Janet Kellogg Ray | Science Denial and Christian Culture

Ray:

For myself, I have just come to the point that nothing discovered in science will cause me not to believe in God, nothing, no science discovery. We could discover absolute empirical evidence for abiogenesis or the multiverse, but the science is the one thing that’s not going to challenge my faith. I’ve come to peace with, I can say, “This is empirical evidence. This is science. These are the facts.” Now, given the facts, how do I as a person of faith respond? I’m Janet Kellogg Ray and I am an instructor in the College of Biology at the University of North Texas.

Stump:

Welcome to Language of God. I’m your host, Jim Stump. One of the interesting and rewarding things about working at BioLogos is getting to know other people who have had similar experiences. For those of us who grew up in the conservative church and came to accept the modern science of origins, it can sometimes feel like a pretty lonely world, but there really are other people out there who accept the science and remain committed to following Jesus. Janet Kellogg Ray is one of those people. I’d gotten connected to her through social media a couple of years ago and saw an earlier book she had written. Now, she has a new book out that connects the science of evolution with COVID vaccines and with climate change.

In full disclosure, the publisher had asked if I’d write a blurb for it. I did that and was compensated with a free copy of the book, which did not influence our interview with Janet in any way. I do think this is a fun interview with her and hope it continues to give you confidence that there really is a community of people who take science seriously and take their faith seriously. 

Let’s get to the conversation. 

Stump:

Well, Janet, welcome to the podcast. I’m glad to be talking to you.

Ray:

Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Stump:

So you and I have had some sporadic contact over the last few years. I know you’re a Christian who teaches science, and you’ve written a couple of books that are in the BioLogos orbit. The second of which we’ll spend some time talking about in a bit, but I don’t know too much more than that. So, how about if you start with a little autobiography? Where’d you grow up? What was your family like?

Ray:

Yeah, I am a Texas girl, born and raised.

Stump:

We hear it in the voice.

Ray:

Oh my. I’ve worked on that. I’ve worked on that.

Stump:

No, don’t hide it.

Ray:

In high school, I was a competitive debater and speaker and you had to tone it down for those competitions. But I was raised in a small Texas city, about 100,000. My church was absolutely central to our family’s life. The tradition I was raised in was a very conservative, fundamental type church, part of the American restoration movement. It was the main line. Churches of Christ is where I was raised. My family went to church three times a week, twice on Sunday, once on Wednesday, and every night of the week if it was gospel meeting time.

Stump:

I remember that.

Ray:

I like to say that probably the most scarring aspect of that upbringing was the fact that I never saw The Wizard of Oz until I was an adult. You probably know why, because back in the day before on demand programming, The Wizard of Oz only broadcast once a year and always on Sunday nights.

Stump:

Sunday night during church. Yeah, for me, it was I Never got to see the Super Bowl until churches quit forcing you to go on Sunday nights as well.

Ray:

Oh, absolutely. You would go in and you would see the last bit of it. But church was central to our life. Honestly, I never remember hearing science or evolution denigrated from the pulpit, because it was just the default position that creation occurred in six literal days. The first few chapters of Genesis were absolutely literal, and we would’ve no more questioned that than we would’ve questioned the existence of Jesus. But I remember the first turning point for me was actually in seventh grade. Believe it or not, in Texas in the ’70s, science was an elective. It wasn’t required for seventh graders.

So, I wanted to take choir because I thought that sounded fun. But my dad was a teacher at my school and he was a very disciplined, type A type man. Still is. He didn’t appreciate the lack of discipline he saw in the choir room. So, he signed me up for the science elective, and I tell him to this day, I credit him with changing the trajectory of my life.

Stump:

This was public school. This wasn’t a Christian school.

Ray:

Public school. No, absolutely public school. Interestingly, it was a public school, a middle school junior high, what we called it in the day. It was brand new and it was very experimental in how it was set up, in how the classes were taught. That just fit me to a tee. Well, this science course, this science elective that I took, looking back on it as a science educator, it was actually amazing for a fairly small school district in a seventh grade class. We did dissections, real live dissections, not the virtual kind. We worked our way through what we called at the time the animal kingdom. I had absolutely no vocabulary at the time to express these questions, but I definitively remember thinking as we worked ourselves through those dissections of these animals…

Well, first of all, in my experience, animals were puppies and kitties and the sheep and the cows that I saw around my house and not these things like sea stars and mussels and earthworms were also classified as animals. What I was seeing was these animals from the simpler to the more complex seemed to be connected somehow. It seemed to be that there were systems and organs that were just reworking and remodeling of something in a simpler animal. Again, I had absolutely no vocabulary to express that question at all. I just remember having those thoughts. So, went on to high school. I remember having some of the same thoughts in high school biology, but just put it on the back burner.

