was very difficult for me. So those were the kinds of things that were a significant concern for me growing up as a 12 year old, 13, 14 year old. I wanted so much to believe because of the beauty of the faith, because of the security that I felt within my home and within my and within my church. I loved that way of life. But nonetheless, science seemed to point in other directions.

Jim:

Why then did you pursue science further? Was it with the intention to try to show that it was wrong somehow?

Darrel:

No, it was actually, I stayed away from biology as much as I could. It was biology that was my biggest concern. I was good in physics and chemistry and math and I could have been good in biology, but I stayed away from biology because I didn’t like those doubts that kept coming in whenever I thought about especially evolution. And so I actually stayed away from biology for as long as I could. But when I went to university, as I began university, I decided that I would become a doctor. I guess I felt a calling to become a doctor and so if you’re going to be a doctor, that means you have to take biology. So I started off with a first university biology course with that in mind. 

The big surprise, and it was a big surprise, is that I fell in love with biology itself. And, so by the end of, I guess what would be the middle of the second semester, I knew that what I wanted to do was to spend my life studying biology, especially genetics. That was right at the time when genetic code was being discovered. DNA had been discovered 8 or 9 or 10 years earlier. And so we were just seeing how protein synthesis worked. It was so beautiful. And so I said I could spend my whole life studying this, which was exactly what I did.

And for me, the beauty of it pointed towards a creator. And I had no idea, at that point how to bring things together with the Bible, but all I knew was biology is really, really beautiful and it sure points towards a creator. And so I didn’t have doubts, per se at the start. I didn’t worry too much about the Bible by this stage. I just, it’s gonna work out somehow. My dad told me we don’t know how it all works. He was a wonderful father in terms of, guiding me to be careful about being too literalistic with respect to scriptural interpretation. So I felt freedom, by the time I was 18 or 19. And even earlier, if I didn’t feel freedom, it was more because I thought personally that, even though my dad said don’t worry about it, I still worried about it.

Jim:

So we’ll come more to your reconciliation of science and faith in that way and a little bit, but let’s talk some more about your scientific career in this regard. So this must’ve been a really exciting time with the advent of genetics as a serious discipline and you’ve lived over a really interesting time of development of that field, right?

Darrel: 

Yes.

Jim:   

So what was it like in those early days? What were the kinds of genetics that was going on in university when you were a grad student and immediately after?

Darrel:

It was. It was a very, very exciting time. And there was one big question that existed at that point in time. We knew a lot by the time I had started graduate school, we knew a lot about how genes worked, how they functioned to maintain a cell to direct life processes. We knew a lot about that but it was all based upon work that was done with bacteria and viruses. And so when I began graduate school, this is 1969, when I began graduate school, the big question was, so how does this work? How does it apply to the process of development? How does it apply to complex organisms, like humans for example? We were already at that point, there was a pretty good knowledge about what happens in the process of an embryo that’s developing. It had been well described. But the question of how genes would somehow direct all of that, what would be like the switches that would turn a gene on, and turn a gene off that would allow it to so intricately control the process of a single cell becoming two cells and four cells and then eventually billions of cells all arranged in such an unbelievably beautiful fashion?

And so that was the question. And it was a wonderful time to begin. Biology has often used, especially genetics, has often used model organisms to study processes. And so the kinds of things that we could do in terms of studying human genes and how they worked, we just couldn’t do that with human embryos and couldn’t do that with human cells, not in a sophisticated way. And so people had model organisms. The mouse, for example, was a model organism, but even then, you couldn’t get very sophisticated in terms of the kinds of questions you could ask, with mice. But you could with other organisms. 

And so Drosophila, which is a small fruit fly, was becoming the organism of choice. We knew an awful lot about their genes, but not at the molecular level. We knew an awful lot about how the genes map and how to study the genes, but not the molecules that the genes produce. 

So my work was to develop a particular system that would allow us to get down to the molecular level. When I first went to a meeting as a brand new graduate student of all the Drosophila geneticists in the country, the total number of the people at the meeting was only about 45 and probably about 15 or 20 of them were graduate students like myself. Today, in this field of people who are studying how genes work in Drosophila it might have 3-4,000, at least. And it continues to be an extremely important organism for studying how genes work. Genes work pretty much the same way in higher organisms. And so what we did learn about how genes work in the fruit fly turned out to work, apply very well for mice and on into humans.

