Nazarene University Professor Fired

The Daily Beat is reporting that a well-respected Nazarene professor has been terminated not because of their theological stances but because they dared to support evolutionary theory.  Karl Giberson has this to say:

Evangelicals have just voted another intellectual off their island.

On the eve of April Fools’ Day, while on vacation in Hawaii with his wife, Professor Tom Oord got an email from the president of Northwest Nazarene University (NNU) notifying him that he was being terminated. NNU is one of eight schools sponsored by the evangelical denomination Church of the Nazarene.

Oord was a tenured full professor—the highest rank in academia—who had been on the NNU faculty for 13 years, after several years as my colleague at Eastern Nazarene College. Oord was the university’s leading scholar, with 20 books on his CV; by most measures he was also the denomination’s leading scholar and one of a tiny number of Nazarene theologians whose reputations reached beyond evangelicalism. Oord had won multiple teaching awards and was wildly popular with students and respected by his colleagues. He had brought over a million dollars of grant money to the university—a remarkable accomplishment for a professor at a small, unsung liberal arts college.

With a glowing resume like that, why, in the Wide, Wide World of Sports was he fired? Here's why:

He strongly supported evolution and had long been a target of creationists in the denomination. He embraced “open theism,” the view that God does not know the future but responds in love—rather than coercive control—to events as they occur, rather than foreordaining everything. Fundamentalist critics called him a heretic and had been vying for his termination for years. But Oord was also gentle and pastoral, especially with students.

What is open theism, you ask? Here is a brief synopsis of this movement:

Open Theism, also called openness and the open view, is a theological position dealing with human free will and its relationship to God and the nature of the future. It is the teaching that God has granted to humanity free will and that in order for the free will to be truly free, the future free will choices of individuals cannot be known ahead of time by God. They hold that if God knows what we are going to choose, then how can we be truly free when it is time to make those choices--since a counter choice cannot then be made by us because it is already "known" what we are going to do.¹ In other words, we would not actually be able to make a contrary choice to what God "knows" we will choose thus implying that we would not then be free.

This is diametrically opposed to reformed theology and reminds me of the joke involving the reformed minister who, after falling down a flight of stairs, gets up and remarks “Whew! Glad that's over with.”  Open theism is not process theology, which is even more restrictive on the power of God.  The basic premise, that God is bound by time, seems to me (the unaided eye) to have a fatal flaw in that: if God is bound by time, and time began with the creation of the universe, how would God have created it in the first place?  Perhaps someone with a much better handle on open theism can point out the response to this argument, but it seems pretty central. 

I find it unusual that Northwest Nazarene University had more trouble with his acceptance of evolution than with his acceptance of open theism.  Apparently, evolution gets the blood boiling but potentially heretical theology does not. 

Karl Giberson: 2014 Revenge of the Creationists

Karl Giberson has written a post for the Daily Beast called “Revenge of the Creationists,” in which he outlines all of the recent developments in the land of young-earth creationism, although he lumps in climate change as well, a related and often correlative movement.  Aside: I am currently working on a post involving the examination of young earth creationism as a natural theology-based heresy.  Anyway, back to Giberson.  Of course, leading the charge is Ken Ham.  Giberson writes:

America’s leading science denialist is Ken Ham, head of the Answers in Genesis organization that built the infamous $30 million Creation Museum in Kentucky. He also put up a billboard in Times Square to raise funds for an even more ambitious Noah’s Ark Theme Park. Ham’s wacky ideas went primetime in February when he debated Bill Nye. An estimated three million viewers watched Ham claim that the earth is 10,000 years old, the Big Bang never happened, and Darwinian evolution is a hoax. His greatest howler, however—and my top anti-science salvo of 2014—would have to be his wholesale dismissal of the entire scientific enterprise as an atheistic missionary effort: “Science has been hijacked by secularists,” he claimed, who seek to indoctrinate us with “the religion of naturalism.”

