After the winter morning at The Rusty Spoon, Jared was resolved to follow Aly’s advice. He needed to help his young people relate faith and scientific findings and theories. But he had no idea how he was going to do this, or even how to think about it.
Resolve has a way of weakening under the pressure of a full schedule. And as the new year dawned, all but the next task was dust under Jared’s pace. Not only was he behind on getting things ready for the January high school ski trip, but the denomination’s youth worker training event was only days away. Jared was honored, but a little overwhelmed, to be the host and emcee of the event, as well as leading a workshop.
Jared titled his workshop session, “From Dull to Dynamic Small Groups.” There hadn’t been much time to prepare as the event neared, so Jared went into it with only very broad notes but a clear sense of his larger point. He punctuated the need for small groups to be a place to ask difficult questions. He shared how he organized and trained his adult volunteers to be ready to engage young people’s questions and how this had affected his ministry. He traced the transformation back to last summer’s mission trip. “It was then that we decided to embrace a ministry of sharing in each other’s humanity.” Jared told how in the past he’d seen his small groups as a strategy for program building, rather than communities of shared life.
As Jared spoke, he felt exhilarated; the workshop seemed to be humming. For a moment he felt like he was standing outside himself, watching himself talk, and noticing that, indeed, it was all going well. Yet, underneath those pulses of excitement, he had another feeling that rushed him back into his body. Like waves, small pinched pangs of panic would crash into Jared chest as his subconscious reminded him that he didn’t really know what he was talking about. To keep these pinched pangs of panic from growing, Jared just talked faster. It seemed to help ..... until the Q&A.
As Jared invited questions, the pain was acute as he anticipated the first response. The first few questions were logistical, giving Jared every opportunity to speak from his own experience. He told how many young people he had per group and how he trained the leaders. Jared noticed how much people liked it when he threw in a few stories to illustrate his answers. So he decided he’d keep this strategy going. But soon Jared’s confidence was crumbling, and the pinched pain throbbed as the questions became pointed. Sarah, a youth worker Jared had seen around but never spoken with, asked, “How do you prepare your leaders for the really difficult stuff?”
“What do you mean?” Jared asked.
“I don’t know,” Sarah continued. “I guess I mean how do you prepare your leaders to talk with high schoolers about hooking up, or how do you deal with their questions around evolution?”
“Oh, no,” someone jokingly added from the back of the room. “Sex and science, the two big no-no’s in the church—watch out!”
Everyone laughed, giving Jared a second to race into every corner of his brain, activating every neuron cluster for an intelligible word. He stood as still as he could, searching for some hidden content to connect to and cure him from the state of blankness. Jared still needed more time, so he asked, “What do you mean? Can you give us an example?”
Sarah had been around the denominational youth ministry conversation for years, but mainly stayed on the fringes. It wasn’t until last year that she moved from part-time to full-time. But this move gave Sarah the confidence to inject herself deeper into the youth ministry conversations. She felt like she actually belonged. In response to Jared’s call for clarification, she laughed and said, “Okay.” She paused to put her thoughts together. The group sat in silence for a few beats, which felt like minutes to Jared.
“Well,” she said, “for instance, almost all my ninth-graders are taking Earth Science, and I know in late October they’re going to get to the evolution sections of the class. Right about then the questions start coming in our small groups. I personally feel like I can handle them; I tend to tell kids that evolution and faith really have nothing to do with each other, that they’re really just two different perspectives that don’t really talk to each other. They’re like two different operating systems, I guess, like trying to run an Android app on an iPhone. So let’s move on. But, I have parents and other adult leaders who don’t feel this way. I have one leader, Lynn, who tries to show how evolution and the Bible go together, which seems tricky, and maybe dangerous, to me. And I even have a parent, Cal, who has brought in pamphlets from Ken Hamm, showing how evolution is a lie—I’ve put a stop to that now. But still I’m not sure how to prepare adult leaders, or parents for that matter, for these more difficult topics of discussion.”
