Friday, September 7, 2012

Conversions and De-conversions - Gone was the old grey stone


My first semester astrophysics professor lectured in front of 25 of my fellow students.

“What wavelength of solar radiation reaches Earth’s surface with the least amount of attenuation?  What wavelength is the least scattered or absorbed by the atmosphere?”

“About 550 nanometers,” answered one of the students.

“That is right!  550 nanometers corresponds to the green portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.  The light that we perceive as green is the light that is most efficiently transmitted to Earth’s surface.  That is why leaves appear green.  And the human eye also has its peak sensitivity at 550 nanometers!  Our eyes are more sensitive to green than any other color.  Coincidence?  Not at all.  This is evidence of …”

I had heard this before.  Chuck Missler used to stand in front of a crowd of hundreds in Calvary Chapel and give endless peculiar examples like this as evidence of obvious design by our loving Creator.  How is it that possible that our eyes could possess peak sensitivity at the optimal wavelength of solar irradiation?  How could the human eye possibly know where the sun would shine brightest?  Chuck Missler would say, “This is evidence of God’s handiwork”.

“This is evidence of Evolution by Natural Selection,” said my professor.  “The mechanism is amazing.”

I have mentioned several times in this story that I have always accepted Evolution as the best and most accurate explanation for the diversity of life on Earth.  I never told anybody in Calvary Chapel about my belief in the Theory of Evolution via Natural Selection.  Evolution, as I understood it, made perfect sense to me.  Evolution was intuitive to me, as the logic of it was gleaned from all the hikes and exploring of my youth, and witnessing firsthand the geology and climate of the vast desert.  It made more sense to me than the literal belief in a first man named Adam, and him naming all of God’s creatures.  True, I did believe the Genesis story because I had to as part of my Christian belief, but I always assumed that there was some non-literal or allegorical explanation behind the Biblical account, and I left it at that.  I did not explore the problem further, not because I feared the story would be debunked, but because it just seemed like an unsolvable problem, and I did not want to waste time wrestling with Christian issues that were peripheral to the central Gospel of Jesus Christ.  I also worried that becoming sidetracked by angels that danced on pinheads would become unnecessarily divisive within my Christian community.

Yet my belief in Evolution, as much as I accepted it, was immature before I enrolled in college.  Enrolling in a science and engineering university forced me to think about these scientific issues in a way that intruded uncomfortably on my religious beliefs.  I could not simply ignore Evolution like I had in the past.  Being confined in a science and engineering university forced me to confront it in a way that was sometimes a little too uncomfortable.  The implications of the Theory of Evolution via natural selection are earth-shattering to any person who believes that humans are special creations of God, and distinct and separate from the animal kingdom.  Many Christians who accept Evolution, like I did, have to sidestep or even ignore these implications in order, I now believe, to cling to their beloved Faith.  I just accepted Evolution without fully understanding it, and did not dissect it fully enough to discover the problems that it would give to my Faith.

Christians have every reason to either dismiss Evolution as a fraud, claim it is without scientific support, or tentatively and grudgingly accept it only to brush it and its uncomfortable ramifications under the rug.  When my professor fiendishly told us students that the human eye is most sensitive at the same wavelength as the peak solar irradiance, I could just as easily have claimed that it was not due to Evolution, but was instead evidence of the exquisite design of our loving creator.  God made our eyes sensitive in the green portion of the solar spectrum because God made the Earth’s atmosphere transparent to that part of the solar spectrum.  How else could we explain the interlocking serendipity of the otherwise unrelated human eye and a sphere of plasma 93 million miles away?

