Can You Believe in God and Evolution?
A Guide for the PerplexedBy Martinez HewlettAbingdon Press
Copyright © 2006 The United Methodist Publishing House
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-687-33551-0Chapter One
Is There A Battle In Our Classrooms and Congregations?
As we already mentioned, one of us is a pastor and theologian while the other is a scientist and philosopher. Marty has taught biology at all levels of the university, from graduate and medical school to beginning courses, for over 30 years, primarily at the University of Arizona. He has seen firsthand the results of the battle in the lives of students, what some think of as a conflict between science and faith. The following is Marty's firsthand account of what happened in the case of two students whose stories typify the crisis. It is a crisis for both classroom and congregation.
Marty's Two University Students Caught in the Crossfire
This is the story of two of my students in Intro Biology. The first one—I'll call him Robert—took my beginning course with aspirations of becoming a wildlife biologist. He was an outstanding student, always scoring at or near the top on exams and asking penetrating questions during that semester. Near the end of the term, he took me aside after class.
"I won't be taking the next semester," he said.
"Why?" I asked, knowing that it would be required for his major.
"Because the next semester covers evolution and, for me, listening to lectures about evolution would be like looking at pornography. I can't do that."
I was stunned. Robert saw the Darwinian model as a deep conflict with his Christian faith. He would not accept my reassurances that the science itself was not a problem. He wound up changing his major.
The second student—I'll call her Kathy—stood at my office door at the end of the first week of class.
"May I talk to you, Dr. Hewlett? It's about religion."
I always begin the semester by telling the students about myself, including my strong Roman Catholic faith.
"Sure, come on in and sit down."
Her eyes were already beginning to tear up as she lowered herself into a chair.
"I come from a small farming community and I'm here at the university to become a medical doctor. But I'm afraid of the science classes I have to take. My father is convinced that I'll lose my faith. What can I do?"
Her question precipitated a long mentoring relationship between us. I prepared a reading list for her, loaning her books from my collection, such as Ken Miller's Finding Darwin's God and John Haught's God After Darwin. I set up a schedule where she would see me on a regular basis during my class and, more importantly, during the second semester of the intro course. As a result, she not only persisted in her biology major, but is currently finishing medical school. We communicate now by e-mail and she assures me that everything is fine, both with her science and with her faith.
Those Evening Phone Calls! Teachers Caught in the Crossfire
High school science teachers say that they tremble a bit when the telephone rings in the evening. They fear that it might be one more of "those calls." Those calls come from parents of children who want to know what they're teaching. If the parent is angry at the godless atheists who are trying to secularize our country and take away our Christian heritage, that anger can get displaced onto the teacher at the other end of the phone. It can spoil a teacher's quiet evening at home. Worse, it can cause worry about that teacher's eternal salvation.
Ken Miller testified as an expert witness during the 2005 trial that took place in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, over the teaching of evolution in the Dover, Pennsylvania, school district. Miller had written a widely used high school textbook on biology. He is also a devout Christian. The day following his testimony, he received five e-mails telling him that he was "going to burn in hell."
University of Kansas Religious Studies Professor Paul Mirecki planned to teach a course, "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and Other Religious Mythologies." He canceled the class after a furor of e-mails complaining that the professor was mocking Christian fundamentalists. It got worse. While driving one evening on a rural road in December 2005, he was tailgated by thugs. They stopped the professor, dragged him from his car, and beat him on the head, back, and shoulders with their fists, punishing him for the class, they said.
We ask: where are the preachers and pastors in this situation? Are the parents who make the frightening phone calls also parents of children in congregations? Has something taken place in church that now comes to expression in the form of displaced anger against schoolteachers and college professors? Does the anger boil and bubble in the churches and then spill over into the public arena, into our schools, before school boards, and before our legislatures? Yes, this appears to be what is happening. It's one more battle in the culture wars, and the combatants include parents.
What about pastors and church leaders? Are the pastors the generals leading their congregations into battle? What happens to the children when they watch the war taking place around their education, even at church? One thing we can note right away. Some end up in Marty's university level biology classes with the painful internal struggles he reports.