Again, no vocabulary to express any kind of question or doubt about what I had been taught about Young Earth creation. I went off to university. I went to a Christian university, Abilene Christian University, which I love, still love. I was a biology major there. I remember that in my freshman biology course, the professor who ended up being my favorite professor of all, I took many classes with him and I ended up teaching labs for him my last two years at school. I remember him distinctly pointing out a section in our textbook and saying, “Here’s where it talks about evolution. You need to know it.” That was it for a class of biology majors. So, at this point, I graduated, married my husband, started medical school.

We both went to the same Christian university. I remember just having thoughts like, “Okay, can I just close one eye and squint and can I make the fossil record line up somehow with the days of creation?” I just tried to float along with those mental gangs with myself. Then another defining point happened just a few years after I graduated from ACU. There was a Young Earth creationist apologist who had no connection to the school at all, but he came into school, into the media, all the different kinds of church publications and with the absolute goal of destroying the careers of two of the biology professors. One of whom was the guy that was my favorite professor.

Well, the other professor was a tough old guy. He weathered the storm, but the professor that I had worked for was a very gentleman, a deeply religious man, but he was crushed because by this time, he had become more overt about teaching the major’s evolution. He was a man of science, but he was also a man of deep religious faith. A couple of years ago, I had the opportunity to meet a professor who was on faculty at the time. I had been invited back to ACU to speak in chapel and a couple of other things. He said the ironic thing about that whole affair was that this particular professor was so religiously conservative, he squeaked, but he was a man of science. It destroyed him. It destroyed him. He ended up resigning in humiliation.

Unfortunately, he passed away a few years after that. This was just a devastating event for my husband and me. We started investigating more on our own, reading on our own, listening to speakers on our own. The rest is just history. I’m glad to say that that event was a turning point for ACU. The science faculty stood up and said, “We are not a Bible college. We are a university, and we will teach intellectually honestly.” Today, that is by far not a problem there at all. But it was a turning point for me to see this wonderful professor that I had, a man of God, a man of science, to have his career destroyed because he taught his students about evolution.

Along the way, I got a PhD in curriculum and instruction. I began my career as a middle school science teacher. I always focused in my graduate work on science education. I’ve been an instructor at the University of North Texas now for 18 years. I’ve taught both science majors and non-majors. I am still in an evangelical church, not the same one of my growing up years. It’s got some of the same DNA. Honestly, I’m sure I’m an outlier. I’m sure I’m an outlier there on many issues, but then I don’t agree with myself of 20 years ago. So, I try to hold that with some patience there.

Stump:

So somewhere along the way here, you got started writing books. So, I remember your first one from a few years ago was Baby Dinosaurs on the Ark. Now, there’s a new one coming out that we’ll spend some time talking about, but how did you get into the book writing business? I say business there tongue in cheek, because I know you’re probably not buying a second house in France with the money you earn from these books.

Ray:

No, but I love it. I love it. It’s so much fun. Well, about the time that we really started researching and investigating on our own as biology majors, my husband and I, and reading and saying, “Oh, you’ve got to read this book. Okay, well, you’ve got to read this book.” We passed them around. Within a few years after that, I started writing a blog primarily just to get some of my own thoughts on paper and putting it out there. So, I started writing the blog. I started doing a little bit of speaking. I was voluntold. Have you ever been voluntold to do something sometime? I was voluntold one time to teach a lady’s Bible class at the church I was at the time, a fairly conservative church on this topic.

So, admittedly, I gave it a pretty soft sell, but that was the ground zero for the Baby Dinosaur’s title, because one of the sweet dear older women came up to her daughter, my friend afterwards, and said, “Did Janet ever think it could have been baby dinosaurs on the ark?” I’m like, “Okay, but that’s a great title. That’s a great title.” But Baby Dinosaurs for that book just became a metaphor for me for all the ways we try to force our science into the Bible and vice versa.

Stump:

Your new book that’s coming out very soon here also has an interesting title, The God of Monkey Science. I think there’s a funny story behind that one too. Can you tell that story?