Jared had no direct answer, so he went to his ace strategy and told a story, sharing how over the last nine months he too had been hit with questions about science from young people and their parents. He shared a little bit about Sasha and Trent. But then he recounted in more detail his experience with Aly. Jared told particularly about the Thanksgiving dinner debates between her dad and uncle. People all laughed as he described the scene. He painted quite a picture of Aly’s uncle accusing her dad of being an ignorant cave-dweller, chasing an invisible person. Jared did his best to say that he felt a little differently than either Aly’s dad or uncle, that he believed there were real ways that scientific findings overlapped with faith.
He then held his breath and prayed that no one would ask him how.
It was a child’s experience in China that would eventually provide us with the clearest map for the ways of relating faith and science—the echoes of which we can hear in Sarah’s comments above. The young Ian Barbour was born to American nationals teaching at Yenching University in 1920s China. Ian’s mother was a scholar in religious education, and his father was a geologist. As a child, Ian and his family became close friends with the French paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard was ingeniously relating evolutionary findings with the practice of faith. While he was on a dig in China, the Barbours and Teilhard became close.
Teilhard saw himself as a “scientist-theologian.” Within decades, following the footsteps of his boyhood hero, Ian Barbour, too, became a “scientist-theologian” himself. But unlike the paleontologist Teilhard, he chose physics.
These dreams of following Teilhard’s footsteps all but disappeared under the grind of studying cosmic rays. But in the 1950s a Ford Foundation Fellowship took Barbour back to his boyhood. The fellowship allowed the young Kalamazoo College professor to spend a year at Yale Divinity School studying theology and ethics. Now the trajectory of the rest of Barbour’s career was set; his vocation, like his boyhood hero, was to relate science with religion.
In his 1997 book Religion and Science, Barbour presented a fourfold model for this relationship, and his map has become paradigmatic. Barbour explained that there are four options in relating faith and science: 1) conflict, 2) independence, 3) dialogue, or 4) integration.
Like a married couple, religion and science may relate through fighting and argument. They might yell their perspectives at each other, the resentment of misunderstanding drawing them together, but with the bitterness of conflict.
Or religion and science may have decided that the time for talking is over; they are just two different people with different desires and hopes. One stays in the house and the other moves across town. It is best if they live independent lives. Of course, at moments they’ll have to be together for a graduation or funeral. But when they are, they’ll make no eye contact, striving to avoid each other. If they never talk, the peace is kept.
Or maybe faith and science are a couple where all the romance has disappeared, but in its absence they have found a friendship. They are different people, but now that there is no pressure to be in love this difference is welcomed. They’ve freed themselves from the guilt of the past, and now they enjoy long dialogues on the porch over coffee. With all the defensiveness and jealousy gone, these conversations are rich. There remains a few sore subjects between them, but at this stage, what counts is the places of connection.
Or, finally, faith and science might be a couple that at times publicly fights at a restaurant, or ignores each other for a full weekend, but these are just signs of an electricity between them. These tensions are just building to an explosion of integration—boom-chick-a-wow. In these moments the two become one.
Barbour’s map provides clear paths for relating faith and science, and it is helpful. But while this map is genius in its directionality, it is weak in its topology—that is, it’s too flat. Barbour presumes that the issues between faith and science, between our married couple, are contained only between the two. In his map Barbour assumes that there are only two entities relating. But this is not the case, as we’ve seen above. When we move closer to the ground, reality becomes more complicated, and the map is less helpful. We see that there is not just a couple needing to relate, but a whole constellation of figures.
The flatness and absence of this constellation in Barbour’s map can be seen in the title of his book Religion and Science. Barbour makes no distinction between “religion” as a set of theoretical judgments, and the practices of personal encounter with divine action—which is the pursuit of faith. It is one thing to relate “religion” as theoretical (metaphysical) judgments to science, and quite another thing to relate “faith” as the lived experience of encountering the personhood of God.
