The Language of God

I recently read Francis Collins' "The Language of God", and I'm going to spend a few posts trying to sort out loud (okay not really, but on paper. Okay, not really paper either, but digitally) my own evolution of thought on evolution.

First, some background on Collins. My first introduction to him was at the National Prayer Breakfast this past February, where he was the keynote speaker. Collins is the head of the Human Genome Project, which just a year or two ago announced the complete mapping of the billions of codes within human DNA. I'm not going to even pretend to understand much about this at all, but I do find it totally fascinating and--much like Collins--awesome. Collins saw himself for many years as a skeptic and agnostic, eventually as an atheist. But the beauty of molecular biology drew him back, along with what he calls the universal sense of a Moral Law. He read C. S. Lewis voraciously in his late 20s, and eventually became an evangelical Christian.

And therein lies the rub for most people who call themselves evangelical Christians. Collins is a confirmed evolutionist. And in most evangelical circles that's just a no-no. You can rant about Christian morals and then be outed as having homosexual sex and still get Christians to support you, or you can have a very public divorce and still pastor and make millions, but you better not say you believe in the theory of evolution, cause that's "straight to hell, do not pass go, do not collect $200" kind of stuff.

Last week I was in El Paso, and drove through my old campus stomping grounds at UTEP. As I drove by the student union, I remembered that day 20+ years ago when I stood there with a microphone and speaker and debated students on various topics. I made several (stupid and/or ignorant) comments about evolution and those who supported it.

I was wrong.

Tune in to the next post to see how wrong I was.