Ray:

Yes, absolutely. So, actually, it was during the time of when Baby Dinosaurs was in its final edits. It was due to be released in a few months, and we were right in the middle of the COVID experience. We didn’t know we were in the middle of it at the time, but in retrospect, we were in year two of about a three-year experience there. I was in a chat forum with most everybody I knew in there. We were in a chat forum and somebody had mentioned that the governor of Texas had just rolled back the mask mandate for Texas. Now at this point, it was early in 2021 and the vaccines had just been released to the general public. I think Texas at the time was in single digits, around 7% vaccinated.

So, several people in the chat room were saying, “Ooh, this may be a little early. Yeah, I’m getting my vaccine. I haven’t had a chance to get mine yet.” So that was the flow of the conversation. I think I chimed in with something really science nerdy like get your vaccine, go ribosomes, go. Something along those lines. But another individual who I actually know is being quite anti-vaccine, that’s no big surprise to me, had this comment to make later on, of course, that “There she goes again, Janet and her monkey God science.” My mouth just dropped. I honestly was not offended, because I know this person is not a vacciner.

I know that she’s been in some of my classes before about evolution and faith and that kind of thing. So, I know the feelings on evolutions and science associated with that, but what I could not understand is why monkey God when I was talking about vaccines and public health and epidemiology, those things. What did one have to do with the other? So I had my second title at that point, and I just began to research. I fell down lots and lots of rabbit holes. It wasn’t long before I found out that there is a package deal, so to speak, in science denial.

Stump:

Yeah, I’d like to probe some of those rabbit holes a little bit with you that you’ve gone down here, because I think it’s really interesting. Several of us at BioLogos too when COVID was just beginning, we thought, “Okay, this might get bad, but maybe there’s a silver lining here and that Christians will join with science or at least be on the same side as science in addressing this crisis.” Looking back now, that was hopelessly naive, I fear. Instead, it followed this pattern that was established already with evolution and then climate science and now COVID.

So, let’s start there with just some of these broad strokes. What’s the connection between these? Because I’ll note that Christians are generally fine with other sciences, right? The science of germ theory and photosynthesis and even quantum theory. So, what’s the difference here with evolution and climate science and the COVID vaccines which you treat in this book?

Ray:

Well, I first want to go back a little bit further than that, back to the science trial of the century, back to the Scopes Monkey trial. As most people know, it happened in the mid-20s. William Jennings Bryan was the prevailing attorney in the trial. He was known as the great commoner. He was a man of the people. If he were alive today, he would probably have his own talk radio show or cable TV show. He was very popular, but most importantly, he spoke the language of the common man, the common people. One interesting thing I found out in one of my deep dives was that during the Scopes trial, no scientist at all testified. In fact, there was no science evidence entered into the record. Instead, it was Bryan. Yeah, Bryan’s speaking the language of the people.

Bryan said, “There’s no evidence for evolution and even scientists don’t accept it.” Bryan characterized those who support evolution. He called them enemies of the Bible. Then finally and this is a big one, he said that because people who are against evolution are in the majority, whenever evolution is taught in schools, their rights are being violated. So, now fast forward to the 21st century, and we are seeing Bryan’s exact playbook being retooled and remodeled and used against all things pandemic science, against climate change evidence. Guys, it was almost like I was finding these argument fossils embedded in 21st century rhetoric against these modern science issues.

Stump:

There are common ancestors of our present day arguments, huh?

Ray:

Absolutely, because we are still arguing. Oh, the science evidence is sketchy. There’s really not any evidence for COVID, climate, fill in the blank there. Science threatens our faith in God. That here’s a big one, acceptance of the science evidence comes today at a cost to our personal freedoms and rights. Like you said, nobody wants to debate or teach the strengths and weaknesses of photosynthesis. It seems to be evolution, COVID science, any pandemic science, and climate change science, specifically human involvement in climate warming. We see the artifacts there of Bryan’s arguments that he made, but I think there is a second aspect to why we see these three, the big three as a package deal.

I think that happened a few decades after the Scopes trial in the 1970s. Many people, many historians of science and faith will trace back the current version of Young Earth creationism to the 1970s with the publication of the book, The Genesis Flood. But it was during the 1970s and early ’80s that we see the birth of organizations dedicated to researching and publishing and teaching Young Earth creationism. Here is what I find as key. The goal of this modern version of Young Earth creationism was to reframe creationism not as a religious belief, but as a science. So, initially, these institutions try to disprove evolution. They tried to find empirical evidence for special creation. It wasn’t too long before they were thwarted and they weren’t able to do so.