Jim:

Do you remember from those days of what the hopes and expectations were for the field over the coming decades, and what of those predictions maybe turned out to be realized more easily than was thought or what turned out to be, “nope, this was a lot harder and this is going to take way more time, or maybe we’ll never get there”? How has the field developed in that way?

Darrel: 

That’s a great question. It’s almost the reverse of what you would think. So, I mentioned that I started graduate school in 1969. I finished my PhD in 1973 and then went on to do postdoctoral work. And the first phase of my postdoctoral studies, there was this feeling that the questions were too difficult to be able to solve with higher organisms. And so I remember one key person, a leader in the field of Drosophila genetics, saying that genetics has reached a dead end. We were able to do all these fancy things with bacteria and viruses, but it’s just too hard a problem. There’s no, it’s an intractable problem with the knowledge we have at this point. And so he actually left the field and encouraged some others, at least indirectly to say, you’ve got to move on to something that’s going to be more productive than studying the genes of higher organisms, it’s just going to… we just don’t know enough and we don’t have the tools. 

The big surprise was being able to take genes from a higher organism, like Drosophila or even like humans and put them into little, they’re called plasmids, little circular DNA molecules of bacteria. And so to make hybrid DNA molecules, which contain genetic information from higher organisms such as humans and genetic information from bacteria. That was, it’s called recombinant DNA. So as some people were leaving the field because it was intractable, others were developing this technique of being able to study genes in a way that nobody dreamed you could do, in a test tube. I mean, it was our genes, human genes could be studied in a test tube that could be isolated and could be cultured in bacteria and grow from, you know, a small number of copies to billions of copies of human genes. That led, for example, just a quick example. By 1981, so just seven or eight years after the discovery of recombinant DNA and its power, people were taking the gene for making human insulin and growing vast amounts of insulin, human insulin, in bacteria. In these big, big vats. And that was the big surprise because at that point, once we could work with genes through this recombinant DNA process and use bacteria as a tool to study our genes, including Drosophila genes, but our genes as well, it changed everything.

Jim:    

And on the other side of that question then, is there anything that we thought would come much more quickly say when we realized we could sequence whole genomes and figure out the entire string of DNA letters, was it thought that, “oh, once we have that, we’ll just be able to solve all these problems,” that turned out to be trickier?

Darrel:  

Yeah I mean, biology is really interesting. Science is really interesting because it doesn’t necessarily go in directions that you would’ve thought. So just like with recombinant DNA, who would have, even in 1975 and 76, people didn’t yet appreciate at that point just where it would take us. And so there’s always little surprises that come up. And so for example, sequencing the human genome, which was done in the early 2000s, and prior to that, Drosophila, I think it was 1998 or 99. And so during those times and when we’re getting the technology, people were getting the technology in place to sequence whole genomes, of course that was an unbelievable dream, you could ever do that.

And I still remember the skepticism about even trying. I remember being in a meeting in which there was this big debate about whether this would be a good investment of scientific expertise and funds to try to sequence the human genome. It just seemed like it was a dream that we ought not be wasting our money on. A number of people felt that way. But obviously the group that didn’t feel that way won out. As we got to 2001 and  2002 and the genome was completed, it was still pretty expensive. And it’s been a process, I don’t want to call it a slow process, to use that knowledge—I mean it’s now 17 or 18 years later—because we’re still not solving many diseases as a result of it. We’re on the verge in many, many cases, on the verge of being able to solve some key genetic abnormalities through having sequenced the human genome. 

And probably some people were thinking it might have happened 10 years ago already that we’d be treating some diseases using that technology. But it’s going to come. I mean, just today’s, Nature, just finished reading today’s Nature magazine and every single species, 850 species of butterflies has been sequenced. Not really, really thoroughly, but has been sequenced. It’ll happen that we’ll be able to have everybody’s gene, every person’s genome sequenced in the future. Not necessarily the immediate future, but not very far into the future. And, so, it’s happening. It’s probably a little slower than what we might’ve thought, but in some ways it’s even more powerful than we could have imagined.

[musical interlude]

Mulder:

Hey Language of God listeners. If you enjoy the conversations you hear on the podcast, we just wanted to let you know about our website, biologos.org, which has articles, videos, book reviews, and other resources for pastors, students, and educators. We also have an active online forum, which you heard about at the top of this show. We discuss each podcast episode, but it goes far beyond that, with lots of open discussions on all kinds of topics related to science and faith. Find it all at biologos.org.

