Evolution in Confirmation

Last week at the close of Confirmation I played a game with the kids called "Evolution" that I didn't think much about until, upon hearing the name of the game, a couple of the students said "Oh... we don't believe in that," which kind of stunned me. So, this week we began Confirmation talking about--what else?--evolution, particularly regarding how we might treat science and religion. The conversation was enlightening for me--if perhaps no one else.

It's not that I didn't know there were plenty of people in the church that mistrust science and the theory of evolution specifically, but I just didn't know how widespread it was among these kids. These are children of generally very well-educated parents, who fall (again generally) left of center politically. And these are people who have elected, for one reason or another, to be part of a church with a strong Lutheran theology that values, among other things, education and service of the neighbor. These are not your stereotypical backwards country folk--not at all. And yet, I would guess the majority of the fourteen Confirmation students came in with the impression that you could not trust evolution because of their Christian faith.

The most enlightening comment of all came when one boy said, "I don't believe in evolution." I turned over the giant flip pad on which I was writing and wrote "Believe" in big letters and underlined it. What do you mean by saying you don't believe in evolution? I asked. Is science something in which we have faith? I'm not even certain how one could have faith in a systematic means of experimentation. Science doesn't work off of faith; it bases itself on the scientific method. It is indifferent to matters of belief or opinion. Prove something to be true under closed and repeated experimentation then we can talk, science says.

Our conversation veered eventually to the place where these conversations tend to go--Genesis 1. Although, perhaps the insight that got the most reaction from the group was when I told them that there are in fact two creation accounts--the one we all know in Genesis 1 and then a second in Genesis 2. This information, more than anything else, seemed to get the students to think, and I hope that they thought something like this, "If there are two creation stories, then maybe the purpose of both isn't to tell us the particulars of how God created the world. Maybe instead the purpose was to tell us why life came to be."

For all their bickering, science and faith need each other. I realize that might sound a bit of an overstatement, but I don't think so. We live in a world where you can't get away from technological advancement, where new and better things rule the markets, and where the markets determine in very concrete ways how we live our lives. However, markets are volatile partners with both science and faith. Scientific discovery is valued only when it produces something of economic gain to the system (hence the reason why NASA is on the verge of disappearing from relevancy). Faith is valued only when it provides social service and order to the universe of its constituents. Social stability is key to furthering the economy.

And so, both science and faith are increasingly marginalized. I understand that it often does not feel this way, especially to the scientists among us who see the church as a force constantly opposed to their cause. However, I think we need to draw an important distinction here between faith and church leadership, which is so often led astray by political and personal motivations. God is invoked in the public sphere far more often to give credence to political standing than as an article of faith, and so, advocates for a scientific worldview are forced into a position of arguing against large personalities with opinions that are often obviously wrong. So, scientific and religious leadership trade barbs over issues that are on the surface about protecting their respective causes--scientists seeking to demonstrate the absurdity in the church's rejection of very obvious theories to any observant human being, and religious leaders seeking to hold on to the hardline interpretations of the faith since giving an inch looks like giving up the game entirely--but in reality both have left their respective fields of expertise beyond to enter the fray.

The scientific method, as I understand it, exists to prove prevailing theories wrong. When science talks about theories it is not in the sense that most of us use the word in daily life. A scientific theory is the dominant epistemological result of myriad experiments that have tried to prove it wrong. You can't prove a thing right, but you can prove it wrong. For example, a scientific theory is that the earth orbits around the sun. Is this also a fact? Definitely. But science doesn't work by calling it fact, because that would preclude the possibility for further experimentation. In this way, science remains constantly open-minded. Perhaps we don't correctly understand the particulars of gravity and that orbit, or perhaps (stranger yet) we have everything backwards and the sun does revolve around the earth and all the experimentation has been based on faulty perspective (OK, unlikely, but I'm just saying...). So when scientists get caught up in arguments about faith, they turn to evolution, creation and the miraculous and explain that these demonstrate the absurdity of religious beliefs. But in doing so they've made a logical leap that is not at all in line with scientific reasoning. They can demonstrate rather convincingly the idea of natural selection, and so they can then extrapolate evolution and discount a seven-day creation. This is all well and good, but then the politics take over and too often from those experiments the subject becomes the falsity of faith. Science can faithfully (pun intended) take no such leap.

Faith, on the other hand, has no business rejecting concrete means of explaining the "how" of the world's creation or evolution. Religious leaders, again playing the political game under the guise of protecting their flocks from worldly interpretations, have tied faith into very particular, historical understandings of Biblical texts. Instead of reading Genesis 1 with Genesis 2 and wondering if perhaps scripture itself is telling us that it has no one historical purpose in mind with telling us about creation, too many religious leaders want to hold on to the historicity to the cost of their general credibility. In these moments, they fail at doing theology. The slippery slope to faithlessness and godlessness is a falsity that too many leaders cling to on both sides of the science-faith divide.

So here's the problem, people of faith and people of science, you have created a divide that tells my Confirmation kids that they have to choose sides. They need to believe in God or the scientific method. They need to reject their science teachers or their pastors out of hand. They need to defend every inch of their territory against any possibility that incredibility seeps in. And in doing so, they have partitioned their lives into black and white, right and wrong, true and false, faithful and unfaithful--lines that do nobody any good.

Congrats. You have done this.

Now, let's start untangling this mess.