The Crisis Breeds Fear
Our society is facing a crisis regarding what to teach the children in our public schools, Roman Catholic parochial schools, evangelical Christian day schools, home schools, along with our colleges and universities. Even more important, our young people are facing a crisis of faith. Many are frightened that what we study in science may threaten our faith. Science may draw us away from belief in God. And because of this fear, some of our young people are steering themselves away from opportunities for a meaningful vocation in science.
What Is at Stake
While many fear that science will undermine faith, we the coauthors of this book have quite a different concern. We fear that a misunderstanding about our faith might create an unnecessary deafness to a divine call to study God's creation through the eyes of the microscope and telescope. What is at stake is the understanding that the world God has made is complex and magnificent; and science provides the lenses through which we can view the fingerprints and footprints left by God's history with our beautiful world. While recognizing that materialistic ideological smudges are occasionally left on the scientific lenses, we believe in taking a look through them anyway—better partial sight than ignorance. We believe in courage, and we believe that faith armed with courage, is just what God needs from people in our churches today and tomorrow.
As we face the crisis over evolution, we need a faith that seeks understanding. We ask for fides quaerens intellectum ("faith seeking understanding"), in the words of St. Anselm of Canterbury. We ask for a faith that is mature enough to pause and get the facts right before jumping to conclusions. We ask for an unanxious faith that exhibits confidence in the face of ambiguity and difficulty. We ask for a faith that trusts the truth, knowing that any truth—whether scientific truth or religious truth—must come ultimately from God. We ask for a faith that sees itself as a seed, a seed willing to grow, blossom, and expand—a faith that is willing to deepen and enjoy the searchable as well as the unsearchable riches that God has placed before us.
A Map Through the Wilderness of Controversy
It's easy to get lost in the wilderness of the evolution controversy. Is there only one authentic Christian view of evolution? If we get it wrong, do we betray our faith? Must one be an atheist to be a Darwinist? If our ancestors were monkeys, do we lose our dignity? Should public schools silence the Christian voice in favor of a secular view of evolution? Would evangelical day schools and Roman Catholic parochial schools along with families who home school risk contaminating the faith of our children by teaching the "e" word?
What we need is a map. We find ourselves in a wilderness of controversy, and we need a map to find our way through it and onto higher and clearer ground. Such a map is what this book will try to provide.
The road we will follow will begin in a valley and climb to the top of a large hill, making numerous stops along the way. Our point of departure will be the classic Christian faith, the one that derives from the Bible. Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Evangelical Protestants, and many Liberal Protestants share this classic commitment. As we wind our way up the road, we will pass evolutionary science and proceed on toward the atheistic ideologies that some have chosen to build on top of the science, what some have called atheistic materialism. We will pause to show respect to the laboratory researchers and the high school teachers who merely want to go to work each day and make a positive contribution to our life together. We will then follow the road up to where scientific creationism and Intelligent Design reside, where religious soldiers are strategizing for what they believe to be a better science. Beyond this point we will visit with the theistic evolutionists, those who believe they can affirm both their Christian faith and evolutionary science as secular scientists present it. Finally, we will arrive at our destination, the hilltop, from which we hope to gain a comprehensive perspective on the road we will have just traveled. On the hilltop, we will try to frame this perspective with a Christian vision informed and even edified by solid science and a larger appreciation of the grandeur of God's creation and God's promise of a new creation.
Once we've arrived at the hilltop and look back at our passage, we might want to redraw the map. This is a conceptual map, actually, a spectrum of views. At one end we would place those views according to which God acts directly and perceptibly in natural events. Here God is an interventionist, and we can see the results of God's action in nature. On this end of the spectrum we would place scientific creationism and Intelligent Design (ID). Creationism holds that God acts decisively at the beginning, at creation. The ID school holds that God acts periodically along the path of evolution, intervening with new designs and jumps in complexity.
At the other end of our spectrum we locate those views in which God is not perceived as an actor in natural processes. Atheists represent this position well, because they believe there is no God who could act. The particular atheists we have in mind here are those who rely specifically on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. We prefer to call them ontological materialists, meaning that they want to say that nothing but the material world has being. They are also known as reductionists or secular humanists. One of the concerns we have is that too frequently these materialists are equated with all practicing scientists, or even the high school teachers of evolution. This is not only a mistake; it is unfair. The average laboratory scientist and typical schoolteacher think of themselves as pursuing science, not as pursuing a materialist ideology, let alone atheism. Even though the scientific method does not make room for transcendental causes, the actual scientists themselves are not necessarily committed to an ideology of materialism. In fact, many are devout Christians. Some are devout Jews or Muslims as well. Let us make this point: it is possible to both believe in God and employ Darwinian evolution as a scientific theory.
