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Can You Believe in God and Evolution?

Abingdon Press

Chapter One

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...