Evolutionary Biologist and Evangelical Pastor Call for Ending the Culture War Between Mainstream Science and Biblical Faith 

Evolutionary biologists and evangelical pastors aren't supposed to get along, but wonders never cease.  We've been talking lately about evolution and faith, and by that we mean Darwinian evolution and biblical, life transforming faith, and we find more to agree on than the current culture war rhetoric would suggest.  Who called us to engage in such a culture war pitting mainstream science against evangelical faith?  Certainly not Jesus of Nazareth.

Evolution simply asserts that all life is related by common descent; that populations tend to become more like the members who breed the most; and that variations arise from the copy mechanism for the information imbedded in every living cell.  The particular copy variations that confer an advantage are passed through future generations at a higher rate than variations that confer no advantage to the body in which they are imbedded.  None of this is blasphemous, irreligious, or threatening to the cause of Christ in the world. 

In ages past, Thomas Huxley, the primary popularizer of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection spun the story of evolution as a replacement for the biblical story of a God of purpose and love in search of humanity.  Later popularizers with a religious axe to grind, like Richard Dawkins,  take the name of science in vain by using it to insult religious believers. Believers are all too quick to ignore the teaching of Jesus to turn the other cheek, instead returning insults of their own, and seeking to replace evolutionary science with a more faith-friendly version, whether "Young Earth Creation Science" or "Intelligent Design Theory."  Both of these are based on the dubious assumption that the biblical God can be definitively detected by the lens of science.  We think God is too intimately involved and too infinitely beyond the natural realm for that kind of detection. Our Bible says, "By faith we understand the universe was formed at God's command" (Hebrews 11:3)  Faith, not sight. Faith, not science.  The creation speaks the glory of God but science is not equipped to isolate his voice from all the other sounds and silences in and beyond this wonderful world. For that, trusting humans are needed.

Like many wars, this one seems so unnecessary to us.  Evolutionary biologists claim only that the information-copying process has some randomness, not evolution as a whole. The direction to evolution comes after the copy-variations are produced, whereupon some organisms breed more than others. Species then come to resemble the individuals who do most of the breeding. The hand of God is free to guide the process of natural breeding, as when God directed Jacob's stock of speckled cattle to breed more vigorously than his master, Laban's, or leave the direction of evolution free to unfold within the limitations of necessity according to his good pleasure and mysterious will.   

Nor is randomness, as with variations that arise from the information-copying process, foreign to the Bible. Jesus compares his teachings to the seeds of a farmer sown haphazardly on rock, shallow soil, and good soil. Jesus says his teachings that reach the ears of those who can hear, like seed sown into good ground, bear fruit a hundredfold. In nature, a copy-variation is a “mustard seed” of DNA, sown at random into various bodies, some of which then bear fruit a hundredfold.

We call on evolutionary biologists and people of faith to begin the process of laying down their arms.  

Let's have a moratorium on the insults and mutual anathemas.  Instead, let's follow the counsel of holy love and listen to each other, for we can only truly understand when we are willing to love.

Joan Roughgarden is Professor of Biological Sciences at Stanford University and author of Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist (Island Press, 2006). Ken Wilson is Senior Pastor of Vineyard Church of Ann Arbor.