This is Tokens. I'm Lee C. Camp.
[“You Can't Make a Monkey Out of Me” plays]
Episode Transcript
Lee
Rachel Held Evans
I was raised in a very conservative Christian home and a very conservative Christian town.
Lee
That is Rachel Held Evans.
Rachel passed away too soon, too young in an untimely death. It was just over a year ago. Now, at the time of our producing this episode, she was heralded by many as a sort of savior of American Evangelicalism. Others portrayed her as a dangerous heretic. This sort of divided response, of course, often results from someone's courage. Someone brave enough to make observations that others might prefer. Be left unobserved. For example, in her childhood, she grew up...
Rachel Held Evans
...with the impression that if one was to believe in evolution, then it would have to be an atheist.
Lee
Rachel was raised in Dayton, Tennessee, the famed locale of the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925.
Ed Larson
The Scopes Trial was critical for changing the debate over evolution in America.
Lee
This is professor Ed Larson. Ed wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the Scopes Trial entitled Summer for the Gods. His telling of the story challenges many of the culture war presumptions we all think we know. Often overlooked is a fascinating fact; the great fundamentalist figurehead of the trial was not exactly what we today might imagine.
Ed Larson
William Jennings Bryan was a political liberal and a religious conservative.
Lee
So here is yet another irony, that the right-wing side of the American culture war in large part precipitated by the Scopes Trial was fashioned by a political liberal - who was a political liberal precisely because, well, he was a religious conservative. The narratives we have today about faith and science somehow stand in tension with the past.
Francis Collins is undoubtedly a trusted voice in science. He was the director of one of the most significant scientific accomplishments in human history, the Human Genome Project. He now serves as the director of the National Institutes of Health, one of the largest scientific endeavors on the globe.
Francis Collins
Unfortunately, in this country, we've arrived at this strange point where it seems that the things that we have been allowed, through the intelligence that God has given us to learn about ourselves, and about the world, and about the universe, are somehow seen as a threat to God.
Lee
On this episode of Tokens, faith and science. These two concepts can seem to be at great opposition for some, and for others orbit in a beautiful harmony. Our conversations with Ed Larson, Rachel Held Evans, and Francis Collins in just a moment.
In my eighth grade science class, I wrote the answer to the test on evolutionary theory the way the teacher wanted me to write it. Then I wrote an eighth grader addendum, something to this effect: that humankind did not evolve from monkeys, that humans are special and are not animals, and that the book of Genesis teaches that the world was created in seven 24-hour periods. I'm sure I was snarkier than that, full of adolescent confidence in my own brilliance, but she did not take lightly to my impertinence. I remember only that her reply required a great deal of red ink, clearly communicated a high degree of impatience and anger, and made clear that she thought that I was an ignoramus, so at least we had mutual feelings. One for the other. I was raised believing that one could not truly be a Christian and believe in evolutionary theory. Certainly one could not take the Bible seriously and believe in evolutionary theory. The scientists were not to be trusted, and were actually arrogant in these matters. I became convinced as a boy that one could in fact hold a literal reading of the early chapters of Genesis alongside logic and rationality. It was the scientists who were the problem. The choice, at least as my adolescent mind saw it, was simple. One could choose the creation story from Genesis, and thereby choose God, or one could choose the evolutionary theory story from the scientists, and thereby reject God. But like many allegedly simple choices, they turn out not to be so simple. After all, things are more complicated and more interesting than that than either the so-called right or the so-called left would have it to be. I met professor and Pulitzer prize winning author Ed Larson at the locale - at the very boiling point we might say - for this classic faith versus science debate: the Rhea County courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee, home to what has now become known as the Scopes Monkey Trial. All the Tokens Show team was there to tape a public television special on the Scopes Trial. Ed helped us begin to see some of the cultural complexity of it all.
