Christianity and Science: Current Disputes among the Faithful

Transcription

1 Jeff Hardin University of Wisconsin November 18, 2014 MICHAEL CROMARTIE: Well, many of you have already met Professor Hardin. As you know, he is the Professor and Chair of the Department of Zoology at the University of Wisconsin. He did his Ph.D. in biophysics at the University of California, Berkeley. I know there are about five or six or seven of us in here who did our Ph.D. s in biophysics. Also, he has written a book called The World of the Cell. It s a cell biology textbook. JEFF HARDIN: It s really a pleasure to be with you. This is a bit of a cross-cultural experience for me, and it s really been delightful so far. So I want to talk about three things. First of all, I hope it s all right to give you a bit of a personal perspective on why I think this issue matters. Then I want to talk very briefly about some data on what Evangelical Christians in particular think about science. And then I want to move to the thing that Michael asked me to present, which was a bit of a case study on laying out different viewpoints that Evangelicals have with regard to the Bible and science. So let me begin by why I think this matters. Geoffrey Cantor, who is a historian and philosopher of science, in a millennial essay in the premier scientific journal Nature, was asked to comment on what are the big challenges in the next millennium for science. Cantor said one of the issues we are going to face in this millennium is trying to relate science and religion. He said it this way: Issues of science and religion are important to our civilization, far too significant to be left either to the devoutly religious physicist or the scoffing atheistical biologist. People holding different beliefs and forms of expertise need to work together in an open nonconfrontational environment accepting both science and religion as valid aspects of human experience. So no matter what your own take is on religion and on science, this is an important topic. And for you, as journalists, I think it s particularly important.

2 Now, for me, I will admit that there is some personal importance here. First of all, I m a professor; I m Chair of a Zoology Department at a major research university, so I think about biology and science quite a lot. One thing that s not in my bio, though, is that I happen to be a Christian, and before I did my Ph.D. in Biophysics, I did a Master of Divinity degree at an Evangelical seminary in Southern California, which maybe because I went through there no longer exists! It was called the International School of Theology. So for me personally putting together science and Christian faith is pretty important. Now, one proviso in this talk: I am not an evolutionary biologist, so if you want to get into the nuts and bolts of evolutionary mechanism I mean, I can address some of that, but I m not an expert. Now, in addition, though, I m a faculty advisor. So there are a lot of student groups on the UW campus, Christian student groups, and I m a faculty advisor for several of them, so there is kind of a pastoral concern for me as well. So given all of this, these are important issues for me personally. And in addition, I m in a bit of a strange class. So Elaine Howard Ecklund, who is a sociologist at Rice University and she s one of the co-authors of the article that Christian put out on the tables yesterday did a survey, and I took part in the survey. It was a survey of scientists at leading research universities in the United States about their religious beliefs. This is an infographic from the BioLogos Foundation, and they have a page that is full of really beautiful infographics like this if you want to look for some nice resources. But what this shows is a green test tube that is scientists and a blue test tube that is the general populace. And it breaks people down by their religious convictions from Don t Know, Refuse to Answer, Nothing in Particular, Atheist, Agnostic, Other Religion, Jewish, Catholic, Mainline Protestant, and at the very bottom, there are 4 percent that are Evangelical Protestant. So, you know, I m in a very small minority of scientists at major research universities. Now, compare that to the general populace and what you see is that 28 percent identify themselves as Evangelicals. And so the point is that as a practicing scientist who happens to be this particular kind of Christian, there aren t very many of us out there, and so this is of personal importance for me to get this right. 2

3 This is Alyssa Bryant Rockenbach. She studies a kind of educational psychology, and she wrote a piece several years ago which I found very helpful. She interviewed a number of students who were Evangelicals, and they talked about whether they were truthful in the classroom, and one of them she interviewed said this: To get the A, you ve got to repeat what the teacher tells you, regurgitate it, get your A, and get out, even though you might not believe in it. I mean, to me, the irony of it all is that I have to play the part of somebody that s not true to himself, and that is a problem to me. So from the personal side, I have a lot of passion for this issue and I have a lot of passion for us collectively thinking well about this and helping the public in the United States to think well about it. So let s turn then to some thoughts that Evangelicals have about science. There are some deficiencies in the way this has been assessed; Christian is far more able to identify the pitfalls here from a social science perspective. I guess the most famous assessment is by the Gallup organization, and they have been running a poll since 1982 where they ask about human origins. They ask whether humans evolved, but God had no part in the process; that would be the bottom green line at the very bottom. The darker green line is the percent of people responding that humans evolved with God guiding it somehow. And then the lime green at the top is that God created humans in their present form quite recently. And you can see that these are pretty flat, I mean, there s not a lot of movement in these numbers over three decades despite repeated and vigorous attempts to educate the American public. So, now, there are deficiencies in the way these questions are asked, and we can talk about that, but nevertheless, this is pretty discouraging to biology educators, including myself. And you can break this down, or these polls can be broken down, by political party. I think you can guess how that might shake out in terms of Republican, Independent, or Democrat. And the orange here is the percentage that responded God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years. The red is that Humans evolved and God guided the process. And the teal is that Humans evolved and God had no part in the process. So you can see for Republicans a simple majority actually believe in a recent creation of humans. 3