Despite my belief in the Theory of Evolution, and despite living in a university environment that stressed methodology over certainty, my brain still protested with echoes of Evangelical Christian propaganda.  To think that Evolution could produce us, in our complexity, out of nothing but a stew of chemicals, and with nothing but blind chance, was seemingly impossible.  Pastor Skip, who just repeated to us clichés that he had heard, said that it was like assembling a 747 jet airliner with a tornado rampaging through a junkyard.  The eye, I was told, was too complex to assemble by chance and out of multiple inter-dependent parts.  I still have an old sermon on cassette by Henry Morris, father of Flood Geology and author of The Genesis Flood, in which he claims that something as complex as the eye could not form by random mutations.  Each of perhaps hundreds of mutations would have to be independently directed to the benefit of eyesight.  The mutations could not form gradually from these random mutations over millions of years, so I was told by Henry Morris.  What good is half an eye? 

Out on one of my multiple geological field trips in the desert, rock hammer in hand, I asked one of my friends about some of the problems that I had understanding Evolution.  More precisely, I asked him about problems that Evangelical Christianity told me I should have with Evolution. 

“Like what?” he asked.  I gave him the problem of the existence of the eye that Henry Morris told me was unsolvable through the blind chance of Evolution.  After my friend solved the problem of the eye after about one minute of explanation, and after he scanned the harsh desert that we hiked through and reminded me about the natural, environmental pressures that drive natural selection, I never again thought of Henry Morris, young earth creationism, or flood geology as viable or believable scientific theories about our natural world.

Pastors Skip and Chuck, indeed nearly everybody I knew in Calvary Chapel was convinced that Evolution was not only wrong, but also a willful deception.  A lie.  Evolution was an unproven theory, they said, that people who hated God clung to in their desperation to deny His existence.  ‘Evolutionism’ was viewed as an alternate religion to Christianity.  Most of my friends back in Calvary Chapel did not think that heathens were deluded by the faulty evidence for Evolution, rather they believed that these heathens used Evolution as a smokescreen to outwardly deny what they inwardly knew to be true – that Jesus was Lord, and would be their ultimate judge.  Heathen Evolutionists were deluding themselves because of their hatred toward God.

This was emphasized when a special guest visited the New Mexico Tech campus for a free lecture.  Phillip Johnson, widely regarded as the father of the Intelligent Design movement, visited our campus and spoke to a packed auditorium.   I have to give him credit for his courage.  He spoke to an auditorium full of students, professors and scientists about the myopia of their methodological naturalism.  Surely, we must supplement our instruction of Evolution with at least the possibility of a Designer.  Since Evolution alone cannot possibly explain the complexity of the biological cell, or the self-aware mind in the human brain, we need to consider that there is some Purposeful Mind at work behind the biology.  I had never heard of Phillip Johnson before, but I had seen his book Darwin on Trail in the church bookstore, and I knew that he was an Evangelical Christian.  Although he purposefully never mentioned God, Jesus or the Bible in his public lecture, he otherwise spoke just as Chuck Missler would speak to a Sunday morning congregation.  I knew damn well that ‘Designer’ was just a euphemism purposefully chosen for a secular audience.

After the lecture, Johnson took questions.  One of the biology professors came absolutely unglued.  She stood and pointed at him, doing her best to control her anger.  “How dare you come here and accuse us of intentionally hiding data!  I do this for a living!  I devote my life to this!”  With that notable exception, most of the professors stayed quiet until they walked into the foyer.  From there, I heard plenty of snickers from the Geology department.  “I can’t believe that guy.  He thinks we are in a conspiracy to hide damning evidence against Evolution.”

One by one, the stories from the Bible that I had been taught, since childhood, to take as literal truth, were crumbling into mere fables.  Adam and Eve?  I had always taken that as some sort of metaphor, but pondering Evolution proved it to be nothing but myth.  Noah’s Ark?  Geology and physics demonstrated this story to be impossible if taken literally.  I especially remember the insight I felt thinking about the origin of the rainbow.  Rainbows are formed due to the natural refraction of light through the natural prism of water vapor.  Did the refractive properties and the laws of optics not exist before God formed a rainbow for Noah as a sign of His promise?  Absurd.  The deconstruction of my literal belief continued.  There was no ice canopy that covered Earth to give it a universally ideal climate.  A comet did not shatter the ice canopy, did not create the Deluge, and did not cause the first rain and thus the first rainbow.  This was all ad-hoc speculation that had no scientific basis.

