Evolution on campus

Nathaniel Blake has a follow-up to his article of last week. He got letters from lots of people who aren't ready to make peace with evolution.

My last column was like a grenade thrown into the choir I’ve been preaching to. I received scads of responses (most quite civil) arguing that evangelical Christians most certainly should not make their peace with evolution.

There are many who ask, "If believers in Darwinism (or Neo-Darwinism) are right and are firmly convinced that they're right, why do so many of them react so emotionally with ridicule and other personal attacks when people ask questions?"

I wonder how much of Blake's e-mail contained ridicule and personal attacks? Certainly, the phrase "grenade thrown into the choir" seems to hint to emotional reactions. So, it's not just "believers in Darwinism" who react that way.

So why the emotion? Blake thinks:

My answer was, and remains, that the source is religious and not scientific – evangelicals generally not being much interested in scientific controversy. For instance, they don’t care a whit whether string theory is true, because they don’t think its veracity (or lack thereof) has anything to do with their faith.

This doesn’t mean that the anti-evolutionists aren’t sincere in their belief that evolution is a scientific farce; they are. But they care about the issue because of its supposed antagonism toward their religion, and thus approach evolution as an adversary. And thus evolution has become far more important in the culture wars than it ought to be.

Having traversed from that perspective, I think it worthwhile to continue to try explaining why I think it’s wrong and terribly self-destructive.

The latter is simple: by making such a fuss about something most non-Christians (especially educated ones) accept, we bring the gospel into disrepute and are a stumbling block on the road to faith. If this were a central doctrine (basically, anything found in the Nicene Creed), then I would say: very well, let us look ridiculous and the opinion of the world be damned.

But does it really compromise the faith to believe that the Genesis account provides a symbolic or metaphorical description of how God created the universe, rather than a literal one? Even if you believe such an interpretation to be incorrect, the point is miniscule in the overall defense of Christianity, and putting such emphasis on it harms our apologetic.

Lenny Flank, moderator of the Debunk Creation e-mail list, occasionally asks some of the more illogical opponents of evolution, "How much is Satan paying you to make Christians look stupid?" I doubt anyone's getting paychecks signed with brimstone ink to conspire against Christianity, but the effect is the same as if they were.