I grew up moving around the country (Air Force dad), but half of my pre-college days were spent in a church that openly promoted YEC. This church was and is a warm and loving place. I have fond memories of it. When I was in 7th grade, an ICR speaker came to the church to talk about the reasons for a young earth, no macro evolution, etc. What stood out to me was that he was speaking during the normal time for the sermon. We were a church, mind you, that HIGHLY valued Scripture, and the time for preaching it was being given to this issue. The message to me was clear–this is a make-or-break issue for Christians. Walking into the service, I still recall opening to Genesis 1 and wondering out loud whether the days of creation might correspond, in a way, to the stages of natural history that scientists suggest. If I recall correctly, my father was gracious and affirmed that my thought was interesting, but then qualified that Scripture seems to require a young earth. While I found the presentation interesting and bought into YEC, I like to describe that early curiosity as an “itch” that never went away.
When I left home for college, I had a faith-defining moment where I decided that my faith was the most important thing to me, and the way I pursued that was by being as “conservative” about that faith as possible. Honestly, it is the only thing that made sense to me if I was to be faithful. I was somewhat embattled over things like evolution, though I never seriously studied it.
I went to a conservative seminary after college, eventually earning an MDiv and a PhD. Some way through my PhD studies, I was pastoring a small church (still here!) and going crazy doing the necessarily “mile-deep-and-inch-wide” studies to earn a doctorate. The way I dealt with that mental frustration was by working slower on my dissertation than necessary while also reading more widely. During this time of “extracurricular reading,” I returned to my “itch.” I read Douglas Axe’s book Undeniable, which was interesting but didn’t fully scratch the itch. ID, in my opinion, is often very good at explaining problems in our understanding, it’s just debatable whether they also venture toward explanations that advance our understanding in positive ways.
Eventually, I wandered across a video of a 2019 Royal Society meeting announcing Perry Marshall’s $10 million prize for anyone who could discover naturally occurring code (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJSCBeLD05M). I was floored by what I was watching. He talked about growing up as a pastor’s kid, his brother going to a conservative seminary, which then led his brother to become a missionary to China, where he learned stuff that dismantled his YEC worldview, and he essentially became an atheist. The two got into an intense argument and Perry, with an engineering background and a book on ethernet to his credit, decided to explore the science on evolution, even if what he found destroyed his faith. I knew I had to read his book, Evolution 2.0, which is endorsed by Denis Noble and other top biologists.
Reading that book changed my mind. For me (and for Perry), I needed something outside of the standard, Neo-Darwinian answer. The Blind Watchmaker, which I have now read, wouldn’t have convinced me. But Perry did. He revealed that nature was a whole lot more interesting than most scientists were talking about, and that the Creator was a whole lot more interesting than the Creationists were talking about. The book focuses on the mechanisms that have led the field to discuss an “extended synthesis,” with some thinking that we need a new synthesis altogether. In any case, it wasn’t Dawkins’s evolution, but it WAS evolution. It was the evolution of McClintock, Margulis, Shapiro, Noble, etc.
Since then, I have been hooked on evolution, how it works, and how that should form a dialogue with our faith. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said in The Phenomenon of Man,
“But, as the tension [between science and religion] is prolonged, the conflict visibly seems to need to be resolved in terms of an entirely different form of equilibrium—not in elimination, nor duality, but in synthesis. … And the reason is simple: the same life animates both.”
Thanks for all who read my story. I would be interested to hear from anyone who resonates. And by the way, my church by and large does not know my convictions about evolution. I am currently seeking a new church that might be open to my ideas.