On and on it went during my years in University.  Diverse languages did not originate at the Tower of Babel.  People did not live in excess of 900 years.  Evolution via Natural Selection was only a controversy within Christianity.  The controversy did not exist outside the walls of the Church.  Men did not escape death by being escorted to Heaven in a flying chariot.  For that matter, Heaven was not in the sky or anywhere ‘up there’.

The Red Sea did not part at the stroke of Moses’ staff, and the Israelites did not escape the Egyptians on dry ground.  There were no supernatural plagues to strike the Egyptians.  I supposed that the fantastic numbers of Israelites were exaggerated a bit, and that there were natural causes to all the ‘miracles’ of the Exodus.  However I figured that God was the moving force behind all these events.  The Egyptian chariots may have merely gotten stuck in the marshy mud in their pursuit of their Israelite slaves, but God was the one responsible for placing the mud there in the first place. 

Nearly all of the miraculous elements of the Bible were debunked in my mind.  But somehow, I still believed.  I just downgraded the miraculous to something more like the natural world that we observed.  Unbelievers claim that they never see the miraculous hand of God in the modern world, scientific, naturalistic world.  But, I figured, they did not understand that the hand of God was actually everywhere at work in the world, we just had trouble recognizing it because it was not the fireball from heaven that we were expecting.  The mundane world only operates through the Will of God, and every event occurs only through His providence.  In that sense, everything is a miracle.  It is only in hindsight that we look back, and we can link the events together that brought us into this special place.  How was I fortunate enough, I of all people, to find myself in a University?  Well, I could look back at the various events that happened previously in my life, not all of them pleasant, which brought me to the enviable position that I was currently in.  How can that be explained away?  How can all those people and events come into my life, to place me in this position today, except by the divine Grace of God?

My criticism of the miraculous in the Bible stopped at Jesus.  This is where the Bible remained untouched.  Jesus was God on Earth.  He had ultimate faith in His Father, more Faith than any mere human could muster, so He was able to perform His miracles, as evidenced by the eyewitnesses who wrote the Gospels.  Jesus was, so to speak, too hot for me to touch.  How could we have a redeemer of mankind who was not able to also perform miracles?  I was able to demystify almost the entire Bible as stories or legends or products of their time, but not the Gospels.  That was hitting too close to home.  Instead, my growing non-literal belief in Scripture assured me that I was not actually losing my Faith.  Far from it.  I was just growing more mature as a believer.  I was becoming educated and my beliefs more, I believed, sophisticated.  I no longer needed the strict literalism required for childish belief.

Somehow all disciplines, whether scientific, historical, or religious, like my Christian belief, converged and harmonized into some ultimate Truth.  My professors were not lying when they said they had evidence for Evolution.  The Theory of Evolution was the best model that they knew of to explain the evidence that they collected.  Where did this leave Pastor Skip back in Calvary Chapel?  The conspiracy theories of Chuck Missler or the flood geology of Henry Morris?  The pastors and teachers of my youth in Cape Baptist Christian School? Pastor Jack of New Hope Church?  Even my boyhood religious instruction from the fire-breathing Grandpa Wagner?  None of them were lying either.  They were all presenting truth as best as they understood it, but all in different ways.  They all loved Jesus, and they all accepted the Gospel in ways that they understood.  Jesus met them where they were at their own unique perspectives.

Most of my friends at New Mexico Tech were international students.  During my years in university, I had more friends from Asia and Europe than I did American friends, and I loved learning about their differences in food, music and culture.  But in order to do this, I had to become inclusive in this new environment of vast cultural and religious ideas.  I had to accept scientific evidence, and somehow incorporate it into my religious beliefs.  I no longer preached or witnessed to my friends, and I no longer felt any pressure or guilt for not witnessing.  I can only think of one exception to this.  I remember one evening in the first year of university career, while discussing religion with my girlfriend B----, I decided to use the C.S. Lewis Lord Liar Lunatic argument that I had learned so well from Pastor Skip.  I was not trying to convert her, since she always claimed to be a Christian, but I just wanted to get her reaction to an apologetic argument that I knew her mainline church had never exposed her to.  I recited to B---- most of the words of Jesus from John chapter 10.  From memory:
My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me.  And I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of My hand.  My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of My Father’s hand.  I and My Father are one.
 “Does a normal human say things like this?” I asked B----.  “Are these the words of a merely good man, or a sane human?”  B---- gave me a look that I was used to seeing after giving apologetic arguments.  She probably wondered if mine were the words of a normal or sane human.