4 If you look at people who go to church, similarly you can guess that there is a strong correlation with church-going in the United States and belief in a recent creation of humans. So the orange here again is God creating humans in their present form, and you can see that people who attend church weekly -- that s the top row -- many of them hold that position. People who almost never attend church, well, you can see they re kind of a mixed bag at the bottom. And so there is a correlation between people s belief systems and their regularity of church attendance and whether or not they re open to some of the evidence for evolution. Now, someone who was a postdoc with Christian, Jon Hill, who is now at Calvin College, he s a really accomplished social scientist. I ll mention him, and give a plug for something that s about to come out in a moment that Jon has been working on, when he was still working with Christian. He looked at whether or not college education actually influenced your acceptance or not of evolution. People with no college are on the left in this diagram. The purple represents people who are consistently creationists, so they believe that humans were created recently and that the world, in fact, was created a few thousand years ago; that s in purple. People who switched to an evolutionary view, accepting some sort of evolution, are in pink. People who had a consistent view on evolution are in blue. CHRISTIAN SMITH, Notre Dame: And then to be clear, this is switching between late teenage years and 18 to 25. This is not all people. JEFF HARDIN: And so what you see then is that people who are college graduates -- that s on the far right -- the purple box is bigger. Those are the people who are consistently creationist in their viewpoint. So education, at least for Evangelicals, doesn t seem to move the needle very much. And this is not the only kind of survey that indicates this: John Evans, who is a sociologist at UC San Diego, has done a general social survey, and his findings suggest that there is no religious group that knows less, and actually mainline Protestants know more than those who are not religiously active. And in fact, ironically, Evangelicals have taken more science classes per capita than other types of students. 4

5 Many religious groups don t seem to accept the validity of scientific methodology for the few fact claims in which there is a differing religious explanation, particularly evolution. This is John s conclusion from his work. The solution to conflicts over evolution for ordinary people, not activists, is not in teaching religious people the scientific method or showing how scientific institutions produce knowledge. Conservative Protestants already accept that. Rather, it lies in convincing conservative Protestants that scientists are not systematically biasing the findings of their knowledge. So what is that about? Well, fundamentally, that is about trust. In other words, trust for Evangelicals is more important than data. If an Evangelical doesn t trust you, they re not open to accepting what you have to say. So what that suggests then is that changing attitudes about science is likely more about allaying theological concerns for the faithful than about imparting information, and that attitudes about science may be as much about social and relational considerations as they are about information. So with that backdrop, let me give you a little bit from a presentation that I ve given to several large Evangelical churches to help them see that there are a range of options that they might think about. Part of the motivation here is to help them to be open to seeing that there are multiple ways to be faithful as a Christian and think about these scientific issues. And so here is the big idea, and this is the big idea that I tell them actually: Christians should avoid binary thinking about the question of origins. We, in the United States, we like things that are binary, up-down, yes-no, black-white, we re very comfortable with that kind of approach as a nation, but Evangelicals in particular like to think that way. So the goal here is to move them to see some options, and this will also help you get a sense for the taxonomy of possibilities among Evangelicals out there as journalists as well. So let me begin by saying this is not all that easy. In a really good book by a philosopher of science at Calvin College, Del Ratzsch, called The Battle of Beginnings, says, One of the attractions of the popular caricatures that reign in this area is that they make confident choice appear supremely easy. These sorts of easy solutions are what people tend to go for, so the work is actually very hard to try to provide space in the middle for some discussion. 5

