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A Scientist’s Journey to Reflective Christian Faith
We must know where to doubt, where to feel certain, where to submit.
Blaise Pascal
As Daniel Taylor puts it in his book The Myth of Certainty, “being human is a risky business.”1 From the moment we arrive on this earth, we explore the unknown and tackle unexpected challenges. As we are often fond of reminding each other, “with great risk comes great reward.” It should not be too surprising that risk is also at the center of our relationship with our Creator. Knowing him is a journey that is necessarily disruptive of our plans, as it intends to take us to new places we could not have imagined. But my experience has been that as Christians, particularly in today’s evangelical subculture, our lives often do not reflect this reality. Why are we so alarmingly risk-averse when it comes to our faith? Perhaps since we believe that God is the one sure thing in our lives, we feel uncomfortable with questions that challenge our notions of him (even if there is the chance that they might help to reveal more of him). So we tend to play it safe and build a comfortable nest for our faith, protected from what we perceive to be the threatening cacophony of worldly ideas that rise around us. And to ensure that our faith is not infiltrated, weakened, diluted or lost, we set clear, non-negotiable boundaries for our belief systems, even in areas where the Bible may not demand them. In all this, while we think we are protecting our faith, we may find that we are actually preventing it from growing.
It was during my college years that I became a follower of Christ, in part through campus ministries, which played an important role in my growth as a new Christian. However, these organizations also served as the gateway to a Christian evangelical subculture that, while initially foreign to me, was very compelling because it provided security and a sense of belonging. So without much of the kind of thought and reflection that characterized my conversion journey, I quickly adopted the lens through which the subculture interpreted the world. Perhaps the most striking example of this was with regard to evolution (specifically the idea of common descent), which was commonly viewed within evangelical circles as a notion that threatened the core of the Christian faith. As I transitioned to graduate school to study genetics/genomics, I felt I had a unique opportunity and important responsibility to dismantle the theory of evolution from within the vanguard of academia. But I could not shake the troubling feeling that I was being intellectually dishonest with myself. While I thought I was knowledgeable on the subject of evolution, I was mostly just parroting what little I heard from others, who themselves were certainly not experts on the matter. God opened my eyes to a simple reality: I had not bothered to reflect on why I felt this way about evolution, beyond the spoon-fed talking points. Perhaps what I was really defending was my own sense of security within the evangelical subculture. My plans were about to be interrupted by God.
The point of the interruption was not God’s setting the record straight for me about evolution. He had more important things in mind. He revealed to me that, despite my intentions, I was not loving him. God wanted me to follow him, not any other person or subculture, Christian or otherwise. According to Jesus, this is done in part through the use of my mind (Luke 10:27). Jesus freed me to be a reflective Christian—one who believes that God has called us to think and engage, one who sees that faith doesn’t require protection but honesty, and one who appreciates that there is more nuance and complexity in life than our need for security sometimes allows. With this new freedom in Christ, I committed myself to study biological evolution and its theological implications. Contrary to expectations that this bit of risk taking would dilute or paralyze my faith, I found that it grew by leaps and bounds.
Today, as a committed Christian called to a vocation in the biological sciences, I have a front row seat to the present-day culture war between science and faith. I have been pitied by some colleagues who view my faith as untested and antiquated, and I have also been perceived as a threat by Christian brothers and sisters who assume that I am advocating science as the ultimate answer. So I am often cornered into the question, “God or science?” from both sides. But I have come to believe that the question reflects an incomplete understanding of the relationship between science and the Bible.
Science provides a set of tools that are useful for probing naturalistic phenomena. As powerful as it may be for dissecting planetary motion or battling cancer, it is not intended for that which is beyond the natural realm. Science is necessarily agnostic with respect to anything outside of the natural realm. It does not accept it, and it cannot refute it. I am not necessarily arguing for “non-overlapping magisteria”; I’m only saying that science cannot support or deny supernatural aspects of our existence.
I also do not believe that the Bible is meant to be a scientific text. In other words, the Bible’s primary objective is not to describe the mathematical language, physical laws or chemical makeup of the world. Its goal is entirely different: to speak of God’s interwoven presence in the history of humankind, his love for us, our need for him, eternity, sin, redemption and restoration. The Bible communicates these things in diverse ways, through prose, poetry, song, parables, polemics, rhetoric, observational language—in whatever way will help us best understand who God is, what he has done for us and why. Treating the Bible as a scientific text can turn out to be like a robot reading Romeo and Juliet—the true meaning and effect may be missed. If we don’t humbly and prayerfully strive to understand the richness of the language and the breadth and depth of its intended meaning, then we will be in danger of not only limiting the power of God’s Word in our lives, but also of committing injustice in the name of God—such as the church’s reaction to Galileo and Copernicus. We have to ask ourselves whether we are making any similar mistakes today—because a high view of Scripture respects both what the Bible is and what it is not.
From ancient rabbinical literature to early church fathers to contemporary Christian scholars, Judeo-Christian communities have held highly diverse and nuanced understandings of Genesis 1–2. In my own study, my goal has been to treat the text with the respect it deserves, which means appreciating its style of language and original cultural context, rather than reading into the text my own modern biases and preconceived notions of what it means to say.
So where does this leave me on the topic of evolution and creation? I describe myself as an evolutionary creationist. If this seems like an odd juxtaposition of terms, I believe that is largely because the voices that speak against the possibility of harmony between science and faith are often the loudest in our culture. These voices have popularized the notion that evolution is inherently atheistic, an assertion that conflates biological evolution with ideological evolution (naturalism). Biological evolution is technically agnostic with respect to God. Indeed, Darwin’s thesis was titled The Origin of Species, not The Origin of Life. Many who see the evidence for biological evolution choose to believe that God is not the source of life. But that is their personal belief—the evolutionary process itself does not compel them either way. To me, evolutionary creationism means that I affirm God as the Creator of the world, and that his mode of creation involved biological evolution.
One challenge I faced is the perception that common descent threatens the Christian belief that humans are uniquely made in the image of God. I have come to share the belief of many Christian theologians and Bible scholars that we are not compelled to understand “image of God” as physical or material. Rather, I believe that it is our God-given spirit, desire for fellowship with God and God-ordained royal priesthood (1 Peter 2:9) that differentiates us dramatically from all other created beings. Evolution describes biological change, not our spiritual nature. Therefore, it appears to me perfectly harmonious to believe that after bringing about the biology of Homo sapiens through the evolutionary process, God then set them apart by giving them spiritual sensitivity and purpose (that is, he made them “in his image”).
In the spirit of intellectual honesty, it is worth mentioning that I have not worked out every jot and tittle of every possible theological implication of common descent. I am still very much on the journey and expect to be for my whole life. My primary passion is not to teach evolutionary creationism to Christians; rather, it is to reignite within our Christian communities a passion for thoughtful reflection, honest inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge. Yes, this might be risky, because thinking can be threatening to the comfortable lines we have drawn around our faith. But if they aren’t God’s lines, they’re just holding us back. So let’s ask questions together, thereby allowing one person to sharpen another (Proverbs 27:17).