It is quite clear from his writings that Ham has absolutely no idea how science actually operates and, as further evidence of his bad judgment in this area, relies on writers who know little to nothing of the areas in which they write.  This creates a two-fer-one bad science punch, giving your average scientist (and even most reasonably educated people) yet another reason to think Christianity is stupid. 

I differ from Giberson in his analysis of his point number four:

Climate change is arguably the most serious form of science denial. Creationism may be wrong, but embracing it won’t wreck the planet.  The last few years have seen many howlers on climate change including Senator Inhofe’s claim that humans cannot possibly influence the climate because “God’s still up there." 

There are plenty of examples of people who have embraced the young earth model who believe that the climate will be just fine because all of the changes recorded in the geological record are only six thousand years old.  The corollary to this is that, because earth is only six thousand years old, God must be returning soon, so why should we care how we treat the environment?  I saw that argument made a few years back (cannot find the post at the moment).  Albert Mohler gets a spot, as well as the Discovery Institute's Stephen Meyer, for this skewed analysis of the Cambrian explosion.  The only people missing are Kirk Cameron and Banana Ray Comfort.  Read the whole thing.  His tone is dismissive, but he is largely correct in his assessments.

Karl Giberson Weighs in On The Ball State Eric Hedin Case

Writing for HuffPo, Karl Giberson has suggested very politely that, with regard to the whole Eric Hedin Ball State controversy, Jerry Coyne go stick it where the sun don't shine.  He also cautions us about what academic freedom does and does not mean:

No evidence whatsoever supports Jerry Coyne's claim that Hedin is "proseletyzing for Jesus" in his Boundaries of Science class. Coyne is notorious for pretending not to understand the difference between a philosophically motivated theism and Christian fundamentalism and has waded into this controversy with his usual blinkered culture war mentality.

On the other hand, I can hardly agree with the intelligent design folk at the Discovery Institute that this is an academic freedom case. Academic freedom is a noble, if ambiguous, concept that can be invoked in support of many things but one of those is not the freedom to tell students things that are not true. If, as the syllabus suggests, Hedin's students are learning that the ideas of the intelligent design movement are the cutting edge of science and heralding a major revolution, there are grounds for concern. If the students leave Hedin's class believing that the scientific community is wrestling with the proposals that have come out of the intelligent design movement, then they have been misled and poorly served. Most practicing scientists understand that their disciplines have unanswered questions and "boundaries" of some sort. But virtually none of them are looking to an external "designer" to answer these questions.

I recently had a breakfast with a friend of mine who's set of twins are the age of my oldest son. They are all enrolled in a homeschooling co-op called Classical Conversations. Unfortunately, one of the books that has been assigned for this coming year is Defeating Darwinism by Opening Minds, a book of questionable value by Phillip Johnson.  My friend is a software designer/engineer and is, largely, unconcerned by the science/faith issues that cause me daily angst.  He was, nonetheless, quite surprised when I informed him that large sections of the Johnson book are not just different in opinion, they are wrong.  My friend was quite surprised to find that the theory of evolution is testable.  I outlined some basic instances in which this is the case.  If he has been reading any of the DI literature, I am not surprised that he thought that.  He also saw the wisdom of the question:  "how is it that all of the other major scientific disciplines have gotten their theoretical constructs correct and the evolutionary biologists have not?"  Even my pastor wonders about that.

In the end, Giberson concludes largely what I did, that this course is not what Coyne and other atheists call it and that Hedin has the right to teach it in the hopes of stimulating critical thinking in his students.  He does need to treat ID a bit more honestly, though. 

Karl Giberson: Praise For Pope Benedict

Karl Giberson has written a piece that appears in HufPo about the friendship between Pope Benedict and the scientific community.  He writes:

An underappreciated achievement of Pope Benedict has been his consistent support for science. At time when the gulf between science and Christianity is widening in the United States -- polls show support for young earth creationism is on the rise -- Benedict was a quiet and powerful voice calling for Christians to embrace science.

Just over a year ago Benedict even founded a new organization -- The Science and Faith Foundation -- at the Vatican to continue and enlarge the task of building bridges between science and theology, and to ease concerns of Christians that their faith demands the rejection of science. The executive director Father Tomasz Trafny describes the mission as the search for a "coherent vision of society, culture and the human being," arguably the most important quest we confront today.