Jim: 

Well, let’s go back to your career. So you’re a postdoc and eventually you made it into teaching. What was the science and faith conversation like when you got to Point Loma in Christian colleges and universities?

Darrel:

So I had one other stopping point before Point Loma and that stopping point was Mount Vernon Nazarene University.

Jim: 

In Ohio, right?

Darrel:

In Ohio. And it was a great experience. I loved teaching there. They had pretty much ignored evolution at that point. It’s not that I was pressured not to talk about it. I wasn’ t. But it was something that really wasn’t talked about. Point Loma, which I moved to after four years, it was talked about more at Point Loma. San Diego, California, probably a little more liberal than Ohio, probably a little more freedom. And so there was more discussion of evolution within the biology department. And what was very special for me was that there was a small group of faculty members who were interested in talking about it and reading together and exploring the literature. And so we began, within a couple of years of the time that I arrived, we formed a, several of us formed a small group that were reading various books on theology and Christian faith as it relates to science. That was fantastic for me because it gave me a group to talk about and read with and from that I was maturing both from the perspective of my knowledge of evolution and, since theologians were part of that discussion group, I was able to have people who had helped me a little bit with the theological aspects as well. And out of that came a sense of the need for a book that would address the question of, so how do we think about this from the biological point of view. And how…we were not satisfied with intelligent design.

Jim: 

So you helped to fill some of that gap in the literature by Christians that took the science seriously. Your book Coming to Peace with Science was 2004 about?

Darrel:

That’s when it was published, yes.

Jim:

What was the process leading up to that like, of writing that book and then some of its reception? How did that go?

Darrel:

So, I knew that there was a need for a book like that. And I wondered, given that I was alongside of these people who were helping me understand theology and was able to talk to people about various things that maybe I would be able to help, maybe I could contribute in some way to what I felt was a need for a biology book. There was some physical sciences books, there were philosophy books, but I felt there was a need for a biology book. So I sat down and wrote a chapter. So I wrote this chapter. I was quite pleased with it, almost a little bit excited about it and gave it to various people and said, here’s this chapter. I’m going to put together, trying to put together a book but I need your feedback. So I gave it to various people. Nobody was thrilled, nobody was thrilled. And I gave it to one of my students and…I gave it to several students, the first chapter, and one student in particular that I think I was pretty close to, was very kind also, and he brought it back and he said to me, it just doesn’t work. If only you could write like you can teach, he said, it would be different. But this doesn’t do it. And so I put it down and I said I guess that’s all I need to know and it’s not going to be my responsibility. And so I stopped. 

And about two years later, there was a group that was trying to get Point Loma to talk about young-earth creationism in their science classes. And they came onto the campus and were trying to influence us in that regard. And we had some conversations and this one particular person said to me, he said, you can do whatever you—because we were expressing hesitation, very real hesitation, it had to be science, and it wasn’t science as far as I was concerned and I was a chair of the biology department. And he said, you can do whatever you feel you want to do, whatever you need to do. But he said there’s a big tsunami coming and you are going to be overwhelmed by this tsunami. I mean, in essence, that’s what he said. And so I said to myself, I can’t point to anything that I think is written at the general level that will explain why biologists like myself believe that God created through the evolutionary process in ways that I think are generally accessible. So I said, I’m going to try again. 

And so I had in my mind that comment from the student who said, if you could only write like you can teach, then this would be different. And so I pretended I was at the blackboard. Those days we had blackboards. I pretended I was at the blackboard and I had my class in front of me and I was explaining my concepts to them. And that changed how I wrote. I got kind of excited about it in a way that I did when I was teaching. And so that was the beginning then, of writing. And sure enough, I proceeded.

Jim: 

You gave that one to friends to look at and there was a different reception?

Darrel: 

I gave it to friends, I gave it to students. I wanted students to be able to tell me what they thought because it was intended for students. That was the beginning of an interesting story because it was still at a manuscript stage. And so I copied it off for everybody in my genetics class to read and so that was the beginning of another stage, which was a difficult stage because the manuscript didn’t stay, nor could I have expected it would stay within the classroom. And I knew students would talk to their parents about it. And so that changed things a little bit when that happened, conversations with parents.