Ed Larson
Prior to the Scopes Trial, various evangelical Christians, proto-fundamentalists, had accepted a theistic theory of evolution. In the great work The Fundamentals, most of the authors endorse or say that you can believe in evolution of a kind, as long as God is the designer behind it. Theistic form of evolution. The original American scientist who brought evolution to America, Darwin's theory to America, was a Trinitarian Christian at Harvard. The only one there, a famous, a botanist named Asa Gray, who accepted a theory of evolution, was the person who brought Darwinism to America and later gave a very influential series of lectures at Yale divinity school articulating a theory of theistic evolution that became very influential, and because of his influence as a Trinitarian Christian, many proto-fundamentalists and early Christian leaders from the late 1800s early 1900s accepted a theory of God-involved evolution. America's preacher, probably most famous preacher in America of the late 19th century, was Henry Ward Beecher, the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and he once said about the theory of evolution as designed by God that “a God by wholesale is a whole lot more impressive than a God by retail.”
Lee
But this early acceptance of the theory of evolution among many Orthodox Christians soon began to change. In 1925, the Tennessee State Legislature outlawed and criminalized the teaching of the theory of evolution. So far as humankind is concerned, this legislation led to the famed Scopes Trial. This seems to me to exhibit one of the great ironies of being theologically heavy handed. In an attempt to defend the Bible, the Tennessee State Legislature precipitated a cultural moment that began an unnecessary culture war, and everybody knows that the first casualty of war is the truth.
Ed Larson
The Scopes Trial was critical for changing the debate over evolution in America because it was so highly publicized. The issue was already there, had been building, but the Scopes Trial made it front page news and basically roused the forces, the popular forces on both sides, with the evangelicals and fundamentalists pushing for the fundamentals of the faith to exclude evolution - any type of evolution - and the modernist Christians and secular forces saying, “no, we've got to hold the line and defend science.”
Lee
One of the most well known personalities in the trial was a man named William Jennings Bryan. He was a Democrat from Nebraska, a three-time candidate for president, and one of the greatest orators in American history. By the time of the Scopes Trial, he was growing older. In fact, he would die before he could make his closing argument. So great were his beloved oratorical skills that folks called him “the great commoner.” He had a gift to connect and appeal to the common person through his speeches.
Ed Larson
He can make anything a burning issue if he chose to pick up and run with it, as he did with many issues over his life. It just turned out his last issue that he picked up was the issue of human evolution and the dangers of human evolution - both the Christian and the popular, secular cultural problems of believing in human evolution - and he made that an issue across America, but especially for Christians.
Lee
One might expect, these days, for someone like William Jennings Bryan to be on the far right politically, but that was not the case.
Ed Larson
William Jennings Bryan was a political liberal and a religious conservative. He worked those things together by using his Christianity to lead him, like a Wilberforce of an earlier century, like the abolitionists, to bring him to social causes. And those social causes were protecting working men and opposing militarism - rampant militarism and military build up - so that linked him many times with political liberals who did not share his religious beliefs, but he came to those from his religious convictions.
Lee
So allow me to put a point on it, a point I got from reading Ed's book. Try to imagine it: a man influenced by the famous novelist and pacifist Leo Tolstoy, Bryan worked fervently for peace and sharply criticized American imperialism - a man deeply concerned by the working class, he became famous by his speech critiquing the gold standard, seeing it as a mechanism for economic oppression. He became, at age 36, one of the most liberal candidates for president of the United States of America, and he believes all of these things, not because he is an agnostic, but because he is a Christian. Ironically, his opponent at the trial, Clarence Darrow, was also a sociopolitical liberal and would present quite the case himself.