But because they couldn’t disprove evolution, the approach was to switch gears. I think at this point, we set the stage for what we’re seeing in the 21st century and that is when they couldn’t prove evolution to be false, evolution was then portrayed as the root of all cultural evils. Evolution became the cause of abortion, homosexuality, school shootings, even disobedient children. It was easier to blame evolution for cultural ills than it was to prove it false. So, fast forward to the 21st century, the science community is still suspect. Remember Bryan’s outline, the science community is suspect. They want to make our children atheist, and now they want to shut our churches down. It became a cultural issue. They want to shut our churches down.

They want us to take a vaccine, instead of trusting in God. They don’t want us to trust in the blood of Jesus. They want us to trust in the scientist and their so-called vaccine. What’s next? What’s the government going to make us do next? If they can shut down our churches, what else can they make us do? In climate, the scientists are telling us that we shouldn’t drive our gas cars and shouldn’t use our gas stoves. Now, they’re coming after our ceiling fans and our big trucks that we love so much in Texas. It began to be a cultural problem. It wasn’t a matter of science evidence, but what are the scientists saying to us that is threatening our culture? When I say culture, I also mean a broader worldview. My religion, my religious culture, my religious worldview.

Science was no longer about evidence, but it became affront in the culture war. If there’s one thing that Christians have been good at, especially those in the evangelical precincts, is predicating our faith on a battle to fight. We’re always David fighting Goliath, putting on the armor of God, continually see ourselves as the righteous underdog, standing up to the evil culture. So, when the pandemic hit and we were told to not assemble, to shut our churches down, to have online assembly, online services, to take a vaccine, this was just seen, “Well, there it goes again. There go the scientists again. The scientists that have been godless since the days of Scopes and now they’re trying to shut down our churches.”

[musical interlude]

Stump:

So it strikes me that one of the things that makes the situation that you just described there possible is that the science of these three different areas has become fairly specialized, right? There are experts in these different areas that most of us don’t have immediate access to, an immediate experience with. You described doing the dissections in seventh grade, but that itself is fairly far removed from the evolutionary scientists, from the climate scientists who are in the laboratories in the field doing these things. So, we have to take what they say on faith. We have to trust in some sense. Your chapter three of your book is called Whom Do You Trust? Let me first say that I appreciate your upholding of the rules of grammar by using whom in that sentence.

Though I fear that’s ultimately a losing battle in our culture too. But in that chapter, you ask, “How do we decide what is true? How do you decide whom to trust? Which people do you believe? What institutions do you trust? How often is our trust based on direct knowledge?” I think those questions get at the heart of the problem here too. So, would you talk a little bit about that issue? Why are those questions so important, and then what are the answers to those questions? Whom do we trust? It could be different between “Whom should we trust?” and “Whom do we too often end up trusting?”

Ray:

Right. Well, again, it was a rabbit hole I fell down. I think it absolutely goes back to fighting evolution. For so long, for decades before COVID and climate science came on the scene, we spent decades fighting evolution. There was a study that I talked about in the book that was just appalling to me honestly. It was a study that surveyed high school biology teachers about teaching evolution. Unfortunately, the study found that 13% of biology teachers overtly teach creationism, but that by far was not the most disconcerting to me.

The most disconcerting finding of that study was that 60% of biology teachers, public biology teachers, private school, we could talk another story, but public school biology teachers, 60% of them do not take a strong stand either way, either for or against evolution, primarily because they don’t want the phone calls. They don’t want the trouble. They don’t want the parent conferences. So, they walk the cautious line. What does that look like? Well, that means they teach the bare minimum of evolution theory in a high school class or they skip the human part. But here’s the worst scenario, in my opinion, is when teachers will say to their students, “You don’t have to believe this. Just learn it for the test.”

Stump:

I’ll tell you that my own experience with my children in a large public school system here in Indiana was that their biology teacher said before the evolution unit, “I have to teach this to you, but I want you to know that I don’t believe it myself because of my faith.”

Ray:

Oh my. Oh my.

Stump:

Dead serious.

Ray:

Oh my. Oh my. Yes. I think I heard that in your interview with Lee Camp. Did you talk about that there? Maybe. I think I’ve heard you say that before. Yeah, but absolutely. To say, “I don’t believe it but I have to teach it to you,” or “You don’t have to believe it. You just have to regurgitate it back out on the standardized test.” So what we did with that verbiage is for decades, we told students that evolution is up to you. It’s not a theory based on empirical evidence, but it’s a matter of preference or opinion. So, generations have been taught in our public schools that science is a matter of beliefs or values and not evidence. So, in a pandemic, my opinion is no better than your opinion regarding masking, vaccination, social gathering. The big catchphrase of the pandemic was I did my own research.

