How I Changed My Mind About Evolution by Kathryn Applegate

Author:Kathryn Applegate
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2016-04-26T16:00:00+00:00

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A Scientist’s Journey to Reflective Christian Faith

Praveen Sethupathy

Praveen Sethupathy is assistant professor in the Department of Genetics at UNC Chapel Hill, where he directs a research laboratory focused on genomics and human disease. He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina, with his wife and three children, where he serves as preaching elder for Resurrection Church.

We must know where to doubt, where to feel certain, where to submit.

Blaise Pascal

As Daniel Taylor puts it in his book The Myth of Certainty, “being human is a risky business.”1 From the moment we arrive on this earth, we explore the unknown and tackle unexpected challenges. As we are often fond of reminding each other, “with great risk comes great reward.” It should not be too surprising that risk is also at the center of our relationship with our Creator. Knowing him is a journey that is necessarily disruptive of our plans, as it intends to take us to new places we could not have imagined. But my experience has been that as Christians, particularly in today’s evangelical subculture, our lives often do not reflect this reality. Why are we so alarmingly risk-averse when it comes to our faith? Perhaps since we believe that God is the one sure thing in our lives, we feel uncomfortable with questions that challenge our notions of him (even if there is the chance that they might help to reveal more of him). So we tend to play it safe and build a comfortable nest for our faith, protected from what we perceive to be the threatening cacophony of worldly ideas that rise around us. And to ensure that our faith is not infiltrated, weakened, diluted or lost, we set clear, non-negotiable boundaries for our belief systems, even in areas where the Bible may not demand them. In all this, while we think we are protecting our faith, we may find that we are actually preventing it from growing.

It was during my college years that I became a follower of Christ, in part through campus ministries, which played an important role in my growth as a new Christian. However, these organizations also served as the gateway to a Christian evangelical subculture that, while initially foreign to me, was very compelling because it provided security and a sense of belonging. So without much of the kind of thought and reflection that characterized my conversion journey, I quickly adopted the lens through which the subculture interpreted the world. Perhaps the most striking example of this was with regard to evolution (specifically the idea of common descent), which was commonly viewed within evangelical circles as a notion that threatened the core of the Christian faith. As I transitioned to graduate school to study genetics/genomics, I felt I had a unique opportunity and important responsibility to dismantle the theory of evolution from within the vanguard of academia. But I could not shake the troubling feeling that I was being intellectually dishonest with myself. While I thought I was knowledgeable on the subject

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