An oldie but a goodie by Francis Collins, formerly of Biologos:
___
It happened again this week. I received an e-mail from a student at a major university who is in the midst of a profound personal crisis. Was this a financial problem? A failure in course work that threatens a lifelong career dream? A romantic breakup? No doubt there are plenty of those kinds of crises happening all over college campuses. But none of those accounted for her distress. Instead, my correspondent was having a wrenching crisis of worldviews, and her deepest foundations were being shaken.
She had been home-schooled by loving parents who were dedicated Christians, and who made sure that she learned the deep and profound principles of their faith. She made a personal commitment to that faith as a teenager, and her relationship with Christ was a central part of her life. She arrived at university fully aware that this secular environment might threaten her faith, but she quickly found other believers to share experiences with, and she learned to love the undergraduate experience.
That is, until she decided to major in biology. For the first time, she had the chance to see the scientific evidence for the actual age of the earth (4.55 billion years) and the theory of evolution. Like 45% of Americans, she had based her previous conclusions on an ultraliteral reading of Genesis promoted in many conservative churches - that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, and that all species of animals and plants came into being by individual acts of special creation by God. But with gathering alarm, she could see that a veritable mountain of data from physics, cosmology, chemistry, geology, paleontology, biology and genomics made that interpretation of Genesis no longer tenable. She tried to think of ways that the scientific evidence could have been misunderstood, or even (as she had heard from some Christian friends) that there was a widespread scientific conspiracy to promote these false ideas, but she could not see how to dismiss the massive weight of evidence. She sought guidance from her professor, but he made no secret of the fact that he thought religion was a waste of time. The ice was cracking under her feet. If her spiritual mentors had been wrong about origins, might they have been wrong about other things? Was faith just an illusion? Was God really out there?
She is not alone....
___
The entire post can be read here.
No comments:
Post a Comment