One of the reasons that Dawkins can be so bombastic in his critique is that he fails to clearly state what he is relating to “science.” Dawkins sees violent conflict as the only option for relating because he chooses to see only “religion.” He can poke fun at faith by laminating it to “religion.” Dawkins thinks that faith is absurd because it makes no theoretical sense in our material world. But judging faith by a cut-off external standard is no way to relate to it. If Dawkins wants to relate to faith through conflict, the only way to do so is to take on faith’s own methodologies (this would be truly scientific) and use its practices of personal encounter to seek the action of God. Only after doing this could he contend that there is outright conflict between faith and “science.”
So while Barbour’s map is helpful, it lacks detail. For example, Barbour’s map fails to make important distinctions between the social practice of “science,” and the scientific as particular findings and theories.
Mikael Stenmark has spotted these problems. Although appreciative of Barbour’s work, he has jiggled its parts enough to shift the map, adding nuance and texture. Stenmark reminds us that when discussing forms of relating, and seeking to map them, we need to have an eye for goals (telos). To get beyond the surface of our married couple and truly understand their ways of relating, we have to get underneath their strategies of conflict, independence, dialogue, or integration, and seek to understand their goals, their deepest pursuits.
It is when we focus on the telos that our vision shifts, and we see not just a couple but also the presence of others. We recognize that we must be clear about what we are seeking to relate. For instance, the goal of the comprehensive social practice of “science,” as perpetuated by Tyson and Dawkins, is to convince us that the universe is an impersonal place, and to ridicule anyone who is too weak and immature to face this fact. To relate the social practice of “science” with religion or faith will change the terrain of the paths Barbour laid out.
It will be a bumpy road to try and find dialogue between faith and the comprehensive social practice of “science.” And the path of integration will be impossibly treacherous—filled with steep sharp cliffs, alligators, and lava streams. These paths are treacherous because the telos of each is diametrically opposed. The social practice of “science” seeks to convince us that the universe is an impersonal place, while faith seeks again and again to both encounter and understand a personal universe given to us by a personal God. If the hope is to relate the social practice of “science” and faith, the paths available are only conflict or independence. Each perspective’s telos is too distinct to allow for either dialogue or integration.
But if we decide that what we seek to relate is faith with scientific findings and theories, then the terrain changes. The telos of scientific findings and theories is to understand the very shape of material reality itself. So now the path to dialogue is open, for the telos between faith and scientific findings and theories are not diametrically opposed (though they are not exactly linked). But now this dialogue changes. It doesn’t depend anymore on some obscure thing called “science,” but on the specific methods and findings of, say, particle physics or paleontology. What Stenmark shows is that we are not just generically relating religion and science. We must deal with the telos of multiple perspectives.
Sarah, the youth worker at Jared’s workshop, has chosen the path of independence. She has allowed the social practice of “science” to claim evolution for its own pursuits. The social practice of “science” uses evolution as a point in its goal to persuade us that indeed we live in only an impersonal world, not caring that evolution’s methodology (its research methods and findings) doesn’t actually prove this. The comprehensive social practice of “science” turns evolutionary findings into some kind of conclusive statement about our existence, like “Evolution proves that all we are is animal.” Darwin shows us that there is a link between living organisms through natural selection, but the social practice of “science” takes that to mean that any design in the world is merely accidental, for its quest is to prove that the world is an impersonal place.
Intuitively, Sarah recognizes this and refuses to follow the path of conflict—she doesn’t want to be a closed-minded, anti-intellectual person. The best she can do, then, is the path of independence; her only option is to keep faith and evolution apart. She decides to avoid discussing evolution at church, or does so only vaguely, telling young people not to sweat it, because evolution is Android and faith is iOS. This can only be true if we squeeze faith into some theoretical judgment and close our eyes to how the social practice of “science” uses evolution for it own goals.
