I get email: A Christian Christian!

All the reprimands, prayers, chastisements, and denigrations of evolution I receive from religious people recede into obscurity when I get something like this email. It arrived yesterday and is posted with permission ( last name abbreviated by request). I’ve also verified, as far as I can, that this person is real and not pulling some kind of hoax:

Dear Professor Coyne:

I have been contemplating how to write this email to you.  Let me start by saying I am a Christian but I am not here to argue about faith vs. belief vs. science nor am I here to tell you that what I believe is right while what you research is wrong.  I am here to tell you that I wish I could apologize for the treatment of the scientific community by the majority of Christians.

In the past few days, I have seen the various blogs/posts/comments about your speech at Appalachian State University.  In all honesty, it is hard for me to find a way to express the level of aggravation that I have with the majority of Christians who are posting on blogs and commenting about your speech.  I had no idea just how badly the scientific community is maligned (it is much more observable in the era of social media).  My frustration comes from so many areas.

I am frustrated because the majority of Christians who are critical have never researched evolution nor do they understand true science in general (in fact, I am still an amateur in this area as well but have been taking the MIT online open-course for biology to start learning).  Christians will argue that “evolution” is simply a theory and holds no true weight.  They do not understand what the theory even is nor do they understand how it has developed through the years.  Those same Christians are also quick to discredit the major impact evolution has had on various areas of science such as genetics, medicine, and paleontology for no reason other than it does not agree with their beliefs.

Instead of trusting science, they would rather discredit true research with faulty methods.  Instead of letting the evidence lead them to a hypothesis which can be tested (how evolution was developed and refined through the years), they start with two unproven starting points.  Their two starting points are that God exists (which cannot be proven) and that Genesis (and the Bible in general) is the literal representation of how God created the universe (which is also 100% accurate).  Their unproven starting points mean that every bit of evidence that supports evolution either has to fit in with their beliefs or has to be discredited as “flawed” science.  In essence, their practice of research is backwards.  Of course, the majority of people have no idea what any of the research says as they were born and raised and taught in an environment which does not allow for critical thinking and they simply argue what they were brainwashed to learn.

What bothers me most about this frustration is that they are taking biased opinions and putting them in an argument where they themselves have no standing!  I would find their arguments about evolution similar to an Afghan Taliban cleric telling an American historian that Muslim terrorists did not fly jets into the World Trade Center on 9/11 but that Mossad (Israeli Secret Service) blew the buildings up from within.  The evidence of the videotapes, the audiotapes and the remains of the jets doesn’t matter because of the presupposition of belief that the cleric has!

This leads me to my second point and another aspect of my frustration. This comes from the fact that most Christians ignore critical thinking in regards to their own religion.  There are many ways that I can prove that Genesis is not a literal account of creation (thus disproving their second starting point above).  If one researches how the Old Testament was written, one can see that the book cannot be 100% true in the ways that most Christians want it to.  Most Christians believe it was a spoken word direct from God that Moses composed, however; there are too many inconsistencies for this opinion to be correct.  Most research shows that Genesis (and most of the Old Testament in general) was an oral mythology that was spoken down from generation to generation.  Those tales were likely composed much later in history when Israel was ruled by Persia and later exiled by Babylon.  The scribes would add and retract from the stories when needed (usually in ways that would support Israel’s greatness and hope for a national future).  They usually did not pay attention to consistency thus creating various accounts of events that do not align with one another (read the first two Chapters of Genesis carefully to see that there are two separate accounts of creation that are in disagreement with each other).  There are inaccuracies, inconsistencies and errors when looking at the Bible as 100% in agreement with itself.  These cannot be avoided in careful study of a Bible.

Also, if one researches the society in which the books were composed, they would find that the overall beliefs of that society (similar to the beliefs of Israel composed in Genesis) are grossly inadequate to comprehend what has since been learned through modern-day scientific truths.  This can be proven and shown even without the controversial topic of evolution!  If we look at how the Ancient societies viewed weather, we can see how inadequate their worldview was to understand rain and snow.  If one believes in a literal Genesis they must also believe that there are heavenly storehouses that God would open and close in order to allow rain and snow to fall to the earth from the heavens.  Most Christians don’t understand that this is how Israelites viewed weather but a careful reading of a Bible (and understanding of neighbor societies) shows it to be true.  Science has shown us that there is much more to weather than an invisible dome covering the Earth that God opens and closes as he pleases.  The way I view Genesis and much of the Old Testament is that they are mythologies that were created to explain the unexplainable (much of which has now become explainable).  I can go into more detail about how inaccurate Genesis is in understanding today’s society but the discussion would get much longer.

With that said, I have my reasons for being a Christian, but I am not going to pretend that I will be able to find adequate scientific evidence for the existence of God or even that I can show that YHWH or the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible is the “correct” God to believe in.  I will simply say that