rachel held evans evolving in monkey town

Rachel attended Bryan College (named in honor of William Jennings Bryan, the prosecutor that convicted schoolteacher John Scopes of teaching evolution) she is the daughter of a Bryan professor Kurt Wise was one of her instructors. Rachel grew up in Dayton Tennessee, home of the infamous Scopes Monkey trial of 1925. (You can see her thoughts on the meeting here). With these thoughts in mind, I was pleased to meet author Rachel Held Evans2 at the BioLogos conference earlier this month.

Preaching a “crucified Messiah” had what can only be described as negative apologetics value for Paul: it was foolishness for Gentiles and a serious stumbling block for Jews. For a dyed-in-the-wool presuppositional apologist, this is madness. Accepting that God created through what we observe as a natural process deflates any attempt to argue for His existence based on natural phenomena that science has yet to explain. In contrast, adopting an EC/BioLogos – type approach means being willing to give up an anti-evolutionary apologetic. Meyer, then, seems to be highly motivated to articulate an apologetic to counter the purposeless he sees in “materialistic” explanations. Without a purpose driven universe, there can be no ‘purpose-driven life.’ 1

If the conscious realities that comprise our personhood have no lasting existence, if life and mind are nothing more than unintended ephemera of the material cosmos, then, as the existential philosophers have recognized, our lives can have no lasting meaning or ultimate purpose. Stephen Meyer, for example, puts is this way in his recent book Signature in the Cell:Īccording to scientific materialism, reality is ultimately impersonal… though this view of existence proved initially liberating in that it released humans from any sense of obligation to an externally imposed system of morality, it has also proved profoundly and literally dispiriting. It seems to me that a large portion of the railing against “naturalism” on the part of several ID figures is motivated by the desire for a convincing Christian apologetic. Lately I’ve been musing on the hypothesis that one significant difference between the Intelligent Design (ID) approach and an evolutionary creationist / BioLogos approach is how the two viewpoints employ apologetics: arguments for the existence of God (or a “Designer”) the efficacy of “natural” mechanisms, and so on.

Rachel held evans evolving in monkey town