The parent in Sarah’s ministry, Cal with the Ken Hamm tracts, operates from a similar perspective but takes a different tack, seeing evolution as a weapon of the social practice of “science.” Sarah and Cal are in a death match of difference, but in actuality their struggle is intense because of their similarity. They have both conceded that the relating will be done between religion and the social practice of “science.” Their only difference is that Cal, unlike Sarah, is not willing to follow the path of independence and chooses instead the road of conflict. But they are both being led by the same map. Cal uses Ken Hamm pamphlets as a weapon. Sarah seems more reasonable than Cal, but actually they have both conceded that the fight is between religion and the comprehensive social practice of “science.”
The adult leader, Lynn, that Sarah mentioned to Jared tries the more difficult and seemly dangerous thing, to find a place of dialogue, to explore if there are actual points of overlap. This seems dangerous because it can be misunderstood as a desire to find intersection between the presumed categories of religion and the social practice of “science.” But this not what she is after. Rather, Lynn sees connections between the findings of evolution and the experience of faith. Lynn recognizes that this is not a perfect link. The path of dialogue is not paved and remains rocky. But at the methodological level, evolution’s findings of radical human uniqueness seem to her to open up conversations about spirituality and divine encounter. The very fact that the earliest artifacts we have of homo sapiens are cave paintings suggesting worship seems to deliver an opportunity for dialogue. What Lynn seeks, which is so important to notice, is to relate faith (as pursuing the encounter with a personal God) with scientific findings (methodological pursuits for the verified shape of material reality). When we make the distinction between what we are actually seeking to relate, these paths of conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration are shifted.
But we must be careful. It is clear that the comprehensive social practice of “science” and scientific findings and theories are different—they have different pursuits and goals. But just because they are different doesn’t mean these distinct pursuits might not simultaneously affect a single person. For instance, a scientist like Trent (Sasha’s dad) feels the weight of the comprehensive social practice of “science” when he constructs scientific theory.[1] He sees how a finding of physics might indeed point to a personal force in the universe, realizing that a deeply fine-tuned universe indeed seems to have personal mind. Trent is uneasy sharing this at a physics conference, fearing that the goal of the comprehensive social practice of “science” will punish him for these very scientific findings. Trent says, “Unfortunately, you can’t get promoted and get tenure in a state university for saying you see God in our finely tuned carbon universe.”
But this also shows that the goals for the social practice of “science” and scientific findings and theories are different. When Trent creates an experiment to test the concept of a theoretical physicist, his goals are methodological (as opposed to epistemological). He is seeking what is empirically verifiable through multiple repetitions. If he has an epistemological goal (a way of seeking to know), it is to discover the shape of reality as it is delivered to him through the methodology of the experiment.
So Trent doesn’t necessarily share the goal of the comprehensive social practice of “science.” He isn’t trying to show that there is no personal mind in the universe. His goal is to describe the way the world is. But this goal isn’t completely isolated from the pressure of the social practice of “science.” Trent has to worry that if indeed his scientific findings oppose the goal of the social practice of “science,” his whole methodology will be ridiculed as immature and immoral.[2]
So to decide which path on Barbour’s map to follow, we must first be clear about what we hope to relate. When Sarah’s small group asks questions, they are not asking how theoretical judgments of religion relate to either the comprehensive social practice of “science” or the methods of scientific discovery. Rather, what the small groups of high school students want to explore is how faith, as an encounter with a personal God who acts in the universe, can be related to a certain scientific finding/theory called evolution. And they are asking this, as we saw in the last chapter, because of their experience. They are asking, Do the findings of evolution conflict or connect in any way with my (or my family’s) experience of a personal God? If I’ve been told reading the Bible is a practice of faith that takes me into an encounter with a personal God, how am I to understand the very different story of evolution?
