God and Darwin

This week as we observed Darwin’s 200th birthday, so many of the comments about evolution have reflected such a dumbed down expression of Christianity that’s it’s a beautiful relief to read exploringourmatrix by James McGrath, Associate Professor of Religion at Butler University. I don’t always agree with him, but in every case his is the voice of reason. Too bad more Christians don’t listen.

Here are a couple of relevant excerpts from his recent blogs:

The majority of Christians who accept evolution do so because scientists with relevant expertise accept it. I don't think it should be otherwise. It certainly is wonderful if someone has the time and interest to become well informed about a subject outside their specialty, and for most of us evolution falls into that category. But if you don't have the time to inform yourself, then you really ought to accept what the scientific consensus is, and not a handful of engineers and preachers who tickle people's ears and tell them emotionally-charged things that they want to hear.

For me, my own personal faith has ceased to be about claiming certain things did or didn't happen in the past. That has its place. But I focus more on my own experience, and the reality that we inhabit now. If the teachings of Christianity are "true" in any meaningful sense, then we ought to be more concerned with how we treat others than with debating questions of history or even science.

McGrath takes fundamentalists to task for failing to understand the difference between what we know (for sure) about Jesus (which isn’t much) and what someone believes.

How do we do justice to that higher order of emergence in our experience that we have traditionally referred to as 'God'? The framework within which we speak of such things has changed, and our ideas will thus need reformulation. But in the end, until the experience of the earth's apparent immobility was accounted for, no satisfactory understanding of its motion could be formulated. In the same way, we cannot adequately rethink the nature of reality without doing justice in some way, even if a radically rethought and reformulated one, to the sense of meaning, purpose and transcendence that many human beings have experienced and continue to experience.

Of course, McGrath, with all his biblical learning, is a believer in science and evolution. His faith is not threatened by either. It makes you wonder why they are so threatening to so many others. What does it say about your faith if it can be challenged by a mere scientific discovery?