6 And so I start by affirming what Christians all can affirm about creation. Let s look at something from the Apostle Paul from the Christian part of the Bible, the New Testament, from his letter to the Church at Colossae (Col. 1:16-17). For by Him, this is Jesus he is referring to all things were created: in heaven and earth, visible and invisible; all things were created by him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. So Christians think that Jesus is sort of the metaphysical glue that holds the universe together and he underlies its creation and its day-to-day functioning. And this is reflected in the ancient creeds, the Nicene Creed, for example, which many churches affirm: We believe in one God, the Father Almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible, and in one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom all things were made. So Christians can affirm all of this, and, in fact, Christians have a history of what s called the two books kind of approach, and this really comes from a piece of poetry in the book of Psalms, Psalm 19, where it begins, The heavens declare the glories of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day-to-day they pour forth speech that word is literally from the Hebrew bubbling up, you know, kind of like bubbling crude from the Beverly Hillbillies: oil, that is you know that kind of idea. So it s irrepressibly telling us something about God, its creator. But the psalm also goes on and talks about the Scriptures, how the law of the Lord is perfect and how it revives the soul, how everything there is trustworthy, and these commands are radiant, they give life. And so there are these two books, the book of God s works in the world, and the book of God s word. So Christians all affirm this, and you would think, well, that s a good start; right? In fact, ironically Francis Bacon took this two books analogy and really ran with it, and you may have heard of him, he was one of the important figures in the so-called scientific revolution. He said let no person think or maintain that they can search too far or be too well studied in the book of God s word or the book of God s works. Now, the ironic thing is that this is quoted in a very interesting place, it s in the frontispiece to the Origin of Species. Interesting. So Christians affirm these two books. Where do the controversies come from? Where do the disputes that are in need of dialogue come from? Well, first we need some ground rules, and so I spend some time defining those. We talk about what evolution is: it s change over time. Biological evolution is the biological 6

7 change that occurs over time. And as classically defined in the modern synthesis, evolution is descent with modification from earlier life forms that have shared ancestors, it s made possible by mutation, changes in genes, and by natural selection, pressure to select for particular beneficial changes that confer a reproductive advantage on various organisms. So that s evolution. And you would be surprised that most students really cannot articulate this, which is disappointing from a zoology professor s perspective. Microevolution is small changes over time. Most evolutionary biologists think those are just amplified over time to get what some people call macroevolution, large-scale changes that transcend species boundaries and lead to large-scale changes in organisms over geological time. But we also have to define the word creationism, often used very badly. So what does that mean? Well, this is the idea that the universe and ultimately life on Earth were created by one or more intelligent agents. Now, based on what I told you earlier, for Christians, the agent is God. And therefore all Christians in some sense are creationists. Of course, we know there is a proviso there, and we ll get to that. Now, in addition, I have to define for these folks what is naturalism, and maybe you re wondering what that might mean. We learned about methodological nationalism yesterday from Christian. He was kind of playing off of the phrase methodological naturalism. This is the idea that the natural world is to be explained using the scientific methodologies that are common to science. Many of us would prefer the word natural science for that. Metaphysical naturalism, in contrast, is a worldview or a philosophical commitment that the natural is all there is and that the supernatural can t occur. So no Christians, at least traditional Christians, are metaphysical naturalists, but they may be methodological naturalists. In fact, many Christians who are scientists would be in that latter camp. Okay, so with that backdrop then, I lay out some perspectives on all of these things, and I begin with a really helpful rubric from Eugenie Scott, who herself is not a believer. She has run the National Center for Science Education out of Oakland, California, which is committed to helping foster education about evolution in public schools and other 7

8 venues. And in her book, she says, I encourage people to reject the creation-evolution dichotomy and to recognize the creation-evolution continuum. What she s trying to do is to say, look, we need to recognize that there are a spectrum of views, and that if we want to move people and their understanding of biological processes, we need to accept that and actually help people to think -- move away from thinking in black-and-white binary terms and think more creatively. And Eugenie kind of lays out this interesting spectrum. If you look at Evangelical Christians in particular, there are a number of possibilities. Up in the upper left, people in that position on the spectrum believe that the earth is very young, created very, very recently. So they would be called Young Earth creationists. They might believe that the earth is actually young but appears old. Then there are people who believe in progressive creationism over geological time scales; they might be called Day-Age or Progressive Creationists. Then there are people who believe that God accomplished his purposes through the evolutionary process. Because they re Christians, they re creationists remember I told you that but they believe in evolution, so they would be called Evolutionary Creationists. So on the upper left then are people who believe that evolutionary biology has either got it wrong or it s very, very incomplete. If you move down towards the lower right, evolution becomes a more complete understanding of the way the world works and how living organisms on the planet have come to arise. So you get the idea that there is a spectrum here. Then on the very lower right is what we would call Materialistic Naturalism. These would be people who certainly believe that evolution is true, but they are metaphysical naturalists. All right, so that s kind of the continuum. And it s worth realizing what motivates each of these perspectives, and I hope this will be helpful to you as you interact with Evangelicals. First, it s certainly true that people in the young Earth camp have a more literal -- and I put that in quotes for a purpose -- interpretation of the Bible. What they really do is they tend to read the Bible in a mid-20th century kind of way. It seems to be straightforward and it seems to tell them that the earth was created in 144 literal hours, and that s the viewpoint that they adopt. 8