Jim:  

Was that the tsunami that was coming then?

Darrel:

It was probably not.. I’m not sure that the two events were totally tied together, but it was, it did become a tsunami.

Jim:  

During that decade, especially, there were a number of such issues at Christian colleges, concerns with evolution primarily among constituents, sponsoring denominations and such. One pretty prominent one at a different Nazarene school in Illinois. How did that go for you at Point Loma then and play out?

Darrel:

It was definitely difficult. There were plenty of challenges associated with it. For one thing my manuscript did get copied and I wasn’t thinking that it would get copied, but it got copied and passed around. And the result was that it ended up in the hands of some people that were pretty influential. A leader of the intelligent design movement received a copy of it. A prominent Christian radio personality received a copy of it. And it resulted in a lot of pressure on the university as to whether or not somebody who thinks this way and is actually teaching this way in his classroom ought to be at an evangelical college like Point Loma Nazarene University. And so as a result, there was a lot of pressure put on our administration at Point Loma to think seriously about how they were going to handle the evolution problem. And I think indirectly, probably everybody knew there was this question and so ought we to have somebody with that perspective teaching at Point Loma? Although I don’t think it was ever to my knowledge put in those terms, but it was certainly implied and I think everybody knew that was the question.

Jim:

And were you the only one?

Darrel:

I was supported tremendously supported by the faculty in the biology department, but not just the biology department. It was the faculty in the university as a whole who felt as though there was an academic freedom issue. Certainly the people in the sciences would probably all have thought similarly to how I felt about this particular issue. And so I was supported in a way that was extremely meaningful to me personally by my faculty colleagues. And in turn, and especially meaningful to me, was the university administration itself, starting with the president. And then other faculty, other administrators as well, were highly supportive. And so there was a lot of concern expressed from the outside, but from the inside, I was amazed at the level of support I got.

Jim: 

And it seems at least from my outside perspective on this that as a result, perhaps of that incident itself, Point Loma has really become one of the leading Christian institutions in supporting people in the sciences, particularly in evolution and has been a welcoming place for that now, right?

Darrel: 

So around this time we felt that we needed to be really clear that we were not going to take, the University did not take a particular position itself on the mechanism by which God created, but we did not hold to a literalistic view. The University was not bound to a literalistic view of Genesis 1-4. And the administration was very fair and forthright that this is our Wesleyan theology. This is how we look at the Bible. And so if you want a more literalistic view of how scripture is interpreted, verbal inspiration dictated view, then maybe Point Loma is not the right place for you, if that’s really important to you.

[Musical Interlude]

Jim:   

So there’s another story that overlaps with this one to some degree that you had a prominent role in as well and that’s the founding and early days of BioLogos. So when did you first come into contact with Francis Collins and how did that get started?

Darrel:  

So my book was basically… I had finished the first draft of the book around ‘98 or so and it was around 2001 or so. It was getting pretty close to being, what I was feeling was getting close to being finished. And so I became aware though, as that was going on, that Francis Collins, this person who I knew about as a geneticist, and the head of the Human Genome Project, this big project that was going to revolutionize medicine, and indeed has, was also a Christian. And so I thought, wouldn’t it be nice—I’ve got somebody for the foreword—wouldn’t it be nice if I could have Francis Collins write the afterword? Now he doesn’t know me, but I’m going to send him an email and tell him I’ve got a manuscript and ask him if he would look at the manuscript and consider. And I, you know, I told him that some of the controversy that had been taken had taken place in my life as it relates to the book and the manuscript. And told him, you know, why this book was so important. Because just look at how it’s been received and the controversy that has generated. And we know as biologists, we know that God has created through evolutionary process. It’s important that there be something out there. So that was my explanation as to why Francis should take the time in the midst of doing the Human Genome Project to read this manuscript from somebody who he had no idea who he was. 

So I sent, sent the manuscript that was already all finished to the person who was going to write the foreword and he wrote a foreword, sent it to me and said, his foreword said something to the effect of Darrel Falk believes in the idea that God has created through the evolutionary process. And he says, this is an idea which I think is bankrupt and is sure to be proven wrong or something to that effect. And you know, of course he went on and said, we ought to talk about or to think about it. But that was his foreword: this is a bankrupt idea.

Jim:

Don’t waste your time reading this book, everybody.