Ed Larson
William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow were two larger-than-life figures. We hardly have a parallel in America today. Clarence Darrow is generally regarded by trial lawyers to this day as the greatest trial lawyer in American history, the one they most admire. He had pioneered various techniques of jury selection and the way you present the closing argument, to lead crusades, first to defend labor, and then to - in a variety of different causes for civil liberties - civil rights. In addition to that regular collection of murder cases that would come his way as America's greatest trial lawyer, he was also a wildly popular public speaker. He would go around the country and could fill auditoriums, but so could William Jennings Bryan. After William Jennings Bryan stepped down as Secretary of State, indeed even before that, after his campaigns for president, he was one of the two or three most popular speakers on what was known as the “Chautauquas Circuit” that would go around the country and give large lectures. He was also a popular lecturer. Now his had a Christian bend, usually public policy and Christian bend. Darrow also had a public policy bend, but he questioned the role - publicly questioned the role; sort of the Richard Dawkins of his day - publicly questioned the role of religion and religion in public society. Bryan viewed Christianity as the source of peace, the source of love, all that's good in society. Darrow condemned religion as a source of division, a sort of dividing force in America and in the world that causes wars. And so their worldviews clash. Now, personally, they were friends. Clarence Darrow had supported Bryan - his campaigns for president - on many progressive issues. They were allies. They've known each other for years. But the issue at stake in the Scopes Trial drove them apart. And when they were on opposite sides, they were just as vigorous as when they were friends. Remarkably, William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow had a similar vision for America in the sense of the public policy, where they should be a more peaceful nation, a more progressive nation, a nation that cared about its workers, but they had a different world view. They had a different way of getting there. One thought a more scientific view of society - a more secular view of society - would get us that way. That was Clarence Darrow. William Jennings Bryan thought, we want a Christian nation, like prime minister William Gladstone in England or Wilberforce, who carried those ideas in England the century before of how Christianity could lead to progressive progress that included everyone. So both cared about people. It was their underlying worldview that led them apart. And so they allied on some things, they divided on others, but they were both articulate spokesmen of their positions and could rouse certain portions of the American population to their side and their causes. William Jennings Bryan always was the great commoner - viewed himself as the spokesperson for the working class, for the common people of America. That's how he viewed himself and he deeply believed in democracy. He thought that people could not be wrong. In that way, he was a little bit like Thomas Jefferson, trusting in the common people, the voters, and that's how he cast this issue. He said the people don't want evolution taught. They passed this law banning the teaching of human evolution in Tennessee public schools, and that made it right. That was his view of liberty, democracy - that it was tied to majority rule. Clarence Darrow had a very different view. Now, he was even more from the working class than Bryan was. Bryan grew up sort of in the professional class. Clarence Darrow came from the true working class. His father was an undertaker in Ohio - came from a small town in Ohio, and he worked himself up, but he had a view of liberty as tied to individual rights that the majority would, if given time, given power, would oppress the minority, the smaller groups. And he viewed laws - much Christian-based lawmaking, such as Sunday closing laws or school prayer laws or a law against teaching of human evolution in public schools - as just that sort of a law that the majority was imposing their will on the minority, and his view of Liberty was tied to individual rights. That's a historic battle in America, going all the way back to our founding. Does Liberty come from majority rule. Or does liberty come from protecting minority rights?
Lee
So Darrow and Bryan have some common goals and yet different routes to get there. But in all this, it still is shocking to me the tensions I find in William Jennings Bryan. He's a fundamentalist Christian, and he's opposed to the ideological teaching of the theory of evolution in tandem with his being a sociopolitical liberal. Both of those realities come from his Christian convictions and the context of the nation. The country had just exited World War I, the supposed “War to End All Wars.” It was a devastating war that had killed millions. Exhausted by the violence, German militarism appeared to be the embodiment of geopolitical survival of the fittest. And Bryan is also fearful of laissez faire free market capitalism, because it seems to be survival of the fittest, but this time in economic theory. Bryan cared about human beings. He cared about society, and he wondered how an ideological teaching of evolutionary theory could possibly care about human beings and society.
Ed Larson
At the time that Tennessee passed its anti-evolution law, it was already using George Hunter's civic biology textbook. It was the assigned textbook for use everywhere in the state. It was the most popular textbook in the nation by far. This book became a lightning rod. When Bryan got a hold of it, he saw that it was doctrinally evolutionary. It is an evolutionary textbook, and it includes some controversial features such as eugenic mating advice for high school students that they should mate well, and that leads to a better breed, and also included a heavy dose of scientific racism where you have a hierarchy of races. Now that really comes out of his genetics section, because eugenics - the idea that you could breed better humans by selective breeding - was a popular notion at this time, endorsed by the Republican president, Calvin Coolidge, and the previous democratic president Woodrow Wilson. That grew out of not Darwinism really, but out of the development of Mendelian genetics and the way it had swept across America and became interlinked with evolution. So Darwin theory can be used to support some of these ideas. And Brian saw that as a great opening because he, like many Christians, were opposed to the idea of eugenic breeding.