However, it should be remembered that it was not always the case that Pope Benedict supported evolution (sorry, the regular link is no longer active) and that he went through a "conversion" of sorts.  This seems to have occurred somewhat quickly, although it is not possible to ascertain that for sure.  In August of 2006, he fired the royal astronomer for his support of evolution but by early September, 2006, USA Today reported that, in published minutes, the pontiff had changed his mind.

The minutes, to be issued later this year, will show how Catholic theologians see no contradiction between their belief in divine creation and the scientific theory of evolution, participants said after the annual closed-door meeting ended Sunday.

Now that he is abdicating, I wonder what the new pope will think about evolution.  

“Many miles away Something crawls to the surface Of a dark Scottish loch” -Sting

This is almost painful to read. The Scotland Herald has a story on the arrival of school children from the great state of Louisiana who are being taught that the actual existence of the Loch Ness Monster is proof that evolution has never happened. Rachel Loxton reports:

Thousands of children in the southern state will receive publicly-funded vouchers for the next school year to attend private schools where Scotland's most famous mythological beast will be taught as a real living creature.

These private schools follow a fundamentalist curriculum including the Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) programme to teach controversial religious beliefs aimed at disproving evolution and proving creationism.

and a bit later:

One ACE textbook – Biology 1099, Accelerated Christian Education Inc – reads: "Are dinosaurs alive today? Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence. Have you heard of the 'Loch Ness Monster' in Scotland? 'Nessie' for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur."

The bit about the private schools getting vouchers is true. That is here. Salon.com did a piece on the ACE textbooks. They fill in the remainder of the above quote:

“Could a fish have developed into a dinosaur? As astonishing as it may seem, many evolutionists theorize that fish evolved into amphibians and amphibians into reptiles. This gradual change from fish to reptiles has no scientific basis. No transitional fossils have been or ever will be discovered because God created each type of fish, amphibian, and reptile as separate, unique animals. Any similarities that exist among them are due to the fact that one Master Craftsmen fashioned them all.”

I have written on the apologia textbooks before but these books seem to be every bit as bad. It is nothing short of astounding that the authors of the ACE textbooks, in their zeal to disprove evolution, have settled upon an animal for which No Credible Evidence Exists. It is not just bad science, it is cryptozoology of the worst sort. What is next? Evolution can't be true because of if it were, how would it produce the regular octopus and the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus? Humans could not have evolved from lower ape forms because Bigfoot still roams the earth?

The second quote is just standard young earth creationist nonsense, continually perpetrated by Answers in Genesis and the like and has been rebutted so many times that the arguments can now reasonably be classified as lies.

Karl Giberson once said:

“Ken Ham and his Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY are becoming less relevant, as they speak for - and to - an increasingly smaller band of hyper-conservative biblical literalists. Ham's followers, ironically, are what (we've been warned about): a cult, with their own separate science.”

I have resisted calling young earth creationism a cult. Stories like this one make it increasingly difficult to do so.

Albert Mohler on Parellel Cultures, Karl Giberson, Randall Stephens and Liberal Theology

Albert Mohler has also weighed in on the “parallel cultures” idea that was floated by Karl Giberson and Randall Stephens in their New York Times story. Initially, I did not address the Giberson/Stephens article in the NYT but will now do so. Mohler writes:

The New York Times recently found themselves taken to task by writers presenting themselves as fellow evangelicals. Their essay reveals the central question that evangelicals must now answer: Do we really believe that the Bible is the Word of God?

Actually, that is not what Giberson and Stephens are about in the least. Mohler takes a sort of ‘Ken Hammish’ approach here (and I don't mean this in a positive way) by suggesting broadly that the concern that Giberson and Stephens are voicing is not really why evangelicals are anti-science but rather that they have rejected belief in the Bible. Let's see what Giberson and Stephens actually write:

Like other evangelicals, we accept the centrality of faith in Jesus Christ and look to the Bible as our sacred book, though we find it hard to recognize our religious tradition in the mainstream evangelical conversation. Evangelicalism at its best seeks a biblically grounded expression of Christianity that is intellectually engaged, humble and forward-looking. In contrast, fundamentalism is literalistic, overconfident and reactionary.