Stump:

Do your own research. Yeah.

Ray:

Do your own research. Because we have decided that science is a matter of values and opinions and not evidence. So, we all went to the internet webs and we all found those who agreed with us. We chalked it up as our research. That definitely became a problem during the pandemic is that you’ve got your opinions, I’ve got my opinions. I don’t see it that way because we’ve trained generations of our students to you don’t have to believe it, just know it for the test.

Stump:

To draw this into this Whom Do You Trust chapter a little bit, you say in this chapter, “Without an understanding of how science works, we go with what makes sense, what feels right, what our heart tells us. We go with our team.” So connect that a little bit then to this question of science and evidence and the nature of science itself, as opposed to which baseball team we follow or what flavor of ice cream we think is the best, right?

Ray:

Right. Well, even those people who are the most vehement science deniers, whether it be evolution or pandemic science or climate science, even those that we would say are the biggest science deniers want science on their side. They understand the authority that science claims in our life. The problem is we have a breakdown in differentiating between who is an authority and who is an expert. No one’s going to say, science is baloney. So, we’re going to find authority figures that speak what we want to hear, that line up with our beliefs and values. So, we learned to trust authority without respecting expertise. So, for example, early on in the COVID pandemic, just early in 2020, there was a group of doctors that stood on the steps of the Supreme Court wearing white coats.

They were holding a press conference about the hundreds and hundreds of patients they claim to have cured using hydroxychloroquine, I think, is what they were claiming at the time. One intrepid soul asked one of the speakers if they had published their data, and that was quite quickly blown off. But the point being is that these individuals presented themselves as authority figures. They stood at the Supreme Court. They have the title of doctor. They’re wearing a white coat, but each of them was speaking outside of the consensus of the fields of epidemiology, of medicine. Even if they themselves were not epidemiologists or infectious disease doctors, they were not even speaking to the consensus of those fields.

We saw that in all sorts of videos that went viral during the pandemic. I think there was one called a Plandemic with a celebrity, a big celebrity Oprah doctor that had been on it. It was shared and it was off to the races. Because this person had the title of doctor, had these trappings, so to speak, of authority, we took that person’s word for it and went with it. Again, we’ve seen this for decades with evolution. Quite often there’s Young Earth creationist outlets that will produce films. There’s one that’s actually I think very well-made. It’s called, “Is Genesis History?” It’s very pretty. It’s very well put together. Lots of speakers there, presenters with lots of letters behind their names, but do they actually have expertise in the fields to which they are speaking?

If they are in those fields or adjacent to those fields, are they speaking outside the consensus of those fields? So I think one of the big breakdowns we had during the COVID pandemic specifically is a breakdown in science communication and science literacy. What does it mean to do science? You can look up a science fact, but what does it mean to do science? How does sciences work? That’s why in that chapter that you referenced, I say it’s important to have a healthy questioning for authority, but have respect for expertise in a field.

Stump:

That’s a really interesting distinction that’s not made too often. I think particularly given the rise of social media, it’s a lot easier to set oneself up as an authority these days than perhaps it used to be. There may have been a much tighter connection between expertise and authority in the past, though you give the example from the Scopes trial almost 100 years ago now, where that was undermined as well. You also mentioned consensus of science. I think you do a really good job throughout this book of talking about how science works in these various fields, in evolution, in the COVID vaccines, in climate science. But one of the trickiest things, I think, to communicate about the nature of science is that it is fallible but reliable somehow.

Experts can be wrong. They have been wrong before. Science is subject to revision in light of further evidence, but it’s not like we’re going to go back to geocentrism or to bloodletting, right? Science really does figure some things out, but how do we convey that, no, this isn’t infallible, but it is reliable? How do we convey the limitations of science perhaps while at the same time engendering trust for the consensus as the best we have right now, right?

Ray:

Well, you’re exactly right. One thing I always begin every semester with my students is I try to just walk them through what we just call it science thinking. One point that I make to them is that scientists love to prove each other wrong. They love to prove each other wrong. I give the example of the Nobel Prize winning chemist who a year or so after she won the prize had to retract an article in a prestigious journal because some of the data had been done incorrectly. I would say that absolutely, there are going to be times when there’s a lone voice crying in the wilderness and that lone voice ends up being correct, but the consensus of the field is a good place to start. What are most people who are researching, working, and educated in a field saying about a subject?