9 And then as you move down towards Evolutionary Creation, these are people who have a more nuanced -- I use the phrase nonliteral, -- I m not sure that s a good phrase, but they have a more nuanced way of interpreting the Bible. They seek to find complementarity between the Bible and science, or they re independent, not really talking about the same things. And, of course, materialist naturalists don t care about the Bible, so that s the guys on the bottom. All right. So let s go through each of these and let s see what motivates young Earth creationism. Now, you may think that people who are young Earth creationists are not well educated, they are not particularly thoughtful, and in that, you would be wrong, at least among some young Earth creationists. A good example here is Joe Francis. You may wonder, well, who is Joe Francis? Well, Joe Francis graduated from the University of Michigan with a Ph.D. Joe is well educated, but he holds a young Earth position because he believes the Scriptures insist upon it, so he s trying to be faithful to the Scriptures. In fact, that leads to some motivations for this position. You know, I think the fundamental motivation among the faithful here is that these folks are trying to uphold a strong view of Scripture and God s sovereignty, how he acts, and his kind of authority over the natural world. And it seeks to be faithful to a particular way of interpreting the Bible, a hermeneutic, and one that tends to be literal. You may have heard the phrase, If the plain sense makes sense, seek no other sense. At least I learned that one in seminary. So that s a particular way of approaching the Bible. And we can talk about whether that s truly a literal interpretation. And then I think, very importantly, young Earth creationists are afraid of what I ll call the hermeneutical slippery slope, the belief that if you give up a literal reading of Genesis, then the rest of Scripture can t be trusted, including what it seems to say about human individuals and how they are rightly related to God through Jesus Christ. What I want to emphasize is that this is really what s underlying at least one of the largest young Earth creationist organizations, Answers in Genesis, founded by Ken Ham. He has got a very large museum outside of Cincinnati, Ohio, in Kentucky. And Ken said it this way: I want to make it very clear that we don t want to be known primarily as young Earth creationists. Answers in Genesis main thrust is not Young Earth as such, our emphasis is on biblical authority. For Ken, this is the linchpin idea, and he s trying to be 9

10 faithful to that. And Ken is definitely one of those people who talks about this hermeneutical slippery slope. And so for Ken, another way to think about this is this is sort of an epistemological domino theory. Some of us in the room are old enough to know about the domino theory of foreign policy from when I was a kid, and, you know, this is the same idea here, that if we knock over that particular domino that relates to the book of Genesis, then everything that we thought we believed about our faith must be wrong. You can see how wrenching this has to be for someone if you re asking them to make that choice, if they believe this is the only alternative. Now, there are challenges with Young Earth creationism, of course. This is Paul Nelson, who is a Young Earth creationist. He is also associated with the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington. He says it this way; this is succinctly put: Natural science seems to overwhelmingly point to an old cosmos. It is safe to say that most recent creationists are motivated by religious concerns. That s absolutely true. So the evidence, even for a young Earth creationist like Paul, seems to point against it. People who are trying to educate Christian students about this encounter an interesting phenomenon. Take Dennis Venema, who is a professor of biology at Trinity Western University up in British Columbia. He said it this way: I ve seen students willing to discard nearly the entirety of modern science in order to maintain a particular view. So one of the challenges from denying the scientific evidence is that you kind of have to walk away from those things that science seems to be telling us. Now, in addition, there are some theological concerns. You know, this seems to suggest that we re not trusting that second book that I mentioned from Psalm 19. Some Christians have problems with that entailment here. And you know there is a whole interpretive approach to Genesis used by this group; some Christians feel that this interpretive approach doesn t take the Bible literally enough, in the sense that it doesn t seek to understand the original audience. They would not have known anything about modern science, so seeking modern scientific explanations in the text may not be a wellfounded approach. 10

