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I was sitting alone at the end of the boardroom, fidgeting with some notes on the table in front of me. On the other side, about 10 older men in suits and ties, arms crossed, peered over the table. For someone just walking into the room, it wouldn’t have been difficult to determine which end of the room the power was flowing to.
After my short opening statement, the remaining time was reserved for “discussion.” The two-hour meeting felt like an interrogation. The first questioner remained silent even after I said this. “Jim, I went to school with your dad. We even went on a mission trip to Mexico together. I’ve known you since you were kids. What’s up?” “
I replayed this scene hundreds of times in my head, changing what I said to get my accusers to stand up, shake their hands, and say, “Oh, I get it.” That makes sense. We apologize for the inconvenience. ” But the ending is always the same: I must relinquish my position as a tenured professor of philosophy and leave the university I have held for 17 years.
My crime? What he believes, 99 percent of people with Ph.D.s in biology or medicine, is that humans evolved over time and share a common ancestor with all other life forms on Earth. about it. However, this was a small Christian university and one of the places where the theory of evolution was considered incompatible with Christian beliefs. Evolution is considered dangerous, not just incompatible. They believed that hearing positive things about evolution would make students doubt the Bible. According to them, if the account of creation in the first chapter of the Bible is not believable, why believe it?
I don’t think faith is that fragile. I have already shared with the panel an example of how faith and science can not only coexist, but can actually strengthen each other. But the rhetoric of a prominent young-earth creationist group so upset the university’s leadership that, after questioning me, they changed the official statement of belief that faculty must sign each year.
To be fair, I wasn’t technically fired. Had they agreed to the new rules, they could have stayed. There are still several other faculty members who admit to allowing progress to occur behind closed doors. However, like photosynthesis or the germ theory, it cannot be taught as truth. They cannot publish academic papers defending it.and they surely You cannot hold a leadership position in an organization that advocates the theory of evolution, even if it is from a Christian perspective.
That gatekeeping not only worries me, but saddens me, as my involvement with science has led me to a deeper, more authentic faith. I’m having trouble with this too. Because time and time again, I’ve seen this kind of hostility toward science lead Christians, especially students who ask questions about their inherited faith, away from Christianity, drawing lines that don’t need to exist.
But I can understand why some Christians draw that line. I think their logic works like this. “We want to convince people that the Bible can be trusted.” Today, when people pick up a Bible and read the story of Genesis, they know that what the text says can really happen. You may have some doubts. Such doubts erode the foundations of Biblical truth and lead people to doubt other aspects of the Bible’s claims. To truly refute these suspicions, we must show that these stories can occur exactly as described. Then people will be convinced that the Bible speaks the truth.
But in reality, we find that the opposite often happens. You cannot convince people that the Bible tells the truth if you shut down honest questions about it. We make them doubt our entire faith.
“My church lied to me,” author Philip Yancey said on my podcast, when I asked him if he was frustrated by how the church had made him think about science. He answered: Yancey has written a number of books criticizing the easy answers given by the Christian community to difficult questions.
He grew up in a fundamentalist church in Atlanta that denied the existence of dinosaurs and preached that black people were cursed and could never lead. But when Yancey won a summer fellowship at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), he discovered that his mentor was a Black man with a Ph.D. in chemistry. That’s when he realized his church had been lying about race. “Lying” is a pretty strong accusation, but they were clearly wrong. He continued:
And if they’re wrong about race, they might be wrong about evolution, they might be wrong about the Bible, they might be wrong about Jesus. And it was a great crisis of faith. And the only way I dealt with it was to just withdraw from the faith for a period of time. It took me a long time and is still taking me a long time to solve it. That’s what I do as a writer, to sort out what’s worth keeping and what needs to be thrown away. Because the church doesn’t always get it right. And if you get it wrong with science, if you get it wrong with any of these topics, you open the door to people who just ignore everything the church has taught. It will be.
This is a great illustration of how religious organizations alienate people when they give few reliable answers to honest questions. There’s only a slight difference between answering a question with an outlandish answer that will surely be accepted as an unquestionable truth, and not answering the question at all.
Near the end of my tenure as a professor, a student came into my office crying. She had just come from a Bible class and asked a question about how our faith tradition interprets certain passages. She doesn’t even remember what sentence it was now, but she does remember that the professor replied, “You shouldn’t ask such a question.”
I hope that what the student experienced from his Bible professor and what Yancey experienced from the church were isolating experiences. But unfortunately that is not the case. This habit of ending questions quickly and decisively contributes to the well-documented disengagement of the American public from the church.
One of the main reasons young people turn away from faith is that their questions are not taken seriously. They are specifically asking questions about science, but church leaders don’t seem to realize that. Otherwise, you will receive answers that seem strange and outlandish compared to the mainstream and well-confirmed scientific opinion.
The result is that people grow up in religious communities with a particular view of science that is closely tied to a particular view of the Bible, which essentially becomes a package deal. And when they get out into the real world (or even just watch a nature documentary) and realize that their view of science is clearly wrong, they throw the whole package away. In Yancey’s words, they make “everything the church taught” unnecessary.
Having listened to many former students who have walked that path, I want to address these topics with current students, give them a place to ask questions, and show them that science doesn’t have to lead them away from faith. I wanted to. I wanted my students to understand that they don’t have to abandon their faith because of science. Proclaiming that message led me to quit my university, but I still strive to show that there is a better way.
Jim Stump is Vice President of Programs at BioLogos and host of the podcast god’s languageauthor of The Sacred Chain: How Understanding Evolution Leads to Deeper Faith.
From a newly released book The Sacred Chain: How Understanding Evolution Leads to Deeper Faith Written by James Stump. Copyright © 2024 by James Stump. Published by his HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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