Darrel:   

That’s how I felt, yeah. So I talked to Francis about it. I guess we had some email exchanges and I sent him the foreword and I said, Francis, I’m just not sure that I should have this as the foreword, and what do you think? And would you be willing to move into the forward if we make a shift here? And so Francis indicated that he would be willing to, if I made the decision and asked this other person if it was okay if I not use his foreword. Francis then agreed to write that foreword. And, that’s the story of our interaction.

Jim:

So Francis writes his own book, then, in 2006.

Darrel:

Yes.

Jim:  

Which leads to the foundation of a new little organization that became called BioLogos. What were those early days like then in terms of thinking what this little new organization might be able to accomplish in this space of science and Christianity in America?

Darrel:

It was tremendously exciting. There was a lot of reasons for it being exciting. First of all, so I started becoming involved in November of 2008. And already at that point, Francis had been doing some work with Simon Stevens and several other individuals through Trinity Forum, who had been fellows at the Trinity Forum. And they were basically thinking in terms at that point of developing a website that would be FAQs from the sorts of questions that Francis had received by email in response to his book. 

But late in November as myself and even a little bit, a few weeks prior to that, Karl Giberson started working with Francis and Simon in the context of developing and submitting a grant proposal for a much expanded enterprise, I guess, or effort that would take us well beyond just an FAQ, but would develop, an organization that would address the question of science to the seeming dichotomy between science and Christian faith and do it on a broad scale. 

And so as we began to recognize that we would be able to start this organization, BioLogos, in a way that would be more than just an FAQ, we began dialoguing together. So I’ll never forget that Christmas vacation, late December, emails, I still have those emails from December 27th and 28th and maybe 26, maybe even 25th I don’t know. But I don’t think so, I think we might have taken Christmas Day off. But the excitement that we all felt as we began to prepare for a public launch of BioLogos, in what would become April of 2009. 

Jim:  

So here we are 10 years later after the launch of BioLogos. And how do you see the conversation changing over that time or the topics that are important or the central concerns that people have? Have you seen any development along those lines?

Darrel:

It’s been an interesting 10 years, because there’s been a lot of unbelievable things that have happened in terms of paleoanthropology and anthropology in general. Paleoanthropology, genetics, paleogenetics, have been amazing things that have happened in that time span. But the field has shown us in ways that it has become increasingly clear that God has created through the evolutionary process. The data that has emerged is extremely strong.

Jim:

One of the newer topics that we find ourselves discussing quite a bit now is broadly understood as human identity. What does it mean to be a human? And that is a field that draws on a lot of different disciplines, but I know that you’ve been engaged in some slice of that in the evolutionary development of human beings and what we’ve come to understand both the paleoanthropology and the discovery of fossils, but also the genetics over the last couple of decades that has provided remarkable insights into who we are and how we came to be the kinds of things that we are. Can you give us a little overview of that field, the kinds of things that you’ve been learning, what some of the most remarkable points are that are relevant to this conversation on science and faith as we consider who we are as human beings, as image bearers of God as well?

Darrel:

I can and I’m happy to. There’s some key contributions to this to the answer to your question, I think, that I want to address right from the start. One of the most important books, I think, that has been extremely helpful to me is a book by Augustín Fuentes who wrote a book called The Creative Spark. And that has really shaped, helped me and others I think, with respect to how the field is, how the field of human emergence, human identity, how we emerged as a species, became especially kind of focused. So Fuentes is really important. Another one is the book called The Secret of Our Success. The author of that book is Phillp [correction – Joseph] Henrich I believe. An extremely helpful book in terms of describing the emergence of our species in small groups, and what qualities are important for success within small groups. 

So our species, our genus let’s say, homo, has been in existence for about 2 million years. And in that time we, our ancestors, probably because of climate change, moved out onto the savannas instead of living in the trees. Life was changed to a whole new lifestyle in savannas. And there were small groups out there on those savannas. And what I have come to see, and others, I mean I’ve come to see because of the expert writing of various individuals who have been thinking about this, is that what is necessary to succeed in those small groups—and there’s other people, Martin Nowak, for example, who have shown that cooperation, being able to get along is important in groups where reputation is key. And so if reputation is key you probably can’t be perceived as only looking out for yourself if you’re perceived that way, you probably will not be as successful within that group on a long-term basis. I mean we’re talking hundreds of thousands of generations here or tens of thousands, but probably hundreds of thousands of generations here. And so with that you cannot, over that long period of time on average, you probably cannot succeed at passing on your genes as effectively if you’re totally selfish. And so being perceived as a person who is gentle perhaps, caring perhaps, may well be important in those small groups. Being able to function well in those small groups on the average over those 2 million years.