This sounds perfectly reasonable. Why would Mohler paint it as a rejection of the Bible? Let's read on to find out. In the original New York Times article, Giberson and Stephens argue as their central point that modern evangelicals and GOP candidates are ‘anti-science’ but then make an odd mis-step. They profile some modern leaders of the modern evangelical movement, including Ken Ham (fish? barrel?), David Barton (who rather hilariously argued that the founding fathers of the country had already addressed and rejected the theory of evolution) and James Dobson, who, they argue, has outdated ideas about homosexuality and actually agrees with spanking children and...

...(!)

Come again? What has any of that to do with their central premise? From my point of view, not much. Further, it opens them up to Dr. Mohler, who blasts away with both barrels. He writes:

Appearing on the October 20, 2011 edition of National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation program, Giberson argued that homosexuality should not be much of a concern at all. He revealed even more of his own approach to the Bible by asserting that “there’s just a handful of proof text[s] scattered throughout the Bible about homosexuality,” adding: “Jesus said absolutely nothing about it.”

That hardly represents an honest or respectful approach to dealing with the Bible’s comprehensive and consistent revelation concerning human sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular. Is Romans 1, for example, just a scattered proof text? Is not all of the Bible God’s Word? Well, Giberson has already made his view of the Bible clear — it is simply “trumped” by science when describing the natural world.

For your average evangelical, who is familiar with passages in the Old Testament:

Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable. (Leviticus 18: 22)

and in the New Testament:

We also know that the law is made not for the righteous but for lawbreakers and rebels, the ungodly and sinful, the unholy and irreligious, for those who kill their fathers or mothers, for murderers, 10 for the sexually immoral, for those practicing homosexuality, for slave traders and liars and perjurers—and for whatever else is contrary to the sound doctrine 11 that conforms to the gospel concerning the glory of the blessed God, which he entrusted to me. (1 Timothy: 1:10-11)

it is pretty hard to square that what Giberson is saying is scriptural in any sense.

Why is the passage on homosexuality a problem? It is a problem because if Mohler can show that Giberson and Stephens are not scripturally sound in this area, why should they be believed on the subject of science in general and evolution in specific? Is it not just another aspect of their secular viewpoint?

Whether or not there are arguments for interpreting the above verses in a different way than the way they come across is practically irrelevant here. Giberson and Stephens might just as well have donned bright red Star Trek ‘Enterprise Security’ shirts. It does not matter that Mohler knows little about evolutionary biology, the fossil record, or the geological record. That is no longer the issue at hand. The issue at hand is the “secular knowledge” that is being espoused by Giberson and Stephens, which is at odds with the vast majority of evangelicals. In one swift move, Mohler is able to link acceptance of evolution with liberal teaching on homosexuality. After reading Giberson's and Stephens' New York Times essay, why would your average evangelical even think about changing their minds about evolution?

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World Magazine on the Barna Group Results

World Magazine has an article on the Barna Group results that adds a dimension:

Although Christians have a reputation for being anti-science, the scientific field is brimming with Christian thinkers, Peter Walhout, Wheaton's department chair and associate professor of physical chemistry, said.

"No serious Christian or scholar would ever study Christianity and its history and say it's anti-science," he said.

Many early scientists actively participated in church. Nicolas Copernicus held an office in the Catholic Church, and he was encouraged to publish his research on the planets' orbit system by high-ranking church officials. Isaac Newton, another devout believer, claimed that the laws of physics and the universe were dependant upon an intelligent designer. And the revered physicist Albert Einstein was motivated to investigate the laws of the universe by his faith in a Creator.

"I want to know how God created this world," he said.

Walhout suggested anyone wishing to express to unbelievers the amity between Christianity and science should capitalize on evidence from history.