Lee
So both men had their reasons and both were set in a larger cultural context. But the trial itself turned into something altogether different, rather than just an ideological discussion. It turned into the spectacle of the century, and one of the great moments of the American culture wars was birthed. Ed summarized that moment in front of a crowd, in the very courtroom where it all took place.
Ed Larson
One of the local people here in Rhea County, a northerner actually...
Lee
That's the way it goes, yeah…
[Laughter]
Ed Larson
...he was down here. He'd come down, the mines had closed down here, and he was managing them - the closed mines; he was a civil engineer - and he didn't like the law. And he said, this is a way to get Dayton on the map. Dayton was shutting down. It lost half its population in the previous two decades, shops were closing, this is a way to get Dayton on the map. We will host this trial. It was a publicity stunt. Worked well. Launched by the people of Dayton. He got the school board president on board. He got the chairman of the school board. He got the local officials on board, and they announced that we would host a trial and they had to ask John Scopes. He wasn't the biology teacher. He hadn't taught evolution himself. He was actually the football coach, but he taught general science...
Lee
That's how it goes.
Ed Larson
That's how it goes. And they had asked him if he would stand trial for what would be a show trial. A summer Chautauqua, they called it - a summer sort of educational institute where people would pour down to Dayton, watch this issue unfold, and debate the wisdom of this trial in the course of a criminal trial. The atmosphere was electric. It beat anything that the Dayton civic fathers had expected. It was a carnival atmosphere outside. You had various different booths and they were... they had brought trained monkeys in. There was an ox roast in the back of the courthouse lawn. It was the first broadcast trial, broadcasted nationally over the radio. Hundreds of reporters flew in from all over the country. There was even - among the various musicians - even a blind musician playing mountain tunes on a mouth organ.
Lee
You are listening to Tokens: public theology, human flourishing, the good life. In this top half, we've been talking with Ed Larson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the book Summer for the Gods, his history of the 1925 Scopes Trial in Dayton, Tennessee. As always, you can find out more about any of our guests and special features such as our related DVD of our public television episode filmed at the Dayton county courthouse by visiting tokensshow.com/podcast. There you also find extra bonus features of video with Ed Larson and Rachel Held Evans. We are most grateful to have you joining us for our podcast. Please leave us one of those five star reviews on Apple podcasts and subscribe there or wherever you listen. Coming up, Rachel Held Evans and I talk about being evolutionists, and director of the NIH Francis Collins and I talk about the ways in which anti-scientific Christian stances subvert the faith of the young. All that in just a moment.
In part two of our show today, an interview with the director of the NIH, Francis Collins. But first, we stick around at the Rhea County courthouse in Dayton, Tennessee to hear a bit of my conversation with Rachel Held Evans. Dayton happens to be Rachel's hometown.
Rachel Held Evans
Being raised here in Dayton, Tennessee, the legacy of the Scopes Trial was always sort of on my mind and a part of the community, and the courthouse was the center of town. And so the story of the Scopes Trial was always a part of my life growing up, and I knew it growing up. But I think in the broader sense, the way the Scopes Trial affected me and affected a lot of people is, when we had this sort of showdown between - they said - science and religion, it created a dichotomy that I've always felt and have had to deal with and struggle with in my own life. I was raised in a very conservative Christian home in a very conservative Christian town, and so I always thought that evolution was something that atheists believed. And I think that's part of the legacy of the Scopes Trial, is that it sort of pitted religion against science. And that was something that I grew up feeling the tension of. And so it wasn't until I was a young adult that I started questioning some of what I had been taught about creationism and about how evolution is for atheists and agnostics, and came to accept the science of evolution for myself. But that was a struggle, precisely, I think, because of the Scopes Trial and because of the legacy it left.