When we seek to relate faith with scientific findings and theories, we discover that Barbour’s map shifts. The paths of conflict, independence, dialogue, and integration are redrawn. The original broad shape can still be spotted. But like comparing maps of North America from the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, the detail becomes more fine and the pathways more accurate. It is the focus on telos (goals) that is the lens that pulls things into sharper detail.[3] We are not only pushed to be clearer about what we are actually relating, but also to recognize that any relating worth its name will have either overlap, openness, or refusal at levels of its deepest pursuits. So it isn’t enough to ask, Do faith and scientific findings conflict? Rather, we must first recognize the telos, or goal of each, and then push deeper, and ask, are there indeed places of intersection? And what does this intersection say about our existence? From Stenmark’s perspective there are three options of relating that allow us to account for the distinct telos of our multiple players. Taking this into account, Stenmark shifts Barbour’s map, redrawing its lines.
Option one is to see no overlap between faith and scientific findings and theories. This is the view of Aly’s dad (the “cave-dweller”). The good news is that because there is no overlap between them, there is no need for conflict. They are two totally different domains that have little to do with each other. Steven Jay Gould, and more recently Michael Ruse, have proposed a position called NOMA, which stands for “non-overlapping magisteria.” The idea is fairly simple: faith and scientific findings exist in two non-overlapping domains. Aly’s dad can keep his faith in one part of his life and his scientific pursuits in another.
But NOMA ignores that human beings have an insatiable impulse to give loyalty and authority to some entity. To just “keep ’em separated” doesn’t work, and that’s why this non-overlapping is itself a magisterium. A king only has the majestic authority to rule in his own domain. Once he steps outside it, he may deserve respect, but he is no longer bestowed with authority. It is the same way with faith and science.[4]
From within option one, Sarah is right; faith and evolution have nothing to do with each other. In church, evolution has no authority to speak about origins, and in school, faith is mute. What gives them their authority is their expertise. Scientific findings work in the domain of material facts. Faith rules in the realm of meaning. These two different attentions, to facts and to meaning, allow faith and scientific findings to live behind their separate fences. And fences make for nice neighbors.
But the problem with option one is that when young people ask Sarah about evolution, they are asking from within the social practice of faith—not necessarily the theoretical judgments of religion. And social practices seek coherence across our lives. Aly’s dad can put religious theoretical judgments and scientific findings in different zones, separating them in his life. But this separation is only possible if he has turned faith into religion. Faith as a social practice will resist this. For instance, when Gena is sick he forcefully feels these two domains crashing through the other’s fence, as he prays by her bedside, asking God to act and heal her while the plastic tubes pump meds into her body. No one, Jesus says, can serve two kings (two masters—Matthew 6:24). Faith is not the religion of theoretical judgments, but a way of life.
So complete separation of faith and scientific findings and theories, stuck in their own domains, doesn’t seem possible. Aly’s dad wonders when Gena is sick whether it is time to trust faith or science. It feels like this is the job of the scientific, and yet he can’t help but pray. If in youth ministry we desire for young people to actually live the faith, something like NOMA won’t do.[5] Sarah’s ministry will never be able to engage young people’s deepest questions—those times where the fences bust apart—if she continues to contend that faith and science are separate domains with no overlap.
Recognizing that this won’t do, the temptation is to move into Stenmark’s second option—union. This perspective holds that the goals of faith and scientific findings can be brought into harmony. Assuming this, Aly’s uncle can state that being a person of faith is like being a Japanese solider in 1950, lost on some Pacific island, not realizing that WWII is over. He uses this analogy because he assumes a shared union between faith and scientific findings. This shared union is to thrive and progress toward solutions. He thinks faith is backward and old, because he can’t see how it could move toward answers better than scientific work. With Gena, he’s sure that the scientific findings that produce modern medicine are far better than prayers, fasting, and incense, just as penicillin is better than leeches. Aly’s uncle can’t see why faith is needed at all. It’s no match next to the technological outcomes of the scientific.