The problem is not with historical Christianity. It is with modern evangelical Christianity, a movement that came out of the fundamentalism of the early 1900s and that has, largely, abandoned conventional scientific pursuits or results. It is this group that is largely “anti-science.” In a recent article in the New York Times (yes, I am going to quote it just this once), Karl Giberson and Randall Stephens, about modern evangelical Christianity's response to science, write:

In response, many evangelicals created what amounts to a “parallel culture,” nurtured by church, Sunday school, summer camps and colleges, as well as publishing houses, broadcasting networks, music festivals and counseling groups. Among evangelical leaders, Ken Ham, David Barton and James C. Dobson have been particularly effective orchestrators — and beneficiaries — of this subculture.

It is this “parallel culture” that has become the de facto culture of home school curricula, evangelical churches and Christian colleges. This is the result of what Mark Noll called “The Intellectual Catastrophe of Fundamentalism.” This is not Christianity as it is practiced in either the Catholic or Eastern churches and, in many ways, it is a Christianity that is unique to the United States. It is also a Christianity that I am profoundly uncomfortable with and am becoming more so every day. One of my friends recently wrote this to me:

The academic study of Scripture does not teach people that faith is stupid; rather, that study seeks to elucidate the faiths contained in Scripture as rigorously as possible.

It is this faith and the rich tradition that is behind it that the modern evangelical church has lost.


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Francis Collins and Karl Giberson at BioLogos on Common Ancestry

There is a discussion going on at BioLogos between Francis Collins and Karl Giberson about the role of common ancestry in evolutionary theory. Karl asks:

A layperson is understandably skeptical when they are told that there’s this tree of life going back to a common ancestor and all these animals are on the tree but we have no direct evidence for most of them and we have to infer them hypothetically. How do you respond to this large number of missing pieces in the puzzle? Does that bother you at all?

To this, Francis responds:

I know it bothers people who are not really convinced yet about the consistency of the whole theory but it doesn’t bother me at all. Is the absence of a fossil representation of an organism really all that troubling when you realize that what you’re asking for in that case—fossilization— is extremely unlikely to have happened? Now we can actually go back and predict pretty much to the base pair what was the genome sequence of the common mammalian ancestor.

We have done that for big stretches of the genome to show how you can computationally assemble that information. And it’s breathtaking that you can actually look now at the DNA sequence, which is a fossil record of its own, of an organism that we’re all descended from. And so are all the other mammals because we have enough evidence from today that we are able to look back through history to see what that must have looked like.

This is similar to what Jerry Coyne wrote (paraphrased) that even if we didn't have a fossil record, evolution would still be true, based on the genomic revolution that has occurred in the last fifteen years. The fact that we have the fossil record, which backs up the genomic evidence is just another nail in the coffin.

Francis Collins finishes by writing: There’s lots of stuff we [his fellow geneticists] don’t agree upon. But we do agree upon descent from a common ancestor, gradual change over a long period of time, and natural selection operating to produce the diversity of living species. There is no question that those are correct. Those are three cardinal pillars of Darwin’s theory that have been under-girded by data coming from multiple directions and they are not going to go away. Evolution is not a theory that is going to be discarded next week or next year or a hundred or a thousand years from now. It is true.

Yup. Read the whole thing as well as the first post.

Karl Giberson Responds to Albert Mohler

Karl Giberson has responded to the article by Albert Mohler, in which he argued that our modern understanding of science is a corruption of our walk with God and that we do not see the universe as it really is. We see a corrupted, fallen version of it. According to Dr. Mohler, we must read the scriptures as they are written and, in instances in which it seems to conflict with science, we must insist on scripture being correct. Gilberson responds:

I hope that you are wrong when you say that there can be no reconciliation, for I fear for our church if simple education in well-established scientific ideas becomes a well-lighted exit from our faith. To perpetuate this either/or choice is to guarantee that this exit will continue to be filled with disillusioned young people.