Lee
Rachel would go on to see herself as an evolutionist, not because of her rejection of faith, but again, precisely because she insisted on taking seriously her Christian faith.
Rachel Held Evans
When I call myself an evolutionist, usually when I'm talking about these issues, I'm talking about how everybody has to adapt to sort of survive, and how one's faith has to adapt to survive. And that's true at the individual level. We have to make changes based on new information about how we understand God and how we understand the universe. And as a culture and as the Church, we have to adapt to change when it comes our way, and take new information into account, and rethink things and wrestle with things. If we don't see that, we don't survive, and we've seen this happen from the beginning with Galileo and his telescope all the way to slavery, when we had to shift from thinking of ourselves as the center of the universe.
Lee
This, I think, is another one of the ironies in this conversation. I hear some speak of the arrogance of the humanists or the scientists, as I thought as an adolescent. And clearly there are surely cases of such, but still, I wonder, isn't there a way in which scientific inquiry is immensely humbling - in which many of the big claims of science and cosmology and an old universe may in fact facilitate the Christian virtue of humility?
Rachel Held Evans
Sometimes I see science as sort of continually challenging this idea that we human beings are at the center of everything. And that certainly was true for Galileo and then that whole conversation about geocentricism and heliocentricism. And I think it's true in some ways with the evolution conversation, because we kinda like to think that God created the universe, and the first thing God did was put people in this garden that God had created for them. It's a little humbling to have to think of a universe existing for billions and billions of years and an earth existing for billions and billions of years before we come along. And so I think that science challenges us to rethink the notion of us being the center of everything, and if we're willing to let that humble us, I think it can be a good thing.
Lee
When Rachel joined us that evening at the Rhea County courthouse, I asked her more about this: about the ironies of the ways in which the quest for certainty can lead to a kind of skepticism.
Do you suggest that your own quest to be an apologist - that is, to have all the right answers, to be able to defend the faith, defend your understanding of the Bible and so forth - that your particular quest for being an apologist led you to skepticism? Tell us more about that.
Rachel Held Evans
Well, you know, you always hear people say all truth is God's truth. So follow the truth wherever it leads, but sometimes, depending on the culture we grow up in or what's happening in Christian culture at the time, there are parameters around that. And so, as I started exploring the truth and studying these issues on my own - not just the science, but also the biblical issues and interpretation of scripture - you know, that quest to find the truth wherever it leads led me very much outside of my own comfort zone and beyond what I had previously believed.
Lee
Now, raised in the Bible belt in conservative segments of the Christian tradition, as you discussed in your book, you always took reading the Bible very seriously. You knew the Bible very well.
Rachel Held Evans
I won all the sword drills.
[Laughter]
Lee
Yes.
Rachel Held Evans
I conquered, divided and conquered.
Lee
Yes. Yes. We might have to test each other one day and see.
[Laughter]
Rachel Held Evans
you would be sorry. You would regret it instantly.
Lee
[Laughs] So you took reading the Bible very, very seriously, and you were... along with that came a kind of literalist reading of the Bible. But you've indicated that so-called literalist readings - it's not simply that you don't believe in it as much. What I hear you saying is not so much that you don't believe in a literalist reading as much as you just say they're not particularly honest. So tell us more about that, and I guess your most recent book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, is kind of a, perhaps an experiment in seeing what it might be like to read the Bible, quote, literally. Is that right?
Rachel Held Evans
Right. That's exactly what it was. You know, we - in evangelical circles in particular - we talk a lot about biblical... we want to have biblical politics, biblical marriage, biblical manhood, biblical womanhood, and especially as a woman, I wanted to kind of deconstruct this idea that the Bible prescribes a single way of being a woman. And I thought that a funny kind of humorous, odd way to approach that would be to take a page from A.J. Jacob - he wrote The Year of Living Biblically - and try a year of biblical womanhood. So for one year, I had to follow all of the Bible's instructions for women, literally sometimes taking them to their most literal extreme. So this meant that I had to cover my head when I prayed. I had to grow out my hair. I had to submit to my husband, even with the Netflix queue, which was the hardest part. I even called my husband master. But I only did that for a week ‘cause I felt that there were some reasonable limitations we can put on this experiment. And so it was basically just a year of insanity. And the point of course was to show that no one is practicing biblical womanhood all the way. And this was not only a commentary on how we understand women and womanhood and the church, but also how we interpret the Bible. We're all picking and choosing, to some degree, what passages of scripture we interpret literally, and apply literally. So it was just kind of a way to bring up some of those questions.