11 Let s move on to people who accept the geological time scale but nevertheless are motivated to remain faithful to what the Scriptures seem to say to them from the book of Genesis, and that s Day-Age or Progressive Creationists. What s motivating this particular view? This is kind of avia media view, a middle ground. It seeks to uphold a strong view of the Bible. That s a huge motivator for Evangelicals, but balanced against the seemingly congruent results from the physical sciences. So it tries to harmonize what the Bible seems to be saying with the evidence from geoscience, astrophysics, and other sciences, but in a way that tries to knit them together using a particular approach. And in particular, it seeks to uphold the uniqueness of humans and the historicity of something called the Fall. If you re not familiar with Christian theology, the Fall is a cataclysmic event involving our first parents and the ancestors of humans who got this whole sin thing going that we re all wrestling with today. So it seeks to uphold an initial pair, Adam and Eve, because the text seems to require that. This is Fuz Rana, and he is one of the Reasons to Believe scholars. He is quite comfortable, moreover, saying that because the text seems to say that God creates groupings of organisms, but there is no evidence from the text that those change over time or go outside their boundaries of their created categories, that evolution cannot really be true. Even though there may be progression over time, God creates different organisms over time, and so we see them in the geological record, but evolution doesn t account for how those forms arise over geological time scales. And so one entailment of that is what Fuz says here: Reasons to Believe scholars believe God miraculously intervened throughout the history of the universe in various ways, millions, possibly even billions, of times to create each and every new species of life on Earth. What are some challenges here? Well, Young Earth creationists are troubled by it because it accepts an old Earth. We saw it s a problem because they seem to think, they seem to feel, that the Scriptures indicate a young Earth. Evolutionary creationist Christians see this view of God s creative activities as sort of ad hoc the millions of creative events seem a little bit interesting to them. And this approach uses concordism: it tries to knit together what the Bible is saying with a modern scientific account, trying to make them 11

12 fit together so they overlay on one another successfully, so the Bible is actually giving us the sequence of events that occurred over geological time. If we could only understand the biblical record properly, we would see that it s laying out the order of creation: a day is used in a sense kind of like back in the day, you know, it s an undefined long, very long, period of time. But if we could figure that out, they would dovetail really nicely. A lot of people feel, a lot of other Christians feel, that this approach may bring modern approaches to the text. It wouldn t have made sense to the original audience; they wouldn t have known about geoscience or many other processes that are implied by this approach. Okay, so we ve talked about young Earth creationists and this progressive creation idea. And then there is something that s lying along this diagonal line. It s really hard to know what to do with this, and that s the idea of intelligent design. So it s worth talking about that very briefly. I think it s helpful to say what ID is not. All Christians accept the idea that intentionality underlies the creation. That s not what s meant by Intelligent Design in a technical sense here. ID, as a technical concept, is an argument. It s an argument for the existence of a Designer based on the premise that certain features of the universe and living things can only -- and this is important -- only be explained by an intelligent cause. In other words, there is no possible mechanism that can explain certain events about the natural world, particularly the origins of living things from nonliving systems being one of them. Also for many ID proponents, evolution itself actually one day will be shown to be impossible, and therefore an intelligent designer needs to move the process along. Probably the most articulate proponent nowadays for Intelligent Design is Stephen Meyer. Steve has written a number of books. All of them want to say that there are certain impossible structures, things that if you remove one of their components, they stop working, so they couldn t have evolved. Those are things Mike Behe calls irreducibly complex things. Where does the information come from that cells use to pass on their genomes to the next generation? So what s motivating this particular approach? Well, the main stated motivation is to provide an alternative to neo-darwinian theory, modern kind of evolutionary thinking, 12

13 since this theory is viewed as inadequate. But sociologically, at least, it is true that the vast majority of Intelligent Design advocates are Christian in their outlook, and so a key motivation I think is the concern that evolutionary theory is dysteleological in nature. In other words, it seems to imply that there is no purpose, built into the process at least, and this leads to lots of concerns about whether God is providentially overseeing what s happening in the world. So what are some challenges here? Well, many scientists who are Christians feel that intelligent design makes no positive predictions about how to do science or about scientific mechanisms that lead to really testable hypotheses, so it s not fruitful. And it really hasn t proposed any alternatives to methodological naturalism in the laboratory with regard to the way we do science. Now, to be fair, Intelligent Design proponents think that s just a matter of time, so if we just wait long enough, we ll figure it out; it s a young movement, it hasn t been around very long, give it some time. Here is Paul Nelson again. Remember he s a Young Earth creationist, but he is also a key member of the Intelligent Design movement, and here s what he says about this: Well, easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. Right now we have a bag of powerful intuitions. That s interesting. So he s saying it feels that evolutionary approaches must be wrong, so we need to look for alternatives. I think that s kind of an emotional motivator for many in the ID movement. Let s then come back to the bottom of this sliding scale here, Evolutionary Creation. Evolutionary Creationists are devout Christian believers, but they believe that evolution is how things work. And many Christians who are scientists in the United States who are part of something called the American Scientific Affiliation (I m a member of that), and in the U.K., Christians in Science, (I m also a member of that organization), the Faraday Institute; these are examples of organizations that promote this particular viewpoint. But the most well-known proponent of this view is Francis Collins. Francis wrote a book in 2006 called The Language of God in which he lays out this view. Francis started something called the BioLogos Foundation. The BioLogos Foundation was created to 13