But he can assume this because he wrongly believes faith and the scientific share the same pursuits. But this is not the case. There is not union between faith and the scientific in their deepest objectives. The union that Christian faith seeks is with the act and being of a personal God in both life and death (Stenmark calls this faith’s “soteriological goal”). The methodological goal of the scientific is to solve problems, diagnosing and then functionally overcoming constraints.[6] The goal of the scientific is to empirically deliver results, solutions, and answers.
But faith has little of this as its pursuit. Faith reaches not for results, solutions, and clear answers, but for encounter with a transcendent personal reality that remains always shrouded in mystery.[7] Both faith and the scientific seek epistemological experiences of reality—they want to discover the way the world is (hence they are not completely separate domains). Nevertheless, their methods for discovering this reality are distinct. They’re not just distinct in that the scientific uses verification and empirical observation, and faith uses ministerial actions of care, prayer, mediation, and confession. It’s more than that. These distinct methods provide unique commitments to the shape of reality itself. The health sciences see Gena mainly as her illness, and see her illness as the problem of low white blood cells. But faith sees Gena as a person who must be ministered to. The goal for the scientific in relation to Gena is to functionally overcome her sickness (something Jared, Aly, and her family yearn for). But faith, on the other hand, asks, Who is Gena, and how does she live and participate in this personal world? What kind of life and death upholds her personhood in love and mercy? And in life and death, how might we help her commune with this personal God and those she loves? These are quite different aims.[8]
The third option, and the one Stenmark finds the most promising, is overlap or contact. There are significant ways that faith and scientific findings and theories overlap and make contact with each other. But faith and the scientific also remain distinct, with different goals.[9] “We can say that science operates with the presumption that there are causes to things, religion with the presumption that there are meanings to things. Meanings and causes have in common a concept of order, but the type of order differs.”[10]
When we focus on goals, we can see that indeed faith and the scientific have places of overlap, but there are also important points of divergence. With Gena’s illness or the ability to land a rover on Mars, the scientific has a technological goal, “and we value [the scientific] because it is useful and . . . helps us control, predict, and alter the world.”[11] A major goal of the scientific is to drive toward findings that might be useful in controlling and manipulating our material universe. And of course, there is a good to this. Aly and her family put great hope in the technological operations of scientific findings and theories. They’re quite happy, and rightly so, that the oncologists, pharmacists, and surgeons possess the know-how to help Gena.
But, this technological goal is not necessarily shared by faith. Most often, faith has no overlap with the technological goal of the scientific (though faith has deeply practical dimensions that impact our lifestyles and communities). People of faith enjoy Wi-Fi and air travel as much as anyone, thinking little about it as they line up for the next release from Apple. This technological goal diverges from (as opposed to overlapping with) faith. They are different, with two different pursuits. Most often faith doesn’t begrudge these technological goals.
But faith must also recognize in this divergence that the technological goal of the scientific leads into interpretations and actions that are different than faith. For instance, the technological goal is to alter Gena’s condition, controlling her immune system and predicting the impact on it of a particular drug. But this technological goal tends to morph Gena into her diagnoses, making her a problem to solve. Faith’s commitment to her personhood will celebrate the ways the technological alters our world, but not if it opposes or crushes personhood and the environments in which people live.
This shows that faith has its own goals. Faith has a moral goal that seeks to uphold a personal order wherein human life is livable and life is valued. Persons are more than their diagnoses; they cannot be totalized into problems to solve. Persons have value that transcends their function. Therefore, persons must be able to eat, breathe, love, and laugh. The divergent realities of faith and science are pulled together like magnets when the technological goal overlaps (chafing against) the moral goal of faith. When the technological goals of the scientific produce weapons for murder, devices of antisocial behavior, and ecological crises, there is an overlap between faith and the scientific. And this overlap is contentious.[12]
But most often faith is happy to leave the scientific to its technological goals, because faith has it own goals to pursue, quite distinct from the scientific. The ultimate goal of faith is what Stenmark calls “the soteriological goal.” Faith seeks communion with the personhood of God (salvation).[13] Faith pursues its soteriological goal by articulating a story that explores what is broken with existence, how existence is healed, and the ways to live in this healed state. The goal of faith is the transformation into new life through encounter with the person of God who comes to our broken world to minister to us. If Jared is to help his young people relate faith and the scientific, he must not give up the distinct pastoral pursuit of encountering the presence of God through the acts of ministry person to person.[14] As we’ve said above, he must hold onto his pastoral impulses and allow faith and the scientific to be distinct.
