Christianity has always existed alongside of science. Some of the greatest Biblical characters were highly educated people (Moses; Daniel; Solomon; Saul of Tarsus). Most of the early Church Fathers were fully schooled in the highest forms of Greek thinking (Irenaeus; Clement; Origen; Augustine). Many leading scientists from the past (Sir Isaac Newton; William Buckland) and the present (Francis Collins; John Lennox; John Polkinghorne) fully embrace their Christian faith. This week, we talk to Dr. Joel Duff, a geneticist, a professor, and an active researcher, who grew up in a Christian home (his father is an Orthodox Presbyterian minister) that always encouraged open inquiry to science. He didn’t sense these two parts of his world to be in conflict. He was fully able to read certain Biblical passages … especially those in Genesis … as metaphor, allegory, and ancient poetry. Instead, it was an encounter with YECism when he was in his twenties that really rocked his theological boat. In fact, his story is a mirror opposite to the one we looked at last week … both were committed believers for more than twenty years, but Paul’s YECist faith was severely challenged by an encounter with science, while Joel’s science-embracing faith was severely challenged by YECism. And the outcome of those encounters are also mirror images: Paul found he had to give up faith because of science, while Joel still found he could harmonize faith with science. In fact, he’s an active blogger who writes on that arena where science and theology overlap: often topics where science denial and Young Earth Creationism run rampant. Once again, we feel there is much to learn from his experience, his example, and his insight. If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

“Throwing out the baby with the bathwater” When modern science conflicts with a Young Earth Creationist worldview, two common responses are either to deny the science (last week’s topic) or reject the faith. This week, we talk to someone who opted for that 2nd coping strategy. But the person we talked to isn’t just another one of the many people who quietly held their faith and then silently drifted away. Paul Enns had been someone who was incredibly active in Christian ministry at all levels, went to Bible College to dig deep into his belief system, memorized most of the New Testament and taught kids to do the same, and devoted most of his waking hours to fully living his Christian faith. And when he made the simple “mistake” of setting out to learn what “those lying scientists” had to say about dinosaurs, he had a road-to-Damascus experience in reverse. He found the scientific evidence for evolution so overwhelming and the YECist counterarguments so flimsy, that he not only rejected his faith, but he became a man-with-a-mission: a YouTube vlogger with almost 200 videos and 46,000 followers. The main target of his new-found ministry is Young Earth Creationism and its leaders. Boyd and I found much to learn from him. Not reasons to give up Christian faith or YECism. Instead, how certain a Christian worldview sets people up for their faith to fail catastrophically. And how the church’s response to the wounded warrior is to let them die and then forget about them. And possibly how a more open attitude to questions and doubts, and a more compassionate response to those who struggle, might lead to a more vibrant faith. We really feel his story is one worth listening to. If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

You may have heard that when an ostrich perceives a threat, it responds by sticking its head in the sand. The implied logic being that it no longer sees the danger, so it no longer feels threatened. “Out of sight, out of mind.” It turns out that this phenomenon isn’t true. It’s a myth! It seems to be our misunderstanding their first response to a distant threat: lay down low with their head and neck stretched out on the ground  — they’re pretty tall birds, so a lower profile might avoid detection. But if that distant threat is foolish enough to make itself an imminent threat, it can quickly find the ostriches opt for plan B: their powerful legs and 4-inch claws can immediately eviscerate the threat. They can even kill a lion!? Nonetheless, that metaphor is in our language. It’s even got a name: “Ostrich Syndrome.” You can look it up in the Urban Dictionary. And defense lawyers have “Ostrich Defense” listed in their playbooks … “my client was completely ignorant of the criminal activities of her associate.” So this is the metaphor we chose for this week’s topic: when certain Young Earth Creationists find modern science contradicts their literal reading of the Bible, especially the book of Genesis, they choose to simply reject the scientific data; which doesn’t make the problem go away, it just means they can hide cozily in their little world. It’s an eye-catching metaphor, and admittedly a provocative one. And what is this podcast series if not provocative? But please know that we don’t mean it in a derogatory way. This week, we wanted to talk to people who feel justified in rejecting science when they think it conflicts with the Bible. But we’re not looking for merely personal opinions here: we want to talk to people who are qualified to judge the scientific data and give strong, scientifically-defensible reasons for