I confess this inclusiveness was sometimes a little uncomfortable for me. I occasionally attended a United Methodist church across from campus.  I knew nothing of this particular Christian denomination, but I knew it was some form of Christianity, even though I knew it was a form of Christianity that the likes of Calvary Chapel despised.  I did, however go because the options were slim.  New Mexico Tech is in the tiny town of Socorro, NM and there were few churches to choose from.  There was no Calvary Chapel, but I figured that was just as well.  I did not want to go there anyway, or to the town’s only Baptist church.  I had my fill of literalism and the guilt that came with it.  I was not about to go to a Catholic church.  This pretty much left the United Methodist as the only option left to me.  But I could not attend regularly.  It was most difficult for me because of the female pastor at this United Methodist Church.  I could downgrade the miraculous to legend.  I could be inclusive as far as I felt the Bible would allow me.  But accepting a female pastor was ultimately too difficult.  Couldn’t these supposed Christians see that allowing a female to pastor a church was in direct contradiction to the Bible, for instance 1 Corinthians 14:34-35?

Despite these reservations, I had to admit that I had left Christianity as I knew it.  I was still a Christian who had to accept the physical world that I was learning so much about.  I could not accept that people who did not believe exactly as I did were lying about their convictions, or that anybody was being deceitful.  I became a generic, liberal Christian.  And again, I believe that I found myself in a place that many Christians find themselves stuck in when they are forced to leave some kind of religious fundamentalism.  I did not criticize my beliefs to the point where it cut too deep.  Of course I was still a Christian.  Jesus was my still Savior and I believed the Bible to be the Word of God.  But I admitted that there was much that I did not know, but somehow, someway I knew it was still all true.  And I left it at that.

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5 comments:

unkleE said...

Thanks for this further instalment, HiS.

" The implications of the Theory of Evolution via natural selection are earth-shattering to any person who believes that humans are special creations of God, and distinct and separate from the animal kingdom. "

I suggest the implications are shattering for some people, but not for others. CS Lewis was one of the world's most influential christians in the 20th century, and he had no problems with evolution. Scientists like Francis Collins and John Polkinghorne are convinced evolutions and also christians, and Ken Miller is a christian who appeared supporting evolution in a creationism vs evolution court case some years back.

Accepting evolution certainly makes many christians re-evaluate the full range of their beliefs, but it isn't shattering for most.

"Many Christians who accept Evolution, like I did, have to sidestep or even ignore these implications in order, I now believe, to cling to their beloved Faith."

I'm sure that's true for some, but for me, the opposite is true. As I have come to understand science and history I have adjusted all parts of my thinking including my faith. For me, the logic is fairly simple. I believe the evidence of the universe and the human race make God a much more likely possibility than no-God. As I learn more about people's experiences which they believe are of God, I adjust my thinking, finding these experiences to be further evidence that God exists. And when I consider the Jesus of history, I am reinforced in my view that God exists and was revealed by Jesus.

Those are what I regard as facts, along with science and history. The only logical way to combine all those facts is to believe in the God of Jesus quite literally and accept that older parts of the Bible are what they actually appear to be - sagas and traditions that may or may not be literally true. Once I get to that point in the logic chain, I can accept evolution and remain agnostic about much else.

"Adam and Eve? I had always taken that as some sort of metaphor, but pondering Evolution proved it to be nothing but myth."

I'm intrigued by this. What do you regard as the practical difference between a metaphor and a myth?