Lee
Well perhaps we're always, we are all always interpreting, even though we want to assert we're not interpreting.
Rachel Held Evans
Right. People say sometimes that they just read the Bible, they don't interpret it. And I would really like an explanation for how that's possible. We all interpret the scripture and we all bring some bias to scripture as we read it based on how we were raised, our gender, our ethnicity - we bring our whole selves to the reading of scripture. And that's a beautiful thing, but it can also trip us up sometimes.
Lee
One of the great critiques of theism from non-believers and atheists has been that… the problem of pain, the problem of suffering. How can there be a God when we have the kind of world that we have, or when you see the sort of mechanism that natural selection is, with seemingly nature “red in tooth and claw” as one poet put it. And you - in your book - you talk about the ways in which the problem of suffering was very significant for you, and making you something of a skeptic for a while yourself. And it strikes me as notable that the Trail of Tears runs through Dayton, Tennessee. So it's not only the Scopes Trial - very significant thing of the Scopes Trial - but also this very significant historical moment in American culture of the Trail of Tears as well. So two very significant things in American culture that have been a challenge to theists. How has that kind of struggle with the notion of the problem of suffering and pain played out in your own kind of story?
Rachel Held Evans
And I don't... I mean, that's the thing. I don't have any answers for that. And I will always probably be a doubter. And I've learned to accept that doubt is probably going to always be a part of my journey of faith. I'll always be asking questions, but with suffering, the only thing I know to say is that I find a lot of peace and I find challenge in the reality that when God became flesh, God suffered too, and knew suffering perhaps better than anyone. So we say as Christians that we have fellowship with Christ and with one another in our suffering, and I find some comfort in that, even though it's not maybe an answer.
Lee
Rachel Held Evans. Thank you very much, Rachel.
[Applause]
That was a fascinating evening with Ed Larson and it was a beautiful evening with Rachel Held Evans, my only regret being not having more opportunity to become friends. May she rest in peace. This episode would not be quite complete without sharing with you one more interview with a major player on the American scene with regard to science and faith, one with Dr. Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project, and now head of the National Institutes of Health. This interview was taped at another one of our live events, this one on the campus of Pepperdine University in Malibu, California.
So here you are, an early agnostic, somewhere along your way in a PhD, become an atheist of some sort, a self-professed atheist of some sort, and then someway, make your way to a Christian faith, and yet still hold on to a 14.5 billion year-old universe, 4.5 billion year-old Earth, and humans coming as a product of evolution. Have you not heard of the Scopes Monkey Trial?
[Laughter]
I mean, how do we hold these? How are we expected to hold these things together? I mean, you can't get into my hometown where I come from.
[Laughter]
Francis Collins
And maybe I don't really want to try after that discussion.
[Laughter]
Now, Lee, I'd love to go to your hometown, ‘cause there's people in your hometown who are in fact imprisoned by this misunderstanding about the truth that God has given us the ability to discover by searching God's word and by searching through God's works, which is nature. And that's what science is all about. And unfortunately in this country especially - although it's true in other parts of the world, it's particularly true here - we've arrived at this strange point where it seems that the things that we have been allowed, through the intelligence that God has given us, to learn about ourselves and about the world and about the universe are somehow seen as a threat to God. Does that make sense to you?
Lee
Yeah, yeah. I hear what you're saying. You know, but obviously those who are firmly opposed to any kind of acceptance of evolution - we're not going to settle any kind of questions like that tonight - but how do you see skepticism or the continual asking of questions being a service? And on the flip side of that, how do you see those who want to defend their faith - you say in some of your words, you actually ended up harming your faith by trying to defend your faith in certain ways - is that fair?