14 foster thinking about evolution, what molecular biology and genetics tell us about that, and how to make sense of that given the Scriptures and to be faithful to the Scriptures from an Evangelical perspective. The motivations are to seek to integrate what appears to be the strong evidence for biological evolution from the fossil record, from modern molecular analysis (it s kind of like fossils in our genomes), all of that data seems to fit beautifully with the modern theory of evolution, and yet it s committed to faithful Christian theism, and in particular, because they are Evangelicals, they are committed to the authority of the text in some sense. They re committed to biblical authority. But it also seeks to honor the Second Book that I mentioned in this two books approach, by acknowledging new biological data and taking it on board. Now, you may think, Well, that s interesting, that seems to fly in the face of people who have a fairly conservative view of the Scriptures, and I think we can talk about this. David Rennie mentioned the word inerrancy yesterday. You know, here is one of the architects of the modern view of inerrancy, a theologian named J.I. Packer. He said it this way: I believe in the inerrancy of Scripture and I maintain it in print, but I can t see anything in Scripture, in the first chapters of Genesis or elsewhere, that bears on the biological theory of evolution one way or the other. So the idea that you can hold these two together isn t just coming from Evolutionary Creationist scientists, but it s also something that is consistent, at least with some, in the pretty conservative Evangelical Christian community. And it comports with a lot of recent Evangelical scholarship on the Bible. Henri Blocher is a French biblical scholar; Tremper Longman, who is at a place called Westmont College on the West Coast; and John Walton, who is at an Evangelical bastion, Wheaton College, in Wheaton, Illinois. All of these guys are taking a more nuanced literary/cultural analysis approach to the Bible, trying to understand what it said to its original audience. For them, there is really no direct conflict with the scientific account of the origins of the universe, of this planet, or of human beings. But there are challenges. Many Christians, not surprisingly based on the survey data I showed you, fear that this approach is dysteleological, it seems to be lacking in 14

15 purpose. God doesn t seem to be running the show in a way that they re comfortable with. There are also concerns about the view of Scripture that may be entailed, or at least that some advocates of Evolutionary Creationism have held. And this idea of the origins of human sinfulness and our need for salvation that is part and parcel of the Christian message, understanding that and taking on board evolutionary ideas is a theological challenge for Evangelicals. Now, other mainline Protestants and Catholics, many of them are quite comfortable with evolution. So we ve covered some Christian approaches. Why is there so much pushback if there are some options here? I mean, after all, I have presented some options to you. What is the fundamental burr under the saddle, the bee in the bonnet, for Christians that tends to get them to dig in their heels so much? Christian mentioned yesterday that one word can set dialogue back many years in this area. I think he called it posttraumatic stress disorder approaches to the discussion. That was very helpful for me because that immediately gave me a mental image of the kind of emotional pushback that words can cause, and I think it comes from this bottom view, Materialistic Naturalism. We kind of need to put a brick wall between the Christian views and this view on the bottom, and I think it s this view primarily that s motivating a lot of the pushback among many Evangelicals. Here is George Gaylord Simpson, leading evolutionary biologist in the mid-20th century: Man, [human beings], were certainly not the goal of evolution, which evidently had no goal. Humans were not planned, in an operation wholly planless. Richard Dawkins, the most articulate spokesperson for this view nowadays, said it in The Blind Watchmakerand many, many places elsewhere: Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist. So what s going on here when Dawkins or Simpson make statements like this? Well, I think what we re engaging in here now is no longer a natural explanation. Clearly it s gone well beyond that, it s gone to a worldview or metaphysical statements about the way the world fundamentally is, and it s the metaphysical naturalism which seems to be an 15

16 entailment based on the writings of people like Dawkins that Evangelical Christians look at and go, I can t accept that, so therefore I cannot accept thinking at all about evolutionary biology. At this point in the talk I usually try to help the audience to understand that I know a lot of agnostic or atheist biologists many of them are friends of mine and atheist or agnostic philosophers. Not all of them see that there is this kind of inevitable entailment of metaphysical naturalism with evolutionary biology. Here is what Tom Nagel said in a book called The Last Word: I want atheism to be true and I m made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It s not just that I don t believe in God and naturally hope that I m right in my belief, it s that I hope there is no God. My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it s responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life. What I appreciate about Tom Nagel is he is just irrepressibly honest. He says evolution, it s convenient for me because it seems to give me an out; I have this cosmic authority problem. And I think that s what s motivating some of the rhetoric here, and at least in my experience, this is helpful to some of the Christians that I present this material to. Now, there are problems with metaphysical naturalism, of course, and one of them is articulated really well by Sir Peter Medawar, a Nobel Laureate himself, an atheist or agnostic, who said it this way: The existence of a limit to science is made clear by its inability to answer childlike questions having to do with first and last things, questions such as, How did everything begin? What are we all here for? What is the point of living?' For Medawar, science cannot possibly answer these questions. We need to seek answers to these questions through something else. And for a Christian, including one who believes in evolutionary biology, as I happen to, the answers to these kinds of questions do not lie in the scientific method, they lie outside of science, and Medawar saw that science is limited in this way. It s spectacularly successful, but its success lies in the selflimitation of its methodology. 16