All this raises interesting questions. Most importantly, why is it that, when they learn of some of these scientific and historical facts, some christians refuse to accept them, others accept them and give up their faith (as you have done) while others (like me) accept them and find they inform, modify and ultimately strengthen their belief? It is a curious thing, and I think if we understood this, we would understand a lot.

HeIsSailing said...

UnkleE, thank you for your continued interest. Sorry for the delay in responding – I do not spend much time online these days.

UnkleE says:
I suggest the implications are shattering for some people, but not for others. CS Lewis was one of the world's most influential christians in the 20th century, and he had no problems with evolution. Scientists like Francis Collins and John Polkinghorne are convinced evolutions and also christians, and Ken Miller is a christian who appeared supporting evolution in a creationism vs evolution court case some years back.

Accepting evolution certainly makes many christians re-evaluate the full range of their beliefs, but it isn't shattering for most.


UnkleE, I have several responses to this. This is the danger I face whenever I speak of Christians. Nobody can possibly speak for all Christians. There are exceptions made to every rule in Christianity. I have a few Catholic friends who knew me both as a Christian and now as an apostate, and they don’t blame me for apostatizing. Why? In their view, I was the wrong kind of Christian, and raised practically in a cultish environment. But most of the friends I knew in Calvary Chapel did not think Catholics were Christians. Who is right? What am I to think? Some Christians are always the wrong king of Christian in somebody’s book.

In this segment, I am writing about a young man from the rural southwestern United States in his early 30s, who is finally began to explore the world outside of his sealed Christian environment. That was me, and that is the perspective I am writing about. I am glad that in your environment, more Christians are willing to embrace Evolution. This was not true in mine. Evolution, in fact, most science, was literally demonized by everybody I knew. My pastors, my parents, my teachers, my friends at church – everybody and I mean EVERYBODY without exception told me that Evolution was a lie straight from the pit of Hell, and to accept this lie was tantamount to damning one’s own soul. When I speak of Christians, I speak of the Christians that I knew. I am speaking about my own tradition. I am not speaking about Lutherans, Methodists, or Episcopalians. I am not speaking about Anglicans, Catholics, or Serbian Orthodox. I am not speaking about Pope John Paul II, CS Lewis, John Polkinghorne or Ken Miller. I am speaking about the most influential people in my life – Skip Heitzig, Chuck Missler, Pastor Jack and a ranting cult leader named Grandpa Wagner. These people drilled anti-science propaganda into my head for my entire life, until I as able to escape. Most of the technicians at my present employment, all educated and smart people, will still debate me on the demonic insanity of Evolution. This anti-science culture is far worse in other parts of this country. UnkleE, this is my background and my culture, and this informed my thinking, like it or not. Is Evolution shattering to Christian Faith? In my religious background, you better believe it is.

continued…

HeIsSailing said...

One further thing. Most of my Christian friends these days are Catholics (they will enter in my story in a future chapter). They have told me that they are Christians, and they have no problem also believing in Evolution, in fact, they are proud to tell me that their Pope also believes in Evolution. And as you state – many Christians in general do also accept Evolution. That is great, and a point in their favor, but I also have a problem with this. Speaking only of my Catholic friends, when I quiz these believers in evolution (and I have done this with one or two) to tell me WHAT exactly Evolution is, and WHY they accept it, they are simply not able to tell me in any detail.

What is Evolution? That animals change from one form to another.

Why do you accept Evolution? Because they pope says we can.

Period. That is all I get. I have several problems with that, but relating to this article, it means that if these Christians cannot explain with any precision what the Theory of Evolution is, or why they accept it, then they do not know enough to dwell on how it effects Christian Faith. Of course it is not damaging to their Faith – they acknowledge it, but have no idea what it is. It is much like what Christians say about Faith. It takes more than mere affirmation to be a Christian.