Marty is a practicing scientist, as we reported earlier. In a lengthy career at a university with a medical school, he has investigated viruses in his laboratory. He's coauthored three editions of a textbook on virology. He knows from extensive experience what good science requires if research is to lead to new knowledge. He finds Darwin's theory of evolution indispensable for learning more about molecular biology and producing the kind of scientific knowledge that could lead to advances in medical therapy. Marty wants no part of ontological materialism, let alone atheism. He wants good science, and good science alone.
One short step toward the middle from the noninterventionist end of the spectrum finds naturalism and deism. In both cases, the natural world has a sense of the sacred about it. In the case of naturalism, the world's sacredness is due to the intrinsic value of nature, not to the creative work of a transcendent deity. In the case of deism, a transcendent God is responsible for the creation, but that God has now departed and left the world to operate according to the laws of nature. Science studies the laws of nature, while the God who created those laws becomes invisible.
As we move further toward the middle of the spectrum, we find the theistic evolutionists. We did not name this group of people. Rather, the name was invented by the scientific creationists as a disparaging title. We fished around for a better title, but we couldn't find one. So, we elected to simply fall in-line and use this term. Within this term, we place a wide spectrum of differing views; but they all have one theme in common: the Christian faith is compatible with the Darwinian interpretation of evolution.
A recent study sponsored by the Episcopal Church in the United States of America, A Catechism of Creation, articulates a variant of theistic evolution nicely. "In this evolving universe, God does not dictate the outcome of nature's activities, but allows the world to become what it is able to become in all of its diversity: one could say that God has a purpose rather than a fixed plan, a goal rather than a blueprint." It frames such affirmations within a complementary approach to science and faith. "Science and Christian theology can complement one another in the quest for truth and understanding."
What Do We Advocate?
When we conclude this book, you will find that we would place ourselves in this middle position, subscribing both to Christian faith while embracing the value of the Darwinian model of evolution for scientific research and classroom teaching. In the meantime, we wish to provide an empathetic understanding and explication of the views held by the creationists and the Intelligent Design advocates.
Further, we are earnestly concerned about what this controversy might be doing to young people in our churches and our schools. We fear that they will become discouraged, or worse, fearful about pursuing a life career in science. We believe science is better than television or video games because it provides a window into the natural world. Once we peer through that window, a vast array of depth and breadth and beauty and magnificence opens up. To look through the window science provides opens our eyes to see the grandeur of God's creation as nothing else can.
In addition, the practical advantage of good science is that it leads to technology. Technology in general and medical technology in particular has the potential for improving human health and well-being.
So, to bombard our young people with shock and awe over the evolution controversy may unnecessarily cut them off from many opportunities, one of which is considering science as itself a Christian vocation. It is our earnest desire that young people in middle school and high school are taught the very best science, and this includes the Darwinian model of evolution.
The Church's Role
It is our fervent wish that the pastors and congregations who provide instruction in the Christian faith teach a number of things: first, to trust God before human ideas, and that evolution is one of these human ideas; second, to trust that new knowledge to be gained from a scientific understanding of our world will only enhance our appreciation for God's creation; and third, to trust that faith will provide the courage to consider the possibility that God might be calling us to a vocation either as a scientist or as a supporter of the best science for our society.
What should we teach in our schools, both public and Christian schools? It is our sincere desire that young people in middle school and high school are taught the very best science, and this includes the Darwinian model of evolution. We believe this is serious business. The Darwinian model does much more than just tell us a story about the history of the development of different species on our planet. It provides a model for the study of biology that is progressive for new scientific directions. New research in biology leads to advances in medical science, and this leads to therapies that save human lives. Teaching anything less than the best science is unethical. Whether we like it or not, the Darwinian model is the best science at this point in time.
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Excerpted from Can You Believe in God and Evolution?by Martinez Hewlett Copyright © 2006 by The United Methodist Publishing House. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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