But because Jared is committed to seeking a personal God inthe world (in time and space) there is an epistemic goal embedded within the soteriological goal. There is a goal to know and understand the world we live within. This epistemic (knowledge and understanding) goal is necessary at the very least to test and explore if the shape of the world (of our experiences of time and space) fits the soteriological story of brokenness, redemption, and communion in and through personhood. The incarnational center to Christian faith means the world and its order matter to us.
This is where we see an overlap and contact between faith and the scientific that is open to dialogue—at the level of epistemic goals.[15] While the scientific is mobilized by technological goals, its most primary drive is toward the epistemic. It seeks to construct theories from within its findings that articulate the shape of our world. Sarah tries to keep young people’s questions about evolution in one domain and questions of faith in another. But this isn’t possible next to the soteriological (salvation) goal of faith. The young people in her ministry aren’t seeking to know intricate scientific debates about evolution, but they are deeply seeking to know if the story of faith (bound in the soteriological goal) is plausible next to theories of evolution. How do they make sense of these distinct stories? Do these perspectives conflict, or are there points of dialogue? Can humanity be loved through its brokenness if we’re just the accidental results of natural selection?
What Sarah and Jared seek to relate are the epistemic findings and theories of the scientific with the lived story of faith. They are engaging the overlap when they put scientific theories in discussion with the story of faith. Jared recognized in his conversation with Aly, that if he is to be committed to the soteriological goal of faith, then he must engage with the scientific. He must seek ways to help his young people recognize how the findings of the scientific connect with the story of faith.
As Jared reflected on his conversations with Sasha and Martin, he recognized that each was asking how the scientific findings of astrophysics, evolution, and cognitive science connected to faith’s commitment to a personal God who creates a world of ministering love. But they were asking him these questions not because they were confused and somehow thought he was a genius philosopher, knowing everything about science and religion. Rather, they asked Jared because he was their pastor, helping them practice a life of faith that moved them toward the soteriological goal of experiencing a personal God.[16]
And it was next to this soteriological goal that they wanted to know how faith could deal with the findings that indeed aliens might exist, and mass extinctions happen. Jared wasn’t asked to defend faith, necessarily, or to find a way to correlate religion with science. But he was being asked to think alongside young people about how our world is shaped, and our unique personhood within it. Sasha wanted to know how the story of redemption could work if there are other worlds with other intelligent beings. Martin wondered, If everything dies, then how could the soteriological story of resurrection and eternal life work?[17]
Jared dropped the phone from his ear to the desk. Everything felt stale and the room seemed drab and distant as his eyes raced across his office. His shoulders felt too heavy to hold up and he slouched down into his chair under their weight. All his senses were dulled, but smell. He felt overwhelmed by the smell. The candle on his desk mixing with the pastes, inks, and papers of the supply room next door made his eyes water. If not for the toxic smell, he’d wonder if this moment was actually happening. For a few seconds he felt nothingness, as if life was too flat and gray to call it real, like he was seeing through its thinness. But then with the velocity of a piano dropped from an airplane it hit him with startling shock. He thought of Aly, lying on the hospital floor Christmas Eve holding Gena’s hand, and the tears streamed uncontrollably. Grief flooded him. Aly’s words from the day before New Year’s Eve pounded in Jared’s mind like a drum; he could hear it as if she was now whispering it in his ear. “I just don’t want to lose my little sister,” it repeated over and again. But now she was lost. Gena was dead.