Accepting Evolution as a Christian

This is the story of my journey from being a creationist to accepting evolution as fact. A lot of creationists I have spoken to seem to think that one day I just abandoned the Bible, or that I decided to rebel and go my wicked way for whatever reason. I am still a Christian, but I feel that I really have no other choice but to accept evolution. The only way anyone is going to understand why I made the decisions I have is if I share my story.

I was raised to believe in a literal Adam and Eve, and a literal creation week. It was only after a long and somewhat painful process that I came to revise my views on these topics.

My family's house when I was a young child, had a large back yard that had many lizards, snails with big shells, toads, frogs, earthworms, birds, squirrels, even snakes sometimes. I liked to explore the yard and find these animals. Sometimes I would catch and hold some legless lizards (or maybe they were baby snakes) that would sit in my hands and flick their tongues out, and little lizards called anoles that would change color right before my eyes. I always liked to watch "animal shows" on Discovery Channel and PBS and National Geographic, where I could see even more animals and learn about them.

When I got to be a little older I found out the people who studied them were called biologists, and I wanted to be a biologist too. Since around first grade, when someone asked me what I was going to be when I grew up, I would always say "A scientist" or "a biologist studying animals". My parents never really had a problem with phrases like "dogs are related to foxes". Maybe because this did not seem far fetched. They also did not have a problem with there being an old earth per se, though this was never really crystallized.

I listened to a lot of creationists on television when I was growing up, mostly because they talked about "science" and I was always drinking up everything I could that mentioned science. In seventh grade (second grade of Jr. High) I was fascinated when I saw prominent young earth creationist Carl Baugh on TV with a human footprint that supposedly had a trilobite embedded into it. I kind of shake my head at this now, but back then I did not think a Christian leader would be giving out false information. I thought the fossil was real and that he had evidence that humans were around a long long time ago. I did not fully understand at that time that he was using it as evidence of a young earth, or that such evidences generally are not very reliable.

He was also appealing because he talked about how he had evidence that dinosaurs might have been around as recently as 4000 years ago. He even claimed that there were eye witnesses of dinosaurs more recent than that. I now know that all of these so-called evidences are not evidences at all. At the time though, I thought it would be really cool if dinosaurs were still alive somewhere. At the time, I did not fully understand the scientfic method, nor did I understand that eye witness testimony is not considered to be a good source of scientific evidence.

It was also in seventh grade that I was taking a life science course. It was here that I got my first exposure to the nested hierarchy, in which the tree of life is organized. We were told about the Kingdoms: Monera, Protista, Fungi, Plantae, Animalia, and lots of phyla. It was the phyla (large inclusive groupings, such as vertebrates), that gave me a good first understanding of what would help me to accept evolution later.

When it came to animals, they started with sponges (phylum Porifera), went up to jellyfish (phylum Cnidaria), etc. This class was also my first exposure to an organism called Euglena, which seems to show both protozoan and algae traits. It all seemed like it fit together, but at the time I was a creationist and I just thought God created them separately. Evolution was barely touched on, never explained. There were rare mentions of "this evolved" but no support for that, and no explanation of how evolution actually worked.

The class watched a laser disc one day that casually mentioned evolution as being factual. I challenged my teacher on that, saying that I thought that we were created, not evolved. She just told me that the video said that was how it might have happened. When I told her that humans were not animals, she got me to concede that scientifically, we do belong in Animalia. She did not help me to progress on my path quite as much as I needed to, but I have to thank her because she did help me to grow in the right direction. She was very sweet and always answered questions that I had.

In high school, I was home schooled. When I chose to take biology in home school, I did learn a lot of good information, but the company from which I had gotten my home school materials required that I write a paper on why evolution was wrong. The section I had to study from contained a lot of worn out creationist arguments that even some creationist organizations shy away from now. I did not agree with everything they said, but I wrote the paper anyway. I asked my mom if it was right for the school to make us write it with that position rather than deciding for ourself one way or another, and she just asked me if I would rather have gone to public school and be forced to write that God did not create anything. Of course I said no to that.

One thing I had a serious problem with was that the textbook firmly declared that there were two kingdoms, plants and animals. I knew from my earlier class that this was wrong. I knew that bacteria and protists and fungi were in different kingdoms. This was my first dose of skepticism regarding creationists.

