I've been hesitant to write this post but in the end, issues like this are one of the things I started this blog to address: how my faith and religion interact with the culture I live in. First a little background.
I've been interested in science since about 10th grade. One of my friends dared me to read "The Hot Zone" by Richard Preston so I did. I stayed up most of the night two nights in a row to finish it. And once I'd read it, I was both terrified and fascinated. After that, I never seriously considered any career outside of science.
I didn't think much about evolution back then. My opinion was based solely on what I'd heard my dad say, which pretty much was that evolution had never been proven. Armed with that, I left for college at Brigham Young University - Idaho.
Let me say now that attending BYU-Idaho was one of the best decisions I have ever made. The experiences I had there have had a massive influence on my life. At BYU-Idaho I took my first real science courses. I'd taken a few classes in high school (Biotech with Ms. Gladowski was the best!), but science at college took things to a whole new level.
And I loved it.
Now I was really hooked and planned on going to graduate school after finishing my undergrad and spending my life in research.
Evolution started to come up more and more as I progressed in my studies. I still remember the day when Professor Kelson started our evolution unit by asking us to write down what our beliefs were regarding evolution (remember that BYU-Idaho is run by the LDS Church). He then spent a little time explaining what had been said by the LDS Church concerning evolution and giving us some information to read. I won't try to summarize it all but here is a good resource (the site referenced is a run by a private group of LDS apologetics and is not considered an official source for the beliefs of the LDS Church). This got the wheels in my head turning for the first time but I still wasn't presented with any real challenge. The gist of my belief then was that the Church didn't have an official stance on evolution so no big deal; whatever it turns out to be then, okay.
A few months after finishing that class, I found myself in Lebanon, Indiana as a full-time, proselyting missionary for the LDS Church. Here is where evolution first became a snag, and in a very interesting way. I was speaking to a teenage and asked him about his religous beliefs. He said that he didn't believe in God, because he has just learned about RNA (I'm guessing that he was probably referring to self-replicating RNAs). Since life started with RNA, he said there was no God.
I didn't realize this at the time, but I immediately fell into a line of thought that scientists, atheists and many others have been promoting for a long time. The reasoning is this: because there is an explanation for how something happened, God didn't do it and therefore he doesn't exist. Please read that again. Because there is an explanation for how something happened, God didn't do it and therefore he doesn't exist. Another way to say this is that because the origin of life can be (at least theoretically) explained and evolution explains the origin of species, the Jewish/Christian/Muslim God does not exist.
This premise has defined the evolution versus creationism/intelligent design debate for decades, if not longer. It is almost always implied in any discussion with atheists about God. An example is a former employer of mine that once jokingly said to me, "The immune system is too complicated to have evolved. Creationism must be true." Over and over again, the anti-religion community imply and employ this either/or ultimatum; it is either evolution or God, one or the other.
Almost as remarkable as the false premise itself is the way the religious community reacts to it. "Well, if it's either evolution or God then it must be God and evolution is 'just a theory'". Rather than attacking the false premise, the religious often simply reject evolution. This is foolish of the religious community, but please note that the anti-religious have created the situation. Blindfolded creationism is just as much a product of the anti-religious scientific community as it is of Christians and other religious traditions.
There I was, a missionary that was fooled by the false premise. God is real so evolution must be false. Feeling that way worked fine for me while I was a missionary. I even felt I had a little bit of an edge on people because of my science background (modest as it was). But eventually, I finished my two years of missionary service and it was time to go back to school. I transferred to the University of Utah because I wanted to get involved with research.
I need to make it clear right now that I had a wonderful experience at the U of U. I had several incredible opportunities and worked with several amazing professors. I believe the U is a great school. That being said, it is unfortunate that some of the faculty there feel the need to define themselves and their courses as not a part of the prevailing LDS culture in Utah. I'm not referring to being neutral about religion or the LDS Church; I'm referring to the intentional, subtle, persistent attacks by some of the faculty on religion, morality, the LDS Church specifically and God in general. I'm sure similar things tragically occur at most universities, but that does not make it any more excusable. It has no place in education any more than other forms of discrimination. We would never tolerate a professor making racist comments, veiled or blunt, but for some reason it is acceptable if the subject is religion.
Being at the U brought near daily attacks to my faith, most of them in the form of the same old "Evolution is true so God is false." This is when things began to be hard. The more I learned about evolution, the more sense it made. There were so many examples. Darwin's finches, HIV, drug-resistant bacteria, freshwater sticklebacks, to name only a very few. The list could go on and on and on and on. But how did this fit with God? I'd already fallen into the false logic of "evolution or God," and things were starting to point pretty heavily at evolution being real. And then I listened to a lecture by Professor Potts. Every possible work around I had left in my head (mostly crazy ideas involving mass scale divinely organized horizontal gene transfer) were pretty much crushed.
This wasn't just a theoretical problem I played with in my free time. Evolution was a big deal to me now. I was (and am) absolutely convinced that God was real and that I had a personal relationship with him; but evolution was looking more and more like it was real too. The mental stress at times was enormous. How do you reconcile two things that are mutually exclusive? For that is what the discussion was, a war between two ideas that could not coexist.
Sometime after hearing Professor Potts, I happened to attend a religious class (Institute) on Christianity during the first few hundred years after Christ. That was the stated topic, but the teacher was constantly making comparisons and applications to us in modern times. One particular night, we got onto the subject of evolution. You see, people have been using their understanding of natural phenomenon to "disprove" God for thousands of years. But for the first time that night, I realized that there was nothing mutually exclusive about evolution and God. Sure, the thought had crossed my mind before; but something clicked in me that night. Did I suddenly know exactly how God created the world? No; but I did understand that evolution posed no problem for the existence of God. Suddenly a whole new range of ideas on how Heavenly Father might have worked to create life come to my mind. There were so many possibilities!
However, as I went back to school and continued to learn more about evolution, it became obvious that some of those possibilities couldn't work. But that is when I learned one of the most important lessons of all that I've had along this journey: failing to understand how God and evolution coexist is more a problem of creativity than it is of them being unreconcilable. I still don't understand exactly how Heavenly Father created the world and all life. But there is no doubt in my mind the evolution is central in his mechanisms.
But what about all the statements in the Bible? For those that can't be explained with understanding of the original language, creativity is the key. By creativity, I don't mean making up ridiculous explanations willy-nilly. I mean thoughtful, perhaps even prayerful, pondering that is open to the infinite possibilities within the evolutionary process and within God's comprehension of it and all other natural processes. I have come to believe that evolution is the explanation for life that is most consistent with my knowledge of my Heavenly Father. Reject the false premise the evolution and God are mutually exclusive. In reality, I believe that evolution is one of God's greatest tools.
In 1831, Joseph Smith, the first prophet and leader of the LDS Church, received a revelation that included these words: "let them bring forth their strong reasons against the Lord." He is not afraid of secular reasoning.
