There is a war going on inside me, and I’m not talking about that fourth meal stuff that Taco Bell is peddling these days.
I’m referencing an ideological battle that I was hesitantly drafted into when I learned to think. On one hand, my life has been transformed by passionately pursuing the God of the Bible. On the other, I have always been captivated by the sciences.
You could say I’m something like an ideological mutt.
As a child, I was often heralded as the avatar of Steve Urkel. I asked for microscopes and telescopes for birthdays, and my friends called me “Microbe Man.”
I was a consummate science nerd, which led me to study engineering at UF for years before the daring shift to religion.
As an empirically-minded thinker, religion has been a difficult sell for me. I empathize with a friend who confided he felt wholly dissatisfied with the pervasiveness of the “don’t think, just believe” nature of modern religious institutions — especially Christianity.
It’s true that the Bible affirms the impossibility of pleasing God without faith, but many Christians, unfortunately, resign themselves to a frustrating brand of belief that would rather argue about the definition of the word “theory” than seek to understand a prevalent concept in academia.
Faith, by nature, doesn’t require evidence, but it also doesn’t stick its head in the sand.
Still, as my scientific knowledge increased through the years, I hit a crossroad. How could faith stand unshaken in the face of an evolutionary theory that asserts that the biodiversity we see is the result of an innumerable quantity of unguided successive changes?
What do all of these facts, charts and fossils mean for a guy like me?
Not much, I’ll admit with hesitancy.
I recognize that I’m biased (like every human), but looking at the facts was not the definitive story I’d been told my entire life. As well conceptualized as evolution is, science depends on evidence. Clearly, adaptation (or microevolution) happens in the world around us.
People adapt. Species adapt.
I’m not insane enough to deny that.
But saying that beak length will vary throughout 100 years in an isolated bird population and assuming that those changes will add up to an entirely different species given time (macroevolution) are two different things.
I might be committing some serious shenanigans here, but where are the fossils of all the successive changes? No, really. Where are they?
I’m not talking about a cute horse diagram that was drawn up from someone’s imagination, or a museum Neanderthal that was “scaled up” from a solitary jawbone. I want to see the proof of evolution, the in-betweens.
Darwin said that the most formidable opposition to his theory would come in the form of a fossil record that didn’t back up the successive change model. It was taken in good faith that the fossil record was not complete then. After a century and a half of fossil excavations, are we still evoking the same reasoning?
Go ahead and Google the Cambrian Explosion.
How does an evolutionary process that necessitates eons suddenly develop the ability to take quantum leaps in the form of punctuated equilibrium? If that doesn’t qualify as the most ironic deus ex machina, I don’t know what does.
It’s intriguing to hear people assert that science is about proof, and that faith is for the weak-minded. Perhaps they missed the memo.
I might be a man of faith, but I surmise that many more unwittingly belong in that category.
Faith, it would seem, is a universal human trait.
Ryan Galloway is a religion senior at UF. His column appears on Wednesdays.