17 So that s the kind of presentation that I give to Evangelical churches about some of this, and this leads to some interesting discussions. I hope that these kinds of discussions and maybe the way you cover this topic can help create space for Christians, to recognize that sincere Christians can sincerely disagree, but they re all part of one large family even though they have these disagreements. And as I was talking to somebody last night, not all of our families are actually functional, so using that family analogy, I know it s fraught with difficulty for some of us. But the fact is that I hope that Christians can learn to dialogue about these topics. I mentioned Francis Bacon at the beginning of this talk. He talked about this two books analogy and how it got pasted into Darwin s Origin of Species. Well, just below the part I quoted at first, Bacon says this: Let people endeavor an endless progress or proficience in both science and the Scriptures [those two books], only let them be aware that they apply both to charity, and not to swelling. To use, and not to ostentation; and again, that they do not unwisely mingle or confound those learnings together. That s my hope. My hope is that we can create a space where there is not a lot of swelling; it s not about who s right and who s wrong, who we can beat down, who we can win against, but who we can invite into a conversation, and during that conversation making sure that we do well by the text of Scripture, that first book, and that second book, the book of God s world. ROBERT DRAPER, New York Times Magazine: You said, why is there this pushback among young Evangelicals when there are several options available? It occurred to me from the phraseology of the question which sounded so familiar to me that you could have been asking the same thing about immigration reform. And so I guess what I m wondering is if you see that the problem is not so much that young Evangelicals are uncomfortable with the science, they re uncomfortable with the messenger, they feel that the messenger is politically biased, and so the challenge here is to somehow delink this dialogue, as you put it, from the political shouting match. JEFF HARDIN: I think that s absolutely true, that these are -- I think we are religiopolitical creatures in profound ways. I think the U.S. is completely polarized on many of these points. I mentioned that trust is more important than impartation of knowledge. There is 17

18 a great suspicion based on a total package which involves a number of political issues. It involves questions that relate to whether or not there is an ecological crisis looming, and a number of other things, and these tend to be all packaged into kind of one giant ball of yarn, and it s hard to untangle those threads and that giant ball of yarn. I use this technical word disambiguate -- I think that s what we need to do, we need to disambiguate these issues, and that is very hard work, it takes a lot of time. So I think some of you journalists in the room who have covered Evangelicals, you know that there is a lot of mistrust out there. If you re from certain newspapers in the room or certain news outlets, you know that you give them your card, and, I m not sure I want to talk to you. And so I think you re familiar with that pushback. And so I think maybe one of the things that journalists can do to help the American people, whether you re on the more conservative side of the journalistic spectrum or on the less conservative side, is for you not to just create one giant ball of yarn and perpetuate the problem. And so to the extent that you can be more nuanced in teasing apart these different inputs to how Evangelicals think about the world, you can help them think about the world. And so I really hope that you will try to do that. WILL SALETAN, Slate: Is Joe Francis -- and just to pick one person -- impaired in his ability to do science by being a young Earth creationist? And I have a little more complicated one. You used a phrase, I think it was literary cultural analysis. What is that? Or let me put it this way: Can you pick a couple of biblical propositions and explain, show us, how that tool, that way of reading, adds flexibility so allowing reconciliation between Scripture and scientific evidence? JEFF HARDIN: Joe is at a Christian college called The Master s College in Southern California. Joe was quite able to get a very good Ph.D. and published papers, even though he went on to young Earth schools from there. And why was he able to do that? Well, it s because of the kind of science he was doing. Your view on origins really didn t affect the kind of science that he was doing. So if you pick your science in a particular way, you don t have to face kind of the empirical conflict that seems to be created by young Earth creationism. 18