I began to gravitate toward the ideas of Hugh Ross, an old earth, progressive creationist. I listened to him a lot, and I actually did learn some facts I did not know before about the Big Bang and such through listening to him. Even to this day, I still believe that the best universal model to be compatible with a theistic philosophy is the Big Bang theory. I had never really been a strict young earth creationist before, but Ross helped me to realize that I was an old earther. Hugh Ross was appealing to me because he made it seem like it was all right to accept science, that science and the Bible really could come together. I still believe this is true, but I do not agree with all his ideas on fitting them together. His version of science was warped, in my current opinion, but it was a step in the right direction for my journey to have listened to him.

The next time evolution came up was when I was 19 and just starting college. I was in a Christian chat room, where I debated atheists a lot. They would often try to use evolution as a proof of atheism. I would use some of the tired old arguments that I had learned from various creationists I had listened to over the years. Even though my arguments were faulty, I would win sometimes anyway, because my opponents were not equipped to answer the arguments. They confused abiogenesis (the chemical origin of the first life) with evolution (the origin of diversity of life, or species), and I did too. I was often able to defeat them when I showed them that abiogenesis was not proven. One day one of the atheists from Scotland came in that was a little better informed, and I enjoyed debating with him more than anyone else. We liked to spar with each other, we were pretty much evenly matched. He too linked evolution to atheism, but he is the one that first helped to push me in the right direction as far as accepting evolution.

My sparring partner gave me a page that debunked Carl Baugh, and other creationists, and the page also made the case for evolution of theropods into birds. He casually mentioned to me that people at the newsgroup talk.origins would be able to answer any questions I might have.

I studied the page, and it made me realize that Baugh was not quite honest, I did not believe him anymore, and I learned to be a lot more questioning and skeptical regarding my sources. I knew for a fact then that I was an old earther and not a young earther after reading the site's debunking of flood geology.

Flood geology is a creationist idea that the worldwide flood as described in Genesis was responsible for creating features such as the Grand Canyon. It is an idea employed by young earth creationists to attempt to explain how slowly formed structures could still fit into their six thousand year old earth doctrine.

I began to refer to myself as an old earth creationist after that.

I was not ready for talk.origins and was not sure how to get there either, so I forgot about it for then, I wrote a question to the person who authored the page and got a nasty response back in the harshest filthiest language, which reinforced the idea that evolutionists were evil. That killed that.

I did not get close to accepting evolution again until I took my second biology course in college. Again, I was presented with the nested hierarchy that I had learned back in seventh grade. It felt familiar and I was excited to study it in more detail.

This was also the first class in which I was told how evolution works, that it works on populations, not individuals, how natural selection works, how genetic drift works, how sexual selection works, etc. I learned how alleles change frequency in populations, how sympatric and allopatric speciation work, how polyploidy works etc. More than anything though it was the nested hierarchy I had learned back in seventh grade, when it was expanded into such detail in this college course that really started to convince me. It was very hard to deny that the organisms were related through common descent when groups nested into each other.

I did not know how to deal with it. It was all making too much sense, and all the puzzle pieces were fitting together! I tried not to think about it, I could not handle it emotionally so I blocked it out for a while and compartmentalized my mind.

I went on summer vacation, I was watching animal planet on tv, and Gorillas in the Mist came on. I watched the movie, and watched the gorillas. Suddenly that biology class came back to haunt me. I had to know! I could not deny it anymore, I could not compartmentalize anymore, I had to know if there was any truth to creationism at all.

I reminded myself that a true scientist has to follow the evidence wherever it leads.

The words from the chat room, years earlier, came back to me: "The people at talk.origins will answer any questions you might have." I was scared. Things were falling apart, or perhaps, they were falling together. I wrote to creationist organizations, hoping they could give some thoughtful and evidence based answers for what I had learned. I wrote some serious questions, asking about the evidence I had learned about, and I got answers back that just did not make any sense and just were not compatible with observable facts. I finally got up the courage to go to talk.origins, I wrote "this is my last resort" in the subject line, and they helped me.

I got some helpful and polite letters from the regulars (completely unlike the caustic person who answered my inquiries to the site that had been given to me long ago, even though I found that he too was a regular later), I found ways to debate and ask questions of both sides. I had it explained to me that many Christians accepted evolution. I learned that just as Christianity had survived the shocking revelation that the earth was not the center of the universe, or the solar system, that Christianity would also survive the revelation that evolution was a fact.

In addition to evolution, I soon had no problem with abiogenesis either, because if God could guide biological evolution then God could just as easily guide the formation of life from chemical precursors. I began debating with creationists of both the young and old earth persuasions, and began to refer to myself as a theistic evolutionist.

I have learned more as time has gone on. I fully accept science now and I am very grateful to everyone who helped me along the way.

There is no reason to throw away your faith or to throw away science. One need not choose one over the other. Science tells us how we became human, but religion tells us what it means to be human.