spirit that’s a child of god, but nonetheless, a kind of ape. Apes are limited. Chimpanzees will never learn calculus. Quite simply there are things that we will never learn. Let’s talk about evolution, because evolution is science at work. It’s a crown jewel of science. Evolution is a dynamic and active and thrilling science. DNA has explicated the nature of life itself. We can read the history of life—how things are related, when they diverged—right from DNA. But some people think God had to make every little thing, but which programmer is greater? The one who can program every single game ever created or a programmer who can write a program that creates all the video games. That, for me, is why God is not diminished if he’s created a universe whereby things proceed along from the beginning to the end. I am not bothered by scriptural literalists who read the scriptures and then try to read a scientific story from them; I don’t think that’s what they were made for. John Walton is an evangelical person who argues against literal readings of the Bible. He’s a Hebrew scholar who says, “We must keep in mind that we are presumptuous if we consider our interpretations of scripture to have the same author as scripture itself. Nobody is an infallible interpreter, and we must always stand ready to reconsider our interpretations in light of new information.”—and I would add science— “We must not let our interpretations stand in the place of scripture’s authority and thus risk misrepresenting God’s revelation.” I may not have convinced you that evolution is real; I didn’t present all the evidence. I want to encourage you to go read about it. Get the best books on evolution. Pour over them. Come to understand what the arguments really are. You’ll notice, even if they’re written by atheists, you don’t have to follow them into being an atheist. You can be a believing Mormon. You can be a believer of any kind. In Cromwell’s letter to the Church of Scotland in 1650, he said, “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.” Too often we take our black-and-white thinking and we do a child’s version of hypothesis testing: we find a simple anomaly and throw out that theory. We don’t do that in science. If we find an anomaly, we check our instruments. We make sure they are working right. We start to check the way we thought about things, because if something should have worked and it doesn’t, we need to understand why. It might not be that the hypothesis needed rejecting. It means we may need to do more refinement and more nuance, and really try to see what’s going on.
“evolution is science at work. it’s a crown jewel of science. evolution is a dynamic and active and thrilling science.”
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