Re-blog: When We Criticize the Church

This blog REALLY resonated with me this week:

When We Criticize the Church

I feel like I've simultaneously been misunderstood and failed to effectively articulate my thoughts while criticizing the Church, but this eloquent writer pretty much captured it perfectly! I have a feeling I'm going to be referring back to this in the future.

What I don't miss about Facebook

I gave up Facebook for Lent. Before college, I thought Lent was just for Catholics and about not eating meat. This year is my first time participating in it, and it's been a good experience so far. Though I was lonely the first night my hubby went to work and I was stuck at home, since then, I really haven't missed social networking and have enjoyed having more time to do things like starting this blog, reading, crocheting, cooking and baking, spending time with friends in person, sending out my would-have-been-Christmas-newsletter (in March), and mailing cookies to my papa (grandpa).

I've also been reflecting on how I want to use Facebook when I log back in at the end of the month, especially now that I have this blog as an expressional outlet. At times, Facebook can be a horribly distracting vice of mine (especially since I got a smart phone this past fall), and it can also be a source of stress--both from agonizing over the pseudoscience and ridiculously partisan things that some people post on there, but also from dealing with trolls and worrying over properly choosing my audiences for certain things I post. It really isn't a good medium for having certain kinds of discussions, especially if they involve politics (as evidenced during our idiotically long American election seasons).

I really enjoyed reading this post by Darrell Dow (a conservative Republican who is spending a year as a Democrat and consciously re-evaluating his biases, building empathy and critical thinking in the process)--check it out:

10 Ways To Ensure Any Political Discussion Turns Into a Pointless Argument

How about you--have you participated in any regrettable discussions/arguments on social networks? Was there a particular experience that caused you to lose a friend or changed the way you post?

God of the Gaps

"The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind." - Mark Noll 

Ever since I started studying biology in college, I've been learning what it means to love God with my mind. 

I went to public school in a small town, and we didn't discuss evolution much there. The first time I ever heard of anyone accepting both evolutionary theory and creation was extremely memorable because it seemed so novel to me--after someone in my 7th grade life science class asked my teacher what he believed, he replied: a combination of both creation and evolution. I suspect that teaching evolution in high school would have resulted in a barrage of complaints from parents, so I didn't hear about anything else Darwinian until we started having discussions about evolution in my biology classes at George Fox. At last, I was in a place where I could really explore this topic! My biochemistry professor introduced us to Dr. Francis Collins's book, The Language of God, and we discussed various beliefs on creation (young-earth creationism, old-earth creationism, intelligent design, theistic evolution, etc.). We also discussed the book Darwinism Defeated?, which is a debate between Philip Johnson (a law professor who has worked very hard to push his Intelligent Design ideas) and Denis Lamoureux (a professor of science & religion with PhDs in both fields). At the end, we had an assignment to write either a 1- or 2-page paper describing our own beliefs. Mine ended up being 6.5 pages long.

In addition, my genetics & botany professor from George Fox kindly allowed me to interview him on his views regarding creation and evolution. He talked about how God wrote the book of the Bible and the book of Creation, and how two truths cannot contradict each other. This brought me a measure of peace. One of the most important concepts I took away from delving into the subject of creation and evolution was that using God to fill in gaps in our knowledge is unsustainable, especially in a time when more of the mysteries of creation are being revealed through science. Dietrich Bonhoeffer describes this much better than I:

"It has again brought home to me quite clearly how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know; God wants us to realize his presence, not in unsolved problems but in those that are solved. That is true of the relationship between God and scientific knowledge, but it is also true of the wider human problems of death, suffering, and guilt. It is now possible to find, even for these questions, human answers that take no account whatever of God. In point of fact, people deal with these questions without God (it has always been so), and it is simply not true to say that only Christianity has the answers to them. As to the idea of ‘solving’ problems, it may be that the Christian answers are just as unconvincing – or convincing – as any others. Here again, God is no stop-gap; he must be recognized as the centre of life, not when we are at the end of our resources; it is his will to be recognized in life, and not only when death comes; in health and vigour, and not only in suffering; in our activities, and not only in sin."

As I've studied the mechanisms of evolution and see evidence for it even in my own research, I've gained a greater appreciation for the Creator, in a way that's just a tiny bit like how you can't fully appreciate art or music until you've studied the theory and techniques and tried doing it yourself. It's one thing to be awe of something you're ignorant of. It's something quite different to be in awe of something because of what you know about it. In the end, I traded in young earth creationism for evolutionary creationism (a.k.a. theistic evolution). Contrary to what so much of the evangelical church told me, accepting evolution (for which there is overwhelming evidence as well as scientific consensus) didn't make me stop believing in God or take away my need for Jesus. Instead, it led me to more deeply appreciate the exquisite complexity, logic, patience, and unfathomable presence of God through and beyond space and time. I was able to love God with my mind, rather than compromising intellectual integrity for an interpretation of Genesis that for me, contradicts the book of Creation.

I hope that the American Christian community will lay down its arms in the culture wars and start affirming people who choose to love God with their minds. As Rachel Held Evans put it, "The evangelical community…indeed the Christian community… is losing young people every day to a false dichotomy." One of the reasons why people my age are leaving church (or sometimes, The Church) is that while growing up, it was impressed on us that intellectualism and science are a threat to our faith--and yet, as the most educated generation in American history, we are finding as young adults that the pursuit of and advancement of knowledge enriches us and is transformatively rewarding. After all, isn't  a knowledge-seeking, curious faith much more fulfilling than an ignorance-based one?

How about you--have you struggled to reconcile empirically acquired knowledge with what you were being told about faith? Do you think the church has set up a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts that can partially account for the exodus of educated young people?


More reading:
Are gaps in scientific knowledge evidence for God?
Eight reasons to give evolution a second chance