Francis Collins
So my faith is very important to me. As you said, I always started out as an agnostic. I was not raised in a home where faith was practiced. I became an atheist, and then in my twenties, actually as a medical student encountering terrible diseases that afflicted wonderful people, began to have to come to grips with this question of, “Is there something that matters more than what science can measure?”
Lee
And you actually tell that story in your language of God about how seeing suffering and working with people who were suffering actually led you to faith, where many, many times it leads other people to agnosticism or rejection if they've seen people suffer. So how did that lead you in the opposite direction, toward faith?
Francis Collins
I had a patient who was a wonderful grandmotherly character who had terrible heart disease from which we really couldn't save her with our medical tools. And she professed her faith to me and described why she was not afraid of seeing the approach of death. And I was puzzled by that. And then she turned and she looked me straight in the eye and she said, “Doctor, I've told you about my faith and you haven't said anything. What do you believe?” Nobody ever asked me that question like that before. And in that moment I realized I had no idea what the answer was and that made me intensely uncomfortable. And it was time to go and find out, why do people believe in God? What is the basis for this? This can't just be something that's superstition, or something that you've learned as a child and not been able to get away from, ‘cause I know a lot of pretty grown-up, intelligent people who believe in God and believe in Jesus as the savior. So I'd better learn about that. I thought, actually, I'd go learn about it so I could shoot it down. That was my goal. Didn't quite turn out that way. It took a couple of years of digging through the evidence and discovering that, in fact, faith and reason, which I had assumed were opposing forces, were actually walking hand in hand, and had been down through the centuries, from Plato onward. And I had missed that, and suddenly I realized that my worldview of atheism was the most irrational of all. The most bold of all the dogmas, as Chesterton said, to deny something - a universal negative - is one of those things you're supposed to avoid. And that's where I had gone. And so kicking and screaming somewhat like Lewis - who became one of the people I learned the most from, C.S. Lewis - I became a believer, and that was quite a long time ago, some 24 years ago, but now here I am as a geneticist. You might wonder, am I having a problem here with a brain explosion trying to put together that faith with what I know as a scientist? And what I really want to say is no, that what I see as a scientist increases my faith. It gives me a chance to worship God by recognizing things about creation that I didn't know before and nobody else did either. And a scientist gets to discover those things and, in a way, get a glimpse of God's mind. And what a wonderful experience that can be to be a believer and somebody who also has the privilege of investigating nature.
Lee
You tell some stories about Galileo, the condemnation by the Catholic church, but not only about the Catholics, but by Calvin and Luther. You quote a sermon that was preached at one point against Galileo in which the preacher said, “geometry is of the devil.” Though some of us might agree with that, these days I suppose…
[Laughter]
Or that mathematicians should be banished as the authors of all heresies. And do you see a lot of the defensiveness towards science these days, you think we'll look back and see that similarly as we see the way the church treated Galileo?
Francis Collins
Well, if you're talking about the defensiveness against evolution, I hope so, because we are clearly, in this country, in an unnecessary battle, and it's having a lot of casualties. I get a lot of emails from young people who've been raised in a church where evolution is considered to be the enemy, and they go to school at college and they get an opportunity to see what the evidence is and they realize that our evidence for evolution is in the same realm as our evidence for gravity. It is not something that you can sort of look at the data from, particularly from the study of DNA, and just walk away from and go, well, no. There are various ways to interpret this. And evolution is actually not proven yet - evolution has lots of details that need to be sorted out - but the fundamental ideas of descent from a common ancestor by gradual change over long periods of time, there's no question about that. And biology makes no sense without including that as part of the fundamentals of the science. And so why have we put young people in this position of feeling like that is a threat to their faith? If God chose to use this mechanism of evolution to create this wonderful diversity of species all over this planet and ultimately to create human beings in God's image, then who are we to say, well, I wouldn't have done it that way? Now, maybe you will argue - and many have in a very sincere way - that this doesn't seem to quite fit with the straightforward literal interpretation of Genesis 1 and 2, but go back and read Augustine 400 A.D., struggling to understand what Genesis means, writing five books about it, and ultimately saying, there is no way to figure out what those verses are really describing and we should be very careful as believers not to attach ourselves to a single interpretation, lest some new discovery come along and prove us wrong, and we make ourselves and our faith to look foolish.