UnkleE:
I'm sure that's true for some, but for me, the opposite is true. As I have come to understand science and history I have adjusted all parts of my thinking including my faith. For me, the logic is fairly simple. I believe the evidence of the universe and the human race make God a much more likely possibility than no-God. As I learn more about people's experiences which they believe are of God, I adjust my thinking, finding these experiences to be further evidence that God exists. And when I consider the Jesus of history, I am reinforced in my view that God exists and was revealed by Jesus.

I understand some people are able to do this. I was not. Again, I was sealed away from this. Sciecne, reason and understanding were the enemies. My Calvary Chapel Pastor Skip Heitzig told us, from the pulpit, that was proud of the fact that he willfully remained as ignorant as possible about anything that would possibly lead him away from his Faith in the sole-sufficiency of the Bible. I have heard it said that Fundamentalism creates atheists. This was true in my case.

continued…

HeIsSailing said...

UnkleE:
"Adam and Eve? I had always taken that as some sort of metaphor, but pondering Evolution proved it to be nothing but myth."

I'm intrigued by this. What do you regard as the practical difference between a metaphor and a myth?


That is a great question, and I probably do not have a good answer. The more I think about it, myth, in the sense that I now understand it, IS metaphor. What I meant in my article though is this: At the time, we were allowed to think that some portions of the Bible had less than obvious, esoteric meanings. Revelation and other Apocalypses, for instance often featured fantastic beasts, often with many heads, crowns and horns, stars falling from Heaven and on and on. Obviously none of this was to be taking as literal occurrences. The monsters sometimes were metaphor for a particular earthly kingdom, the crowns meant their authority, the falling starts meant some kind of destruction, etc. Metaphor, but something that was still True in a sense. At the time, I would have though of myth as something just false. Something that was untrue whether taken literally or as metaphor. Myth = bogus. Again, this was my thinking back in the mid90s when this chapter takes place. My opinions of Myth have changed quite a bit since then.

UnkleE:
"All this raises interesting questions. Most importantly, why is it that, when they learn of some of these scientific and historical facts, some christians refuse to accept them, others accept them and give up their faith (as you have done) while others (like me) accept them and find they inform, modify and ultimately strengthen their belief? It is a curious thing, and I think if we understood this, we would understand a lot.

UnkleE, this is one of the reasons I am telling my whole story from beginning to end. The only answer I can give to this questions, that I wonder about to, is to tell my story as slowly and thoughtfully as I reasonably can. I am being as thorough as I can, not just with what kind of religious environment I was raised in, why I gave my life to Jesus, how my Christianity changed over the years, and ultimately why I left, but what that background was, what my parents were like, my childhood beliefs, etc etc. I am happy that you were able to integrate your beliefs with your knowledge. I ultimately was not able to, and the answer lies in my background. Not much of an answer, not a simple answer, but that is the best I can do for now.

Time for bed here in El Paso. Thanks for the questions, UnkleE – I really appreciate the thoughtful responses.

unkleE said...

G'day HiS, thanks for replying in detail. Don't feel like you have to reply quickly, or at all - it's your blog and I'm a visitor or guest.

The main point of your comments is that what may be true for me (in terms of how we reacted to things) was not true for you, or many christians you know. Clearly that is fair.

But I had reasons for commenting as I did. When you describe what you felt and thought, I cannot disagree because they were your experiences. But if you make a general statement like "The implications .... are earth-shattering to any person ....", you are extrapolating. I think it is worth pointing out that your response isn't the only response to such dilemmas and challenges. This can lead to asking why the different response, a question I think is very important.

"I am happy that you were able to integrate your beliefs with your knowledge. I ultimately was not able to, and the answer lies in my background."

Background must have something to do with it, but surely it isn't determinative? I think maybe we make implicit assumptions, emotional responses, we read and think and discuss with some books/ideas/people, we make choices, and somehow the same information (more or less) is processed in different ways. We dwell on some ideas but not others, we have different goals, we relate better to some people than others, so somehow different facts strike us as more important, and become determinative.

But hopefully I'll stick with you on this journey and we'll see if we resolve anything by the end. Thanks again.