And these individuals that I’ve spoken of have helped to point out the significance then of that period of time, that characteristic, that feature of our existence for a long period of time shaping our genetic makeup. Our genetic makeup, the genes we have, were probably shaped not so much by battles and selfishness and the strongest is going to be the winner. Probably the one who’s going to be the winner is the one who can function well with a genetic makeup that allows him, him or her, him and her to function well within small groups.

So the unique human characteristics that we love so much in terms of what it means to be human have come about in large part—like we could do a little survey in terms of what it was like. We can say, well, 10,000 years now we’ve been living in larger groups and civilization. 10,000 years. You know what that is? If we were to change 10,000 years, if we were to change the existence of our genus to a 24-hour clock. You know how long we’ve been living in civilization, as civilized communities? It’s seven and a half minutes of those 24 hours. So our genetic makeup was shaped out there on the savannas. 

Jim:

That provides a really interesting corrective, I think, to what many people understand as the evolutionary process and feeling that there’s something deeply antithetical to a God of love working through a process that Richard Dawkins, say, called the selfish gene, right? How does this help us to integrate what we find in the sciences then, moreso, with a theology of love in that regard?

Darrel:

I think that’s the key question for many of us that are interested in human evolution. How ought we think about God’s activity, our response to God being a God of love, who wants to communicate with us once we developed a sense of consciousness? One of the unique qualities, or maybe the most, the hallmark of our species, is called a full theory of mind. I mean there are other species that recognize that another individual within their species has a mind of some sort. But no other species—the data on this is becoming very strong and almost everybody would look at it this way—no other species has a full theory of mind, which recognizes that the other person has a mind like ours and that person recognizes that we have a mind like theirs. And so the back and forth recognition of all of the ramifications of having a mind has been a very significant event, most people would say. Consciousness becoming, as part of that, in some full way.  So does God interact in some way, in a manner that is different when God is interacting with an individual that is conscious and can understand and maybe even begin to recognize that there’s such a thing as eternity?

Darrel:

I’d like to just read a Bible verse if I could?

Jim:

Please.

Darrel:

This is from Acts chapter 17. And this is Paul. And Paul is speaking to the Athenians of course. He says the following: “He marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him. Though he is not far from any one of us. For in him, we live and move and have our being and some of your own poets have said we are his offspring. Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image made by human design and skill. In the past, God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.”

What I want to know is, I don’t think Paul was thinking all the way back, but when does this start? This God who is interacting with people even though they don’t know God in his fullness, which becomes apparent through Jesus Christ. When did that start? Was it 100,000 years ago? Was it 200,000 years ago? And if God was interacting in some fashion, bringing out those qualities that God calls of us, bringing out those qualities over a long period of time, a couple hundred thousand years, that would shape our genetic makeup, would that have had an impact on who we became as a species? And I think the answer to that is yes.

There’s other issues here that are, that we could talk about, but won’t because of time. It’s not all hunky dory in terms of those little communities of loving individuals. There was selfishness. We know that. We know it from our own little communities and so that leaves a lot of other questions. Of which there’s a lot of work going on from the secular point of view, in addition to the theological point of view, and there’s much to be said about that. All of this is work that we, you know, you ask so what’s happened over the last 10 years? There’s an awful lot that’s going on that is really exciting. And part of that relates to how we came to have the genetic qualities that we do and the cultural aspects of that. But then also what is the fall and all of that, what about those bad qualities and how do we think about that?

Jim: 

That’s a beautiful story, though, of seeing natural history through the eyes of faith, of seeing that how this process that we can study empirically in the laboratories could have been used by God to shape us into the people that he wanted us to be.

Darrel: 

Yes.

Jim:

It’s really beautiful. Thanks for talking to me.

Darrel:

My privilege.

Mulder:

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. It has been funded in part by the John Templeton Foundation and more than 300 individuals who donated to our crowdfunding campaign. Language of God is produced and mixed by Colin Hoogerwerf. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We are produced out of the BioLogos offices in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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