So then if someone comes along and they’re a voice that is speaking completely outside the consensus, we can still listen to what this person has to say, but you listen knowing what the consensus of the field is and knowing that that consensus came about by scientists who would’ve loved to prove other scientists wrong. It would bring a tremendous amount of attention to anyone who could, for example, bring definitive empirical evidence that common ancestry is false. Anyone who could bring complete evidence of that is going to win every Nobel Prize in the world. They’re just going to do it.

Stump:

Another element of that that has become tricky in our contemporary culture is that so often even in a popular news story or something, we want to present both sides. Even if the consensus is 99% of the people who are qualified to talk about something hold to one side, they want to find that 1%, that one person who will say something different, because it makes a more interesting and compelling news story perhaps. But we get the impression then that there’s a big disagreement.

Ray:

Absolutely.

Stump:

So one of the studies that I’ve cited several times is that Christians in particular say at a rate of more than 50% when they’re asked, “Do scientists generally agree or disagree about evolution?”, more than 50% of Christians think they generally disagree. Whereas when you ask the scientists themselves, it’s 99%, which is about as much consensus as you could ever possibly get within a scientific field like that.

Ray:

Absolutely. Along that same vein and I mean this absolutely with respect, if there was so much evidence as is claimed for special creation or a Young Earth or a literal global flood or for design, if there was so much evidence as it is claimed, there would be at least one non-religious scientist promoting these positions, at least one, but there just is not. You don’t find any non-religious Young Earth special creationists, because if there was evidence for it, there would be somebody touting it.

Stump:

Yeah, that’s an interesting observation. Let me just bring this trust section we’re talking about here perhaps to a conclusion of sorts. You say later in the book then that “Fighting evolution for so long shaped the way that evangelicals approach science. We are conditioned to distrust. When we don’t understand the details, we listen to voices telling us it’s not true. We listen to those who think like us theologically and theo-politically.”

So here’s the culture wars now and how we lumped these issues together. I think this is a really interesting point, that the way that we have approached evolution for generations has conditioned us for these other sciences here now, whether it’s COVID or climate change, to have this initial knee-jerk reaction because too many of those people are not in our in-group already. If I’m not going to take the time to actually understand the science, then I’m just going to go with those that think like I do on other things and we take the bundle of issues.

So, what’s the solution to that? So earning trust, we have found this at BioLogos. When I started at BioLogos more than 10 years ago now, I had the view that all we have to do is present the facts, just put the facts out in front of people. That’s not how you earn trust, it turns out. How do we earn trust?

Ray:

Oh wow, that’s a big question and maybe a whole other book or a whole other conversation. I’ve been reading a lot recently by Perry and Whitehead who are doing a lot of writing on Christian nationalism, Christian culture being caught up in politics. One of the interesting findings in their research I found is that unfortunately, people who claim faith or people who are people of faith tend to be more susceptible to pseudoscience claims. I think that goes along with exactly what you just said. If we don’t understand it, we go with the opinion or the position of someone that we trust, someone in our ingroup. The thing about pseudoscience is that it offers certainty. If you drink this supplement or this detox, you will have your migraines cured or your diabetes will go away.

Science just doesn’t offer that certainty. Again, I think one of the biggest breakdowns that we have in gaining trust is a breakdown in science literacy across the board among people of faith and those who don’t claim faith and just not understanding that science doesn’t offer certainty. It’s pseudoscience that will tell you absolutes, but science will change as the evidence changes. Like you said, that doesn’t mean there’s not things in science about which we are quite clear, but we’re not going to go back to saying that it’s the planets and bad air that cause disease. We’re going to stick with germ theory.

But I think one big step forward in gaining trust is just to back up a few steps and talk about how science works, some just basic lessons in science literacy and understanding that science is just status report at the time to do that. It’s hard. It’s hard because fighting evolution for so long has also trained us to look at evidence with foregone conclusions. Just a couple of weeks ago, I saw this posted on social media and I wrote it down because it was so descriptive. The poster said, “You will find evidence for a global flood if you just look for it.” So I had to think about that. I’m like, “Why does that hit my ears in such a profound way?” I think it goes back again to a misunderstanding of how science works.

I mean scientists, when they’re approaching a research study, they turned themselves in knots not to say they proved anything. You either support your hypothesis or you fail to support it or you even fail to reject your hypothesis. It’s not about approaching evidence with foregone conclusions. I think that a better approach to gaining trust would be just to simply explain this is how scientists approach the evidence. You can’t approach with foregone conclusions, be they religious conclusions, political conclusions, worldview conclusion. You approach the evidence for what it is.