Giberson is absolutely correct, here. As Mark Noll wrote, the scandal of the evangelical mind is there isn't one. We cannot afford to abdicate our responsibilities to the scientific community just because we might disagree with some of them on their theological positions. Giberson also notes what I wrote in the last post, that Mohler is unaware of his own theological positions:

You seem to equate your understanding of how the Bible should be read with plain-fact Christian orthodoxy. There we must part ways, and I suspect that at the end of the day, this may be the real point of contention. I do not think that I am showing how much doctrine Christianity has to surrender, but how problematic fundamentalist literalism is for engaging science. But even this may imply more disagreement than there needs to be.

This literal, flat reading of scripture, despite having its own inconsistencies, becomes an end to itself. In the end, it is hard not to come away from reading people like Mohler, Ken Ham, John Morris and others that they are not nearly as concerned with whether or not you have accepted Christ as whether or not you believe in a young earth.

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Karl Giberson: Atheists, it's Time to Play Well With Others.

Karl Giberson has written an article for USA Today on the necessity of civil discourse concerning the evolution debate. He writes:

Few idiosyncrasies are more perplexing than the ways people connect science and religion. Widespread rejection of evolution, to take a familiar example, has created a crisis in education, and it now appears that biology texts might be altered to satisfy anti-evolutionary activists in Texas. Many on the textbook commission believe their religion is incompatible with scientific explanations of origins — evolution and the Big Bang — so they want textbooks with more accommodating theories and different facts.

Understandably, many thoughtful and well-educated people, believers and non-believers alike, find this unacceptable. Most of these critics emphasize that informed religious belief — even conservative evangelicalism with its insistence on an inerrant Bible — can accommodate modern science, including evolution. Leading Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke made this argument recently and was driven by theological gatekeepers to resign from his seminary. But Waltke was immediately snapped up by a similar seminary, indicating that partial thawing has begun even on the frozen waters of fundamentalism.

The thawing that Karl mentions does not immediately seem self-evident, given that there are many more stories about townsfolk or school boards being indignant about the teaching of evolution than there are stories of acceptance of it. I certainly hope that he is correct that the seminaries are becoming more open to the idea of acceptance of evolution because the large anti-evolution organizations and their followers sure aren't. These are becoming increasingly insular in their attitudes and teachings and are becoming, as Waltke wrote and as Karl reminds us, "a cult." I am still exploring the possibility that this YEC viewpoint constitutes a heresy.

For this article, though, he focuses on the "new atheists," who seek the purging of religious belief from society. These include Richard Dawkins, Jerry Coyne, and P.Z. Myers, to name a few. Each has vocally argued that people that practice science cannot have religious sensibilities and be credible scientists. To this, Karl writes:

There is something profoundly un-American about demanding that people give up cherished, or even uncherished, beliefs just because they don't comport with science. And the demand seems even more peculiar when it is applied so indiscriminately as to include religious believers with Nobel Prizes. What sort of atheist complains that a fellow citizen doing world-class science must abandon his or her religion to be a good scientist?

I am of two minds about this. Those of us that are theistic evolutionists argue that examination of the natural world is perfectly compatible with an understanding that God is the author of that world and that his power is demonstrated through the interworkings of it.

Having said that, we, as theistic evolutionists, are a little bit over a barrel in the sense that while we accept that God is the creator of that world, we do not accept all interpretations of how that world was created. We argue that those who believe that religious belief is damaging to a complete understanding of science are wrong. Yet we also argue that those who hold to a young earth creation position to the exclusion of other interpretations of scripture are also wrong and are damaging to the very same cause of Christ. While we might, on the surface, be okay with people holding that particular viewpoint, deep down we are not okay with them teaching it to other people, especially in the context of the public schools or home school curricula. Put simply, we want to have our cake and eat it too. We want people to have plurality of thought, but we want, at the same time, for them to abandon their "cherished" belief in young earth creationism. We seek to convince those adhering to a young earth position of their error of their ways and are exasperated when they simply ignore the evidence that we provide them.

I believe that those that choose to educate their kids at home in recent earth creationism have the individual right to do so. It simply means that they will be inadequately prepared for college when they do get there. It may also mean that they have severe crises of faith, such as that by Glenn Morton. I would recommend that anyone that teaches their children the YEC point of view at least ought to read that account. They might not agree with it but it might give them an inkling of what they are up against.