why and how they feel they can interpret the data differently than do experts in the field. Using an analogy that came up often in the episode: if we’re a National League baseball team looking for a pitcher, we’re not interested in talking to people who are just arm-chair athletes that have only ever watched baseball on TV … nor are we interested in talking to someone who got as far as college-level tennis. So we scouted around to find anyone who is scientifically qualified (graduate training in science, and works directly in the area of genetics), who holds a Young Earth view, and who is willing to defend that on our podcast. We feel this is a legitimate ask, if we’re going to give a platform to someone who believes Evolution Theory is a failure and needs to be tossed out. The problem is: we were unable to find anyone who fit these criteria. Even after contacting high-profile Young Earth organizations like Answers-in-Genesis and the Creation Research Institute. It seems their advertised promise of “just contact us, we’re happy to talk” is an empty one. Instead, the best we could get from them was “just check out our on-line resources and buy our books.” This is not the way scientists do business. Nor the way that people who sincerely believe they have the truth help honest seekers of the truth. But it is the way that vendors do business. And their business model is a very profitable one: their vast warehouses are busy equipping a vast swathe of the general population to buy into this worldview. Ostriches in training. Again, we’re using that metaphor not to be derogatory, but for the shock value: our motivation is the large numbers of young people who are raised on this anti-science worldview and end up losing their faith because of it. We want holders of this worldview to see that it has no legitimate scientific foundation. And that it brings ridicule to Christianity. And we want them to know that there are valid alternatives for modern Christians: more on that in the next few episodes. Tell us if you think differently. If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Young Earth Creationism.  “Really?” … you might ask. “Why are we still talking about this?  I mean, how many people still think this way?”  According to polling agencies like Pew and Gallup … “many!” For example, Pew asked two groups of people: “did humans evolve, or have they always existed in their present form?” The first group — 4000 members of a national scientific organization (including professors, high school teachers, engineers, drug sales reps, lab technicians, government officials, lawyers) — largely accepted human evolution. In fact, 98% of them agreed with this. Bear in mind that this group included people of faith (Christian; Muslim; Jewish; Buddhist) as well as atheists. The second group  — 2000 members of the general public  — were less in agreement: only 65% of them accepted evolution. Bear in mind that members of this group may or may not have had scientific training, and may or may not have held a religious belief. When that second group was whittled down to only those who did hold some kind of religious belief, the percentage accepting evolution dropped from 65% down to 52%, and when only the Evangelical Protestants among them were asked, that percentage dropped down even further to only 33%. So, yes, Young Earth Creationism is indeed alive and well today. And pervades 21st century Western society broadly and deeply. In this episode, we explore where that thinking comes from, and how one of their founders claimed that Creation happened on the evening of Oct. 23, 4004 BC, while another one among them “calculated” that it was instead 9:00 am on Sept. 17, 3928 BC. We also look closely at how this thinking sets young people up for a catastrophic failure of their whole belief system when they go to college/university, or enter the workforce. This will set the stage for several follow-up episodes in which we explore three different coping strategies adopted by people when their Young Earth Creationism encounters an alternative scientific explanation for the origin of all things, as told through the eyes and lives of unique individuals. If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Are certain cosmological constants “too good to be random or coincidental”? image adapted from Pixabay Apologies to my high school geography teacher. The only thing I seem to remember learning in that class was how to balance pencils on the end of their erasers!? I’d seen street performers turn the art of balancing odd things into an impressive revenue generator … maybe I could make something of it too? I might have taken an entirely different career path if I’d learned how to take that to the next level by turning the pencil around and balancing it on its point, but no one on earth has ever been able to do that. It’s as if earth’s gravity amplifies an imbalance of even a few molecules to instantly topple even the most carefully poised pencil (air currents are not the problem, because astronauts can do it in the space station). Chaos theory and the butterfly effect come into play here: the very smallest initial event gets magnified into an catastrophic system failure. Scientists have learned that many physical constants that dictate the structure and function of our universe seem to be so precisely tuned it’s