Essential* Christianity, Part 2a: Critical Thinking

(A full table of contents for this series of posts can be found here.)

This is just a quick caveat following the previous post about the Bible:

In my first class on the Hebrew Bible, the professor set aside a major portion of one of the first lessons to talk about evolution. She included a dialogue over an hour long with a scientist who specifically reaches out to religious groups to talk about evolution. One of the assignments for the week was to complete a two-question survey about our views on evolution. The week’s major writing assignment, which we all posted to a class-public discussion board, invited our reflections about the relationship between science and religion.

I discovered that the reason the professor sets aside a unit with such an emphasis on evolution is because, in a graduate-level seminary program in the capital of one of the most academically advanced and certainly the most materially prosperous countries in the world, a surprising number of students went through at least some amount of their childhood — and for some, some portion of their adulthood — in the belief that, because evolution challenged the authority of the Bible, evolution must not be accepted.

It seems clear to me that religious fundamentalism has had a role in keeping people in ignorance, wedded to ancient narratives of the world that are clearly obsolete, for the sake of communing with a God who, I could only imagine, would hope that they would be more open to science. So it seems to me that it can’t be stressed enough that an encounter with the Bible should include a vibrant process of thinking critically. It can’t be stressed enough that damaging things have occurred from religious fundamentalism.

And at the same time, it also seems clear to me that, in the name of critical thinking, that most of modernity has thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Scientific materialism has taken us too far into an inert — and now, frankly, dying — world. This is no slight to atheists. I would not challenge an atheist’s fundamental viewpoint, and I am clear that they are fully entitled to it.

But for any person who is remotely theistic, I think there’s a clear invitation to consider that scientific materialism has overstepped, and has effectively killed the world — starting with the world as it lives in our hearts. And it’s clear to me that on that account, the Bible has valuable things to say, in response, as I would continue to explore in later posts.