Stump:

As BioLogos has broadened a bit beyond just talking about evolution and origins issues and have started engaging more with things like climate science, some of the other people we’ve talked to that do science communication, particularly with regard to climate science we’ve been learning from and what makes for effective communication and how you earn trust and established trust with people often comes from showing that we identify with the same values. That’s made me wonder if we could do better at applying that to these evolution discussions.

Because for something like climate science or even COVID vaccines, where if we start with the values that of course we’re going to hold in common, things like loving our neighbor or we want to be able to enjoy the activities that we do without the climate changing so much that we can’t do this, we want to be able to feed people properly. Are there some values that we can point to with regard to the evolution debates, disagreements that we find amongst ourselves as Christians that we might connect better with some of those values to start with, instead of just trying to convince people of straightforward scientific evidences? I don’t know if you’ve thought about that or if that question even makes sense, but I’m curious about it.

Ray:

What would it look like if we did this? What if we just approached our faith communities and just said, “Okay, evolution is a fact. Common ancestry is a fact. Humans share common ancestry with all life on the planet, okay?” Given these facts, how do we as people of faith rise above our natural evolutionary instincts to put ourselves first? How do we learn to love our neighbor and fight against these evolutionary instincts to put ourselves first and above our neighbor? How do we then as creatures that are intricately connected to all life on this planet? We share life. We share ancestry with everything on the planet. So, how do we as creatures then represent God in the world as image bearers?

Honestly, how beautiful is that that we as creatures connected to all life on the planet are chosen to be the actions of God in the world? We’ve got to get over the idea that a natural evolution of humanity is somehow demeaning, that somehow it demeans God. When we can think of all sorts of things in the natural world, childbirth, nature, oceans that come about through natural processes that we wouldn’t say are demeaning, but yet if we say you share common ancestry with a chimpanzee, somehow that is demeaning and it’s denying God.

Stump:

I’ve had conversations before with people about that very thing who have said, “I just find it distasteful or icky to think that we may have common ancestors with apes and monkeys.” I have sometimes responded with, “Is it less distasteful to think that you came from dust or dirt to begin with?” Why can’t God transform this other living material into humanity, instead of transforming non-living material into humanity, right?

Ray:

Right. For myself, I have just come to the point that nothing discovered in science will cause me not to believe in God. Nothing, no science discovery. We could discover absolute empirical evidence for abiogenesis or the multiverse, but the science is the one thing that’s not going to challenge my faith. I’ve come to peace with, I can say, “This is empirical evidence. This is science. These are the facts.” Now given the facts, how do I as a person of faith respond to these things? I don’t feel like I have to try to prove God using science. I don’t try to have to do the mental gymnastics any longer to try to prove how in the world could I have made this happen and still be able to read Genesis the way I did when I was growing up. I think that approach has ramifications if we face another pandemic.

We face it head on. We say, “Germ theory is real. Viruses are real. These researchers have been researching for decades. They’re not bringing us something they just made up.” Now given the facts, how can churches best serve when a deadly pandemic shuts down public assemblies? Should we take our church collections and hire attorneys to keep our churches open? Should we go to court? Is that the best use of our money, or should we take our church collections and should we support those in our community who can’t work from home, who have to live in multi-generational homes?

We can approach the facts and then respond as people of faith to those facts. It got frustrating there as the… I guess as we were into year three of the pandemic, not knowing it was going to be year three, but when we were looking back on it, I felt like people of faith could lead, could have been leading in that. Like you said, you had hope for it at the outside, that people of faith could be leading in the sciences during a pandemic. Now I just want to say at least could we have gotten out of the way. Evangelical Christians, white evangelical Christians specifically are a huge demographic in our country. I can’t help but think how long the pandemic was extended because evangelical Christians refuse to mask or refuse to quit meeting in large groups or fought against vaccination, that thing.

We can lead or at least get out of the way, which I don’t want us to get out of the way, but I wish that we could speak our faith-filled voices without denying the facts.

Stump:

Yeah, that’s well said. We are approaching the end of our time here. Let me just ask you one more question along these lines, because it’s clear in reading the book and hearing you talk, there’s a certain amount of frustration you have with conservative Christians and attitudes towards science. But I want to make sure that people also hear that that critique you’re making is not somebody from the outside lobbying stones, right? This is a critique from the inside. These are your people, these are our people. The concern you have comes from within. The very last words of your book are, “With a mind for Christ, may we live as people of faith in a modern scientific world.”