19 Okay, so the second question, let s take a good example. Out of the dust of the ground the Lord made Adam. You know, this is the kind of language that s used in Genesis. A literal interpretation of that is that out of mineral components in the ground a noncorporeal entity fashioned, by sort of like Play-Doh, put a human together, and then it says breathed life into him, and the word for spirit -- the Holy Spirit got some mention yesterday -- well, the word for spirit is the same as wind or breath, and so it s hard to know what s being referred to there, but it becomes a living being. Now, my friend John Walton, who is a Hebrew scholar, would say, now, what is that about? Now, if we want to read that as a textbook on human construction plans, it seems to say that the original humans were made from dust, and, in fact, that s part of the funeral liturgy, You came from the dust and to dust you will return. Right? But John would say, you know, the original readers would not have thought this was like human Play-Doh. They would not have thought that; they would have thought that this is an account that God created human beings, yes, but it doesn t really say anything about the material origins of human beings. That is very helpful, and most Bible scholars would say, you need to try to think like an ancient Hebrew receiving this text, someone from the ancient Near Eastern context, not someone from North America in the 21st century, so that it s a category error to read back into the text things that we want to see there. So that s an example: if it s no longer about material origins, then how God created humans, if that s not actually what s being discussed there, now we have a lot more options about that. Now, whether all of those options are congruent with what the text is actually saying, we can talk about that, but I think you can see that moving to a more culturally savvy interpretive schema helps you to untangle our sense for using the Bible as a textbook from what its message to its original audience was saying. WILL SALETAN: It feels to me like what you re saying is a blanket justification for using metaphors. That you re saying we re being faithful to the text as it was meant to be conveyed to these people and it was all poetry. JEFF HARDIN: I would not say that. And actually John Walton would not say that either. He would say real events lie behind the text. But it s not the kind of historiography, the blow-by-blow mechanistically explained kind of sequence of historical 19

20 events that you and I are used to in a modern history book, so don t look for that kind of thing there; that s what I m saying. BYRON YORK, Washington Examiner: What s the role of a political system in all of this? You ve talked about these various schools of thought and we have state and local boards of education, we have federal education spending, you yourself are at a state university. So should the educational bureaucracy funded by taxpayer dollars in your view stick strictly to the straight science and let this whole burgeoning school of thought be covered by somebody else out there, either judges or somebody else, but in your view, should education money be strictly devoted to the straight scientific explanation? JEFF HARDIN: You know, I think science education should be about the science. Do I think there are many other things that students should be educated about? Absolutely. I m of the opinion, though, which we don t often have -- I certainly didn t have it in my public high school -- a course where we can talk about the meta-issues that surround science; that never gets discussed. Like, where is that going to be discussed? The main place that that s discussed in a Catholic high school curriculum is in a religion or philosophy class. We don t have those classes in most public high schools. So that s the problem. Where can we discuss issues like metaphysical naturalism? Now, that s a philosophical or worldview issue, it s not a scientific issue. I would argue it s not a scientific entailment, yet there is no good place for students to get exposed to teasing apart philosophy of science from science, metaphysics from physics. So we don t have good places in the curriculum. DAVID RENNIE, Economist: You talked about trust being more important than data, and you have this idea that a substantial number of these Evangelicals who are taking a lot of science classes, who are not ignorant, their problem is that they need to be persuaded, but most scientists do not systematically skew the data, but that s kind of an unreasonable position; isn t it? I mean, does that square with your view of how scientists operate? JEFF HARDIN: If you talk to the Evangelical on the street, some of them have overt mistrust. They do believe that, I think, that they re not getting the full story in college, to be sure, so there are a lot of people who learn what they need to do to get an A in the 20

21 class, spit back what the professor wants to tell them, but they don t believe what they just spit back on the exam to get the A. I mean, the students that I interact with, which is a very limited sample, I don t think they believe there is a massive conspiracy to skew data. I don t think that s what John is getting at, but he is getting at the idea that when what I seem to be learning in some discipline collides with my worldview, then my impulse is to distrust the message and the messenger. CHRISTIAN SMITH: I think very few Evangelicals would suspect that scientists are somehow cooking their data or at a micro level they re doing something dishonest. I think it mostly is driven by the observation that some of the most vocal atheist science activists very easily and unselfconsciously switch between methodological naturalism and metaphysical naturalism. They genuinely are experts in zoology, to making these grandiose claims about cosmic meaning and so on, and that they can t see that they re making that switch themselves. And so it s this more macro like if these really smart people, because they re driven by atheism, can t see they ve changed the subject now, they re speaking philosophically without any grounding for that, then that just presents this, Well, wait a minute, this general, Wait a minute, I m not sure, I ve got to put a hard line in the sand now and really be suspicious. MICHAEL PAULSON, New York Times: I m curious about how open you are with your colleagues and students about your own faith, your own ideas, about the role that God does or does not play in evolution. I mean, you re a tenured chair of a department at a large research university. Could you have been open about your views when you were a doctoral candidate, when you were climbing the academic ladder? What are the consequences in academia for the kind of beliefs, association, even a willingness to engage in discussion that you are having? JEFF HARDIN: One never knows what one s friends and colleagues say about one behind closed doors when one is not present. But, you know, I have not really had any issues with any of my colleagues. The fact that I m a department chair, I think people have a lot of confidence in me seemingly. 21