as if they were like pencils standing on their points. If the ratio of the electromagnetic force and the gravitational force were off by a decimal with thirty two zeroes in front of it, the sun would burn a million times faster … and any life that ever appeared on earth would be immediately vaporized in that intense heat. If the balance between the nuclear and electromagnetic forces holding atomic nuclei together was off by a decimal with dozens of zeroes in front of it, the universe would have either ended up as just one super-gigantic ball of mass like a mega-supersized proton, or as a vastly dispersed cloud of particles that could never form planets or life forms. Those are some pretty finely balanced pencils! And there’s a daunting list of other examples. But is that an argument for design? For a Designer? In this episode, we explore some of the reasons why some answer “yes,” and reasons why some do not. We also look at how some Fine Tuning proponents stretch this idea to absurdity, adding in all kinds of “examples” which … if you think carefully about them … are not examples of the universe being finely-tuned for life, but instead are examples of how life-as-we-know-it is so finely-tuned for this universe. It’s an important distinction. Tell us what you think in the comment box below … If you want to play this or other episodes later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Bill Gates created Microsoft. The Pharaoh Cheops built the Great Pyramid in Egypt. George Washington founded the United States of America. But did any of them actually get their hands dirty doing so? God may have created everything. But did he carefully design it  — put molecule to molecule … assemble the bits and pieces … shape formless materials … put each animal in its place in the ecology — all from the bottom up based on a blue-print or architectural drawing? The authors of Genesis clearly thought that: they describe God planting a garden, sending rain to water it, shaping some of the wet clay, and breathing life into it. The Psalmist thousands of years ago certainly seemed to think so: “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made … you knit me together in my mother’s womb.” But taking those passages too literally creates problems: there are many aspects of our body’s design that call into question the credentials of a designer. Some of these are small things that don’t raise any serious questions other than “what was he thinking?” small hairs all over our body that stand up on end when we get cold or frightened — aka “goosebumps” — which do nothing to keep us warm or make us look more threatening. muscles attached to our ears so we can wiggle them? toenails? Really? But some aspects of our design create HUGE problems, and reflect horribly on the designer: linking up the airway to the food-pipe in a way that causes many people to choke to death on the water they swim in, the steak they bite into, the saliva that builds up at the back of their throat, or acid from their stomach. forcing the unborn baby through the mother’s pelvis … leading to all kinds of life-threatening problems in childbirth. Really!? All of these aspects of our design — and many others — are better explained as leftover bits and pieces still hanging around after our slow and gradual evolution from some ancient ancestral species. This doesn’t mean God wasn’t involved. Any more than saying Cheops didn’t build the Great Pyramid, when all he did was stand up and say “Let there be a massive monument to hold our national treasures …”, and then sit down while everyone else around him scurried until he could once again stand up and announce “Look at this great thing which I have made.” Look more closely at what the authors of Genesis actually quote God as saying: “Let the land produce vegetation … ” “Let the land produce living creatures … ” Check it out for yourself. But when you do check it out, try hard to not read it through the lens that Fundamentalist Christian dogma gives us, but through the worldview-lens that the ancient Hebrew authors or Cheops himself might have worn. In doing so, you might see less of a micromanaging God who directs every little detail, and instead get glimpses of a bigger sovereign God who instills creative forces (gravity; quantum mechanics; entropy; thermodynamics; biological evolution) into the ancient primal cosmic egg that exploded at the first moment of time, and took delight in what evolved out of that. So: Creator God? Absolutely. Intelligent Design? Maybe we should let go of that idea. Tell us what you think in the comment box below … If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

