From Hardcore Creationist to Cautious Evolutionist
I remember being 18 and riding my bicycle home through the forest, when it suddenly struck me: I had been believing the young earth creation narrative and the old earth evolution one, and up to that point, I had failed to see this as a blatant contradiction. How that happened, I still don’t understand, although a significant lack of critical thinking must surely be part of the answer.
What I can say is that this provoked a bit of a crisis in my life. Suddenly, I had to reckon with a serious challenge to my faith, as it seemed clear to me that I had to either decide in favour of young earth creation, and thus affirm the Bible and keep my faith, or decide in favour of old earth evolution, and thus affirm mainstream science and lose my faith.
I started to devour young earth creation material, seeking to save my faith. I suppose I justified only investigating one side of the debate by thinking that I had already seen enough evidence for evolution in the classroom. And I had. Biology had been part of my curriculum for many years, and what was taught was nothing but mainstream evolutionary science. I even remember the biology teacher ridiculing young earth creationism on one occasion. Again, how I didn’t wake up to the contradiction in my thinking, I don’t know.
Sure enough, I found plenty of creationist material that cast doubts on many aspects of the evolutionary narrative. Articles describing a lack of evidence for abiogenesis (life arising from non-life), the deep multi-dimensional complexity of the DNA code, and many others, convinced me that I could plausibly (scientifically) believe in young earth creation, thus achieving the objective of saving my faith.
For years I continued to keep up with the latest research from young earth creationists by reading their websites, subscribing to the technical Journal of Creation and even translating some of their articles into my native Dutch.
In public, I mainly shied away from talking about this though, especially at university where I was doing my PhD in Artificial Intelligence. In part because I am quite conflict-averse, and this is very much a conflict-inducing topic. But also out of a shame of sorts, for not wanting to be the “dumb conservative creationist” in an environment where I feared I would be judged by all the “cool progressive intellectuals” around me.
Halfway through my PhD though, I made a decision that initiated the process that would spell the end of my belief in a young earth creation. Paradoxically, that decision involved taking Jesus more seriously and committing to following him in all areas of my life. That meant among other things taking a harder look at the Bible, and figuring out what this book actually was.
Initially, I was still going with all the assumptions about the Bible that I had inherited from my church, and all was fine. But the more I read about the Bible, its origins, the contexts it was written and edited in, the more I started to see how it was not the book that fell out of the sky that I thought it was. Humans were heavily involved in its making.
Whereas before, apparent contradictions and disturbing violence in the Bible puzzled and scared me, I now started to see them more as tell-tale signs that the Bible was very much the record of a people’s long history of wrestling with God and their image of him. I came to see that far from being the Book that I could “plainly” understand, this was a collection of books written by people from various eras, of diverse social status and ethnicity. I came to see that this makes me prone to misunderstand significant parts of these various writings, even though they tellingly do reveal a common thread, which climaxes in the life of Jesus and is quite plainly understandable.
Thus, I came to see that reading Genesis 1 and thinking that my “plain” understanding of the text would perfectly match the intent of the original author, who is far removed from me in space, time, culture and language, would be a very strong assumption to make indeed. Especially given all the indications that actually, the original author’s intent was somewhat different from what I perceive as the plain meaning of the text, leaving a lot of room for alternative scientific explanations.
And I realised that the popular dichotomy pitting science against religion is a false one. At best, mainstream science contradicts certain religious interpretations. But science and religion are not opposing forces in themselves.
Thus, I was released to give mainstream evolutionary science another chance, this time with less of an agenda on my part. It doesn’t mean that I’m now on board for everything, which is not the definition of a “true scientist” anyway, but it does mean that I can now call myself a cautious evolutionist, committed to Jesus and an informed reading of the Bible.