Lee
I was moved to the story that you tell near the end of the language of God, about how all of the work that you do, and the ways in which we can be prone to think of ourselves with all of our scientific abilities and intellect, kind of the… you say particularly in a mission trip to Africa, you had kind of seen yourself as kind of the white savior as you were going to do your kind of medical mission. Would you tell us the story about your experience in that regard?
Francis Collins
So one of my struggles as a believer and a physician is that I get this notion that I'm actually the one in charge, and that never turns out to work very well. And it never was more clear to me that when I volunteered to do this position as a physician in a little hospital in Eku Nigeria, and I went there with this idea that I was going to save the whole country in the first week. And instead I discovered an enormous number of challenges that my western trained skills were really not up to. The hospital had very limited resources. The people I took care of had diseases that I'd only read about, and I was deeply concerned that the little bit of good I might do would be quickly erased when they went back to a country where public health conditions were just dreadful. And I was pretty discouraged and wondering why I'd come there and getting pretty down about the whole thing. And I had a young farmer who came in who was close to death, brought in by his family, and I figured out what his problem was. He had tuberculosis and fluid had built up around his heart so that his heart couldn't actually expand when it needed to to pump that next dose of blood, and with a great deal of fear in my heart, I had to take off that fluid because there was no other way to save him. And I'd never done that before. Fortunately, I put the needle in the right place and I didn't kill him right there on the spot. And I felt pretty good about it for an hour or two. Wow. I did something pretty dramatic here! But then the same old gloom settled in, and he's got tuberculosis. He's going to go back to the same environment. It's going to be bad in the outcome. Next morning, I came by to see him sitting up on his bed. He was reading his Bible and he looked at me and he said, you know, “I can tell, Doctor, that you're not like one of the other folks that have been around here a long time. You're new, aren't you?” And I was kind of offended ‘cause I didn't think it was supposed to be that obvious. And then he said, “And I think I know that something's bothering you. You're wondering why you came here.” And now I really felt like he was looking into my soul. And then he said something I'll never forget. He said, “you came here, Doctor, for one reason. You came here for me.” And the tears welled up in my eyes and I realized that that was truth. That was God's truth, speaking right there and nothing could have been more strange than me. This white doctor from America sitting in front of this black farmer in Nigeria and him sharing with me the most fundamental truth - a truth that science would never have taught me - but was right from the heart of God about what we are supposed to do while we are here on this brief blink of time on this earth. And that was my moment of my broken hallelujah, as we sang about earlier, recognizing that you can do all these great and wonderful things in your own mind, but the greatest joy, the greatest sense of connectedness to another human being and to God almighty, comes at those moments that science alone simply can't provide.
Lee
Dr. Francis Collins. Thank you.
[Applause]
You're listening to Tokens; public theology, human flourishing, the good life. We're so grateful to have you joining us, and our sincere thanks to those of you who have taken a few moments to leave us those generous reviews over on Apple podcasts. We would be most appreciative to others of you who could support us in that way and subscribe there, or wherever you listen. In addition, remember, there are lots of great extras on this episode's webpage. Among other extras we have there, a set by our live show's resident comedian Brother Preacher who joined us at the Rhea County courthouse. Visit tokensshow.com/podcast. Our thanks to the stellar, most outstanding team that make this podcast possible. Executive producer and manager Christie Bragg of Bragg Management, co-producer, Jacob Lewis of Great Feeling studios, associate producer, Leslie Thompson of Rogue Creative Marketing, and medium associate producer Ashley Bayne, our engineer Cariad Harmon, production assistant Cara Fox, and our live event production team at Stonebrook Media, led by Phil Barnett. Again, we go out here with a bit of brother preacher, who joined us at the Rhea County courthouse. Remember, you can get that whole set by visiting the podcast episode page at tokensshow.com/podcast.
[Brother Preacher set plays]
Thanks for listening and peace be unto thee.