Tuesday, September 18, 2007

4 - Darwin

Everyone knew that Mrs S was an atheist - atheist, right? Or maybe agnostic, but whatever she was, she wasn't a Christian, and everyone knew it.

Mrs. S was our biology teacher. She inspired scores of students to study medicine, she brought recycling to our city, and every year, she taught the theory of evolution as if it were scientific fact.

“I know this is a controversial subject for many of you,” she said as a preface, “but this is the explanation that science has to offer, so this is the explanation that I am going to teach.” Then she took a breath and began the evolution sequence.

Science,” I thought, and I thought of all of the evidence that refuted evolution. I thought of polystrate fossils and the missing link, I thought of people gluing peppered moths to trees, and I thought of Darwin’s Black Box.

And Mrs. S continued her lecture, so I listened.

She started by telling the story of Darwin, a man who enjoyed traveling too much to continue on his path of becoming a minister. She told us about the context in which he had lived, how there had been a set number of species, and how it was widely accepted that these were the very same species that God had created, the species that marched two by two onto the ark.

She talked about how Darwin had been afraid to publish his ideas, because he knew it would cause controversy. She told us how, when he died, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, where his body still lies.

And when I went home to talk to my dad about this stuff, he would say, “Well, I believe in Natural Selection. How else could so many species be extinct?" But evolution was bigger than just natural selection, and Dad just usually didn't discuss it. Usually, my dad talked about how Medical School inspired in him a respect for a creator who would design a system as intricate as the human body – so surely, my dad was a creationist, right?

Mrs S was introducing me to a different Darwin than I had ever known, and I was forced to sort out the facts for myself.

One time, a couple years prior, I had a substitute Sunday school teacher who talked about the importance of 6-day creationism and the worldwide flood.

“Because if they can get you to admit that even one part of the Bible is wrong, they can make you question the whole thing,” he said, “even the virgin birth, or the existence of Jesus.”

My dad didn’t agree with him, though. He thought that a 6-day creation wasn’t necessary for believing in the Bible. We never had a chance to discuss it in full, but, at the time, I leaned toward the substitute Sunday school teacher.

To me, the Biblical creation account seemed to be screaming for literal interpretation, not as an allegory (“…And there was evening and there was morning – the first day… the second day… the third… fourth… fifth… sixth”), and I felt compelled to believe in the Genesis account, the 6-day creation account, because if I questioned the Scriptural creation account, I questioned the inerrancy of Scripture itself.

About halfway through the evolution sequence, Mrs S was starting to have me convinced. It scared me. And I couldn't believe in Darwin without really re-assessing Genesis - When I re-read the Biblical creation account, it looked more like ancient mythology than complete Truth.

Suddenly, I noticed myself questioning other parts of the Bible, such as the Tower of Babel. "How did languages really develop?" I wondered...

Through these tiny, simple questions, I watched the Bible fall short of Holiness.* And as soon as I knew it had missed the mark, even a little bit, I started to question whether anything about it was worthy of being called righteous – even the gospel accounts of Jesus.

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*There are dozens of sources that attempt to lay out the flaws of the Bible in ways that people can plainly see them, but I feel sure that sharing them would only lead to debates and discussions that I've never enjoyed. It seems that for every author who tries to point out an error in Scripture, there will be another author who can explain it differently. I believe that those sources, just like most things that people read, exist only to convince people of that which they already believe. And I know this firsthand: for the entire time that I believed that the Bible was holy, the only Bible I could see was a holy one, and there was never a lack of Bible scholars to affirm me in the way I interpreted Scripture. I still don't understand what eventually allowed me to see the shortcomings of the Bible, but my prayer is that it would allow my Christian friends and family to see them as well.

1 comment:

PT said...

Here is a link to an article about Darwin, maybe you can learn more from him than your biology teacher taught you.
http://www.desiringgod.org/AboutUs/MonthlyNewsletter/2007_07/

These are drafts of some personal stories that I'm writing and revising.
I would love to hear any feedback.