Fortunately, I am married to a normal woman, meaning she sees things and thinks like most Christian people do. When I discuss topics such as the age of the earth or evolution, she shares the dominant view of “Who cares?”

She and the majority are correct that, on the surface, it doesn’t matter. Believing one way or the other doesn’t make you a better or worse Christian or person. You could say, “I don’t care about evolution or the age of the earth,” and that’s a healthy viewpoint. You could also say, “I don’t want to look at the evidence because it is essential to my faith that the Bible is literal. I also want to believe the church traditions that the Earth is six thousand years old and that humans were created from scratch, Adam and Eve being the first; that’s fine too.

What is not healthy is to lie about the evidence, saying that there are no fossils that support human evolution when there are over eight thousand, or proof that the earth is billions of years old. Or that all the dating methods are fake, the scientists are all working for Satan, making things up, and are therefore untrustworthy. Then conclude that whoever believes these scientists is stupid, brainwashed, and/or evil. It would be insane for any church to make it an issue of who is an Christian, based on what they believe about these issues, but many churches do.

I am a Christian rationalist, meaning that I hold human reason, like Thomas Aquinas did, as a gift of God, the most crucial way in which we find truth from the evidence. Most Christians thought this way until about a fifty years ago. I am not a dogmatist, a religious person who has a litmus test of Bible interpretations (dogmas) that determine if someone is a good person or evil. That’s the MO of religious people. When I talk about issues, I am often mistaken for a dogmatist. My issue is about factual, or evidence-based truth. But I’m not making it a moral problem, or a problem of intelligence.

Following Jesus is profoundly simple. Deny yourself (don’t be selfish), take up your cross (be willing to endure hardships), and follow him. Jesus further defines that following Him is where all the laws, all the dogmas, and all the cultural mores are summed up in loving others as yourself, full stop. That’s why I highly esteem even those who disagree with me about the other things, when they love well.

I welcome criticism of myself and other rational Christians, if it is based on our inadequacy in loving others as ourselves. However, the criticism that my group usually receives, making us out as bottom-feeder-Christians at best or not “real Christians” at worst, forcing many in our group to leave the church, is based on our interpretation of the evidence and our belief in the value of human reason.

People forget history, or never care about it, but it explains so much. Believe it or not, the Scientific Revolution, beginning in the sixteenth century, and the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, did not arise as an affront to Christianity as I was taught when I was an evangelical. These movements were Christian projects. Thomas Aquinas, of the thirteenth century, (BTW, Saint Thomas Aquinas) was a prolific writer, and his ideas laid the groundwork for the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment.

Isaac Newton was the archetypal philosopher/scientist/theologian who bridged these two movements. Many consider him the most intelligent person who has ever lived. He was a devout Christian, at least at the start of his career. He made it clear that the reason he studied nature was that God had created it. He also made it clear that the pursuit of truth was the highest calling of the Christian, not just the conformity to dogmas and mores.

The only reason I don’t say Newton was a devoted Christian throughout his career is like many of the Christian thinkers of this age, including four of our first five presidents, he became deists in the end.

The Four Horsemen of Science

Horseman 1: Heliocentric Solar System

Four significant scientific discoveries (one still in the future) caused the church to declare war on science and eventually on reason itself. The first was the war on Galileo for his writing that the evidence pointed to a heliocentric solar system. If the planets orbited the earth, then they would have a single track across the sky. But they don’t. The track and then do loops, is exactly what you should see from earth if the planets and Earth orbited the same Sun. It was a church tradition, based on the writings of secular thinkers such as Aristotle and Ptolemy, that the earth was the center of the solar system. They made it a “Biblical” and theological essential dogma because the Bible has an anthropocentric view. Then you can infer that the Earth, the home of humans, is at the center of the entire universe.

It has taken three or four hundred years, but now most Christians have accepted the evidence for a heliocentric solar system. However, I suspect that if Galileo lived today and made the same discovery, much of the church would never admit it because it is a different church than it was in the eighteenth century. The conservative church has now demonized all science and scientists (they no longer even trust their own health care providers), and the progressive church has given up on truth altogether. The conservative church would make up lies about Galileo and conspiracy theories about his motives. Earth-centric groups would create webpages, write books, and go on the road spreading lies about the evidence for the Earth being the center. In contrast, the progressive church would say, “Both are true, the Earth at the center of the solar system and the sun at the center because all truth is subjective. Can we have harmony now?”—post-modernist nonsense.

Horsemen 2, and 3; Old Earth, and Evolution

Because of this change in Christian epistemology (how they find truth), it is unlikely that either end of the church spectrum will ever agree that the Earth is ancient (billions of years) or that there was some evolution, including human evolution. This is despite overwhelming evidence. Like with the geocentric model of the solar system, they inferred from the Bible that it is a theological essential to hold these views. You cannot be a pastor in most churches if you view an old earth and accept the evidence of evolution. You cannot teach at a Christian university. I know from personal experience that you cannot teach Sunday school. But worst of all, you are considered a bottom-dweller Christian, or not a Christian at all in most churches, not just for your conclusions, but for using reason and looking at factual evidence. I think, “Where is the evidence?” is the most important question Christians can ask.

Horseman 4; Extraterrestrial Life

The last of the four horsemen will be the discovery of extraterrestrial life. As of one week ago, 5,989 exoplanets (planets beyond our solar system) have been found. Likely, there are trillions more. On Earth, life thrives everywhere. I, therefore, would be shocked if we did not find life, maybe even intelligent life, outside of Earth. There are a lot of fake stories about life being found, but when it happens, the news will be everywhere.

My God is big enough create beyond the Earth. Just wait and see. However, as the evidence starts coming in, the conservative Christian will start manufacturing lies and conspiracy theories. The progressive Christian will say, who cares, there is no truth.

When I was eighteen, I asked the same roommate, who wrote the book The Sin of Evolution, if he thought we would find life on other planets. He was five years older than me and had been in the discipleship group much longer, and I respected his opinions. “That would be a sin to think that there is life on other planets.” He went on to explain, again from the anthropocentric (inferred view), “Since God created the entire cosmos just for us Earth humans, He would not have made life elsewhere than Earth.” God in a box, in other words.

I want to discuss the consequences of this war on science and the hope I see, although small, of some parts of Christianity starting to turn back to human reason as a gift, and factual truth as objective and discoverable by the evidence. The lying must stop. The church is dying and our democracy in peril because of our societal loss of truth. My mantra has been, the conservative church has given up the pursuit of truth in exchange for political power. The progressives have given it up in exchange for harmony. Both will be a disaster unless corrected.

Respectfully, Mike