So let me ask you just in conclusion here, if you have any practical advice or next steps for people who hear this and say, “Okay, Janet, I hear you and I think I and my community need to do a better job of upholding science.” What are some good next steps for people of faith to live in this modern scientific world as people of faith?

Ray:

Well, absolutely, Jim, as you said, I am speaking from within a community of faith, which I was born into and still remain and never plan to leave. Recently, I heard an evolutionary biologist interviewed. I actually had read his book and it was an amazing book. I have no idea what the religious background of this biologist is or was or any of his views. He didn’t go into that, but this statement he made just floored me. It caused pause in me. He said that whenever anyone with religious objections to evolution tries to engage him, he says, “I don’t engage. I don’t try to convince.” He’ll give information, but that’s about it. So, in other words, my takeaway from that was this evolutionary biologist has completely written off people of faith. He doesn’t try to engage. He doesn’t try to convince. He doesn’t try to discuss. I’m not ready to give up yet. I’m just not ready to give up. Because I think that when we deny these areas of modern science, I think that people of faith have taken ourselves completely out of a broader conversation. Who’s going to listen to us? On the one hand, who’s going to listen to us about things that require belief, that things that require faith, things like the resurrection or the incarnation, things that we believe on faith? Who’s going to listen to us about those things if we deny empirical, demonstrable, scientific evidence? Who’s going to care about what our take is on something if we are known for denying empirical evidence?

I’m not going to listen to a flat earth advocate. Tell me about the best approaches to combat climate change. That’s not going to be someone I’m going to trust to talk to me about science because they deny demonstrable evidence. My feeling is that with science denial by people of faith, we are just admitting to the broader world that we have nothing to say. We have nothing to say. We may believe we are sticking up for God, but in reality, we are just making ourselves irrelevant. So, my encouragement would be we have ways we can approach science. We can deny it. We can pretend it’s all a conspiracy. We can politicize it, or we can accept the consensus of the science field. We can accept evidence that we have at the time, and then we can speak as people of faith to that evidence, to that situation. Like I said, nothing that I’m going to discover in science is going to make me change my belief in God. It’s not going to be science.

Stump:

Well, very good. Thanks so much for that. What’s next for you? Any more books in the works to turn this into a trilogy of sorts?

Ray:

Oh, my goodness. You read my brain. The last time I was asked that was by my editor, and it was just in the back of my brain. The next thing I knew I had a deadline in my email box. What’s percolating in the back of my brain right now is I’d like to investigate further human evolution and what that means to be image bearers of God, the human evolution and the image of God there. That’s what’s percolating at the back. When Monkey God gets launched into the world, then I can start researching that one.

Stump:

All right. Well, we look forward to seeing that as well. But in the meantime, it’s The God of Monkey Science: People of Faith in a Modern Scientific World. I encourage our listeners to pick up a copy. We, in conclusion, like to ask people what they’ve been reading. We’ve talked about the book you’ve written. What are you reading right now, Janet?

Ray:

Well, right now, I’m reading Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues. I’m just into it, and so far it’s really good. I finished a book this summer that I highly recommend. It’s called The Song of the Cell by Siddhartha Mukherjee. I believe he also wrote The Emperor of All Maladies. He’s written several. I really love reading a good book by a good science communicator who writes not necessarily to a specialist, a scientist. I’m enjoying this Pathogenesis book and I really like Song of the Cell. In all my spare time, I’m trying to read a lot. Like I mentioned before by Perry and Whitehead, a lot of their research. They’re both men of faith, and I think it’s very interesting their analysis of some of the current situation that we see in our country.

Stump:

Well, thanks for that. Thank you for your work and what you’ve done to help communicate science particularly to a Christian audience in this regard. Thanks so much for talking to me here today.

Ray:

Thanks, Jim. I’m so glad to be on. I’m a longtime listener.

Stump:

Very good.

BioLogos:

Language of God is produced by BioLogos. It has been funded in part by the Fetzer Institute. Fetzer supports a movement of organizations who are applying spiritual solutions to society’s toughest problems. Get involved at fetzer.org. And by the John Templeton Foundation, which funds research and catalyzes conversations that inspire people with awe and wonder. BioLogos is also supported by individual donors and listeners like you, who contribute to BioLogos. Language of God is produced and makes by Colin Hoogerwerf. That’s me. Our theme song is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

BioLogos offices are located in Grand Rapids, Michigan and the Grand River Watershed. If you have questions or want to join in a conversation about this episode, find the link in the show notes for the BioLogos forum, or visit our website, biologos.org, where you’ll find articles, videos, and other resources on faith and science. Thanks for listening.