The same cannot be said for the public schools. Here, the teachers have an obligation to teach the best science that is available because the kids are a captive audience. True, some parents can remove their children if they find that what they are being taught is objectionable, but most parents don't have the wherewithal to do that.

An additional consideration is that if creationism is taught alongside old earth science, it might backfire in a very bad way. The vast majority of young earth creationism arguments don't hold up to even the most cursory examination and this would give an enterprising science teacher the opportunity to, after demolishing the arguments, say, "just how stupid are those Christians, anyway?"

It may very well be that the best way that we can show that there is a way of following after Christ and accepting the findings of modern science is to be the best Christians we can possibly be, without arrogance or condescension but acting in love and humility of spirit. Then we can let the science speak for itself. This does not mean that we should sit idly by while untruths are taught. Indeed, I think it is our obligation to correct those misstatements, but we should respond to those teaching them in love and kindness, lest we, too, become "a boorish bunch of intellectual bullies"


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Karl Giberson and Darrel Falk: A Plea For the Middle Ground

Karl Giberson and Darrel Falk state that "We Believe in Evolution—and God." One might quibble with the title of the piece; one doesn't "believe" in evolution, and, in my opinion, God and evolution should be reversed, but the sentiment is correct. They write:

We are scientists, grateful for the freedom to earn Ph.D.s and become members of the scientific community. And we are religious believers, grateful for the freedom to celebrate our religion, without censorship. Like most scientists who believe in God, we find no contradiction between the scientific understanding of the world, and the belief that God created that world. And that includes Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

Of course, evolution has progressed well beyond Charles Darwin and there is a certain connotation to the term "Darwinism," that needs to be heeded. Nonetheless, there is a growing group of scientists who are coming forward, as these two have, and professing their faith. They continue:

Almost everyone in the scientific community, including its many religious believers, now accepts that life has evolved over the past 4 billion years. The concept unifies the entire science of biology. Evolution is as well-established within biology as heliocentricity is established within astronomy. So you would think that everyone would accept it. Alas, a 2008 Gallup Poll showed that 44% of Americans reject evolution, believing instead that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years."

Such is the state of science education in this country. Many have been taught in church that they cannot accept evolution or they will have to abandon their Christianity. Groups like Answers in Genesis rely on this and on the general lack of science education in the country to marshall support for their causes. How good is this science?:

The "science" undergirding this "young earth creationism" comes from a narrow, literalistic and relatively recent interpretation of Genesis, the first book in the Bible. This "science" is on display in the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where friendly dinosaurs — one with a saddle! — cavort with humans in the Garden of Eden. Every week these ideas spread from pulpits and Sunday School classrooms across America. On weekdays, creationism is taught in fundamentalist Christian high schools and colleges. Science faculty at schools such as Bryan College in Tennessee and Liberty University in Virginia work on "models" to shoehorn the 15 billion year history of the universe into the past 10,000 years.

Davis Young has written a great piece on the demise of "flood geology" in the 1800s. As amazing as it is, this idea gained a resurgence culminating in the 1920s with the publishing of George McCready Price's The new geology: a textbook for colleges, normal schools, and training schools; and for the general reader, which was soundly ridiculed by the geological community. Sadly, its ideas were rehashed by Henry Morris and John C. Whitcomb for their book The Genesis Flood, a book that served as a model for generations of creationists to come. As the authors put it, this is not how it has been historically been:

Many biblical scholars across the centuries have not seen it that way, concluding instead that the biblical creation story is a rich and complex text with many interpretations. Putting modern scientific ideas into this ancient story distorts the meaning of the text, which is clearly about God's faithful and caring relation to the world, not the details of how that world came to be.

How has the most myopic view of scripture come to become the dominant one in the United States? How has it gained ascendancy in the private schools, the legislatures and homeschool organizations? This is especially perplexing since the vast majority of scientists who were believers in the late 1800s had rejected this view of cosmology.

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