The last in this four part mini-series. Previously, we’ve talked about what science has to say about “Original Sin,” and then last week about seven ideas the Church has had for ten or twenty centuries about “Atonement.” Here, we see how those seven ideas about Atonement stand up to our new modern understanding of human origins: we’ve evolved over millions of years from an ancestral species that we share in common with dozens of other hominids, and migrated out of Africa fifty to a hundred thousand years ago. Most of those seven theories are really quite dependent on a very different version of human history: two humans created 6,000 years ago as perfect creatures in a garden in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq). In fact, one of those theories  — the one that produces the worst image of God … Penal Substitutionary Atonement  — is absolutely dependent on that primal-couple-Garden-in-Eden scenario. The problem is, that scenario just doesn’t match with anything we’ve learned about where humans came from. Three other theories which are basically variations on that PSA theme (Satisfaction Theory; Ransom Theory; Governmental Theory) may be less horrendous, but also don’t square up well with human history. Two of the seven theories are not at all ruled out by human evolution: the Moral Influence Theory of Atonement (Jesus came to show us a better way to live) and Scapegoat Theory (an innocent is blamed for a problem in the community, and their murder by an angry mob solves the problem). In fact, the Moral influence theory fits perfectly with what science tells us about the rise of humans through history, and with the timing of Christ’s appearance in human history: humans did not fall from a state of perfection, and from an intimate, personal relationship with God. Instead, it shows us how we’ve been on an upward trajectory biologically, anatomically, physiologically, intellectually, religiously, and even morally. Christ came not at the beginning of our history to take care of sin before it became a problem, nor at the end of our history after all that sin had taken place. Instead, he came into our history when we were still in the middle of that upward trajectory and finally ready … as a species … for a whole new idea. Moral influence indeed! This new way of looking at Atonement is especially interesting when you look at the word that the Bible uses for sin, which is the fundamental problem being solved here. That word is a metaphor taken not from law (penalty; fine; infraction; punishment), or from medicine (illness; wound; disease; infection), or from architecture (flaw; warped; broken; bent), or from clothing (stain; dirty; torn; rip), but instead a word taken from archery: a sport that’s all about being on a trajectory towards an ideal target … and falling short of the goal. Hmmmmm. Tell us what you think in the comment box below … If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Atonement … aka, salvation. The whole point behind Christianity.  In fact, the main reason we have religions of any kind.  Atonement is basically about finding a way to God. Given that this is so central, you might think that the Christian church would have had a unified understanding about this right from its earliest days, or that even Christ himself made this idea crystal clear. Think again!  Christian theologians have had all kinds of ideas on why Jesus needed to come to earth. Here are seven of the more popular views, some VERY different from the others. One of the earliest views focused on Jesus’s life and teaching: he came to show us humans a better way to live (Moral Influence Theory) Two other views also widely held from the earliest days of the Christian church focused on his death.  Jesus gave his life as a ransom payment for humans, paid either to Satan or to God himself (Ransom Theory), or as a trick to defeat the powers of evil and to free mankind from their bondage (Christus Victor). A thousand years later, Anselm of Canterbury wrestled with Ransom Theory’s idea that God was in debt … either to Satan or to himself.  Anselm changed the direction of arrows: it was we humans who were indebted to God. We had robbed from God’s honor and inherited a stain of sin, and Christ’s death satisfied the justice of God. Hence: Satisfaction Theory of atonement. A few hundred years later, Dante gave us vivid imagery of a fiery hell of torture, and John Calvin, Martin Luther, and the Reformation movement put a magnifying glass on God’s wrath. Out of this came a view of God as a vengeful monster who consigned humans to death, hell and eternal torment; Christ stepped in as a substitute to receive that penalty and appease God’s wrath … Penal Substitution Atonement. Methodists later softened this PSA view into what is called Governmental Theory of atonement: Christ doesn’t take the full punishment that we humans actually “deserve,” but just simply gives his life as a recognition that a wrong had been committed and some kind of repayment was necessary (similar to a law-suit in which the plaintiff sues for only one dollar, as long as they get their day in court and the accused acknowledges their guilt). Scapegoat Theory of atonement is built on an ancient tendency of humans to identify someone/something else as the cause of a problem within the community (they might even see this problem as a punishment inflicted on the community by the gods), and if that “other” can be ejected from the community or even killed, the problem will be solved. As such, Christ is simply an innocent victim killed by an angry mob. This episode sets the stage for next week, when we’ll look at what science now tells us about human origins and human history, and see how that new perspective may cause us to re-examine these seven theories of atonement. Stay tuned! Tell us your thoughts on this in the comment box below … If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

Our goal next week is to talk about the core of Christian faith: Atonement Theology. But before we can do that, we need to talk about a fundamental concept on which it’s built: a concept called “Original Sin.” The Christian understanding of that idea is rooted in the story found in the third chapter of Genesis: the one where Adam and Eve bite into the apple in the Garden of Eden, breaking the human-Divine relationship and unleashing sin, death and destruction into all of human history, and also on the rest of creation. Last week, we saw how Christians took this story and turned it into something completely different from how the ancient Hebrew authors intended it, and how their ancient Hebrew readers understood it to mean. This week, we’ll see how they took this story and turned it into something that bears no resemblance at all to what modern scientists have learned about actual human history. We think it’s legitimate to bring Science to bear on this very theological discussion, because science can be used to: show us that humans never originated from a primal pair roughly ten thousand years ago in a Garden in Mesopotamia, but instead arose out of a group that never numbered less than a few thousand, and migrated out of Africa a few hundred thousand years ago. trace a couple of our common ancestors down through genetic lines: “Y-chromosomal Adam” who lived in one part of Africa about 240,000 years ago, and “mitochondrial Eve” who lived about 100,000 years later than him (and from a different part of Africa a thousand miles away). trace down through genealogical lines (different from genetic lines) to show how it’s conceivable — not a proof, but a distinct possibility — that everyone alive on earth can still trace their ancestral roots to some one individual who lived as recently as 1000 AD to 2000 BC. dispel the idea that humans fell from a state of perfection. Instead, over the past several million years, we’ve always been on an upward trajectory physically, physiologically, intellectually, theologically, and even morally. still show us that we did “fall”: we’ve been on that upward trajectory, but “fell short” of our full potential. We caught a glimpse of a human-Divine relationship, and we turned that into a resource. Remember, we learned last week how, when the Biblical authors looked for a word for “sin,” they didn’t borrow one from law (rule; penalty; fine; infraction; punishment), or from medicine (illness; wound; disease; infection), or from architecture (flaw; warped; broken; bent), but instead they took a word from archery … a word that literally means “to fall short.” With this new information on the table, what can/should we now say about Atonement Theology? Stay tuned till next week! Tell us your thoughts on this in the comment box below … If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page

One of the core tenets of Christian theology … is also often one of the hardest to embrace, and all-too-often a reason for giving up on the faith. How is an abstract, theological concept like guilt or sin transmitted down through genetic lines? Can that really be inherited like skin color, or a tendency towards high blood pressure? Or does it become my problem because I’m genealogically related to “that guy,” an ancestor of mine who lived thousands of years ago? (Genetic and genealogical relatedness are two different things.) But how can I be held responsible for what he did? And what do I do with the mountain of scientific evidence that tells me “that guy” never even existed? And how does Christ’s death fix this problem? Why can’t God just forgive? Questions like these make this idea of Original Sin really hard to hold on to. But if one jettisons the idea, then what was the point of Jesus dying on the cross? In this episode, Boyd and I team up with an Old Testament / Hebrew scholar to look at how the ancient Hebrews who wrote/read the story in Genesis chapter three never interpreted it the way the Apostle Paul did, and certainly not the way Augustine later stretched it all out of proportion. And we set the stage for a whole new perspective on this idea, and for the even thornier discussion about Atonement Theology that builds on it. What gives us the right to second-guess the Apostle Paul and Saint Augustine? The fact that we now have information that was completely unavailable to them at the time: humans did NOT originate from a primal pair in what we now call Iraq, six thousand years ago. Instead, a mountain of evidence given to us (by God) tells us that humans originated two or three hundred thousand years ago, out of Africa, and have never numbered less than ten thousand. Faced with this contradiction, most believers opt for one of three easy solutions: blissful ignorance … pretend the science isn’t there; denial … label the science as false; give up … discard the whole belief system. We think an honest and pragmatic approach is to re-examine those ideas. Here’s the first in a four-part series of episodes that dig into this core aspect of Christian theology. Tell us your thoughts on this in the comment box below … If you want to play this episode later on your device, look for Recovering Evangelicals in the iTunes Store, Podbean, Spotify, GooglePodcasts, or GooglePlayMusic. If you want to help grow this pod-cast, please like and share with a friend. Subscribe here to get updates each time a new episode is posted, and find me on Twitter or Facebook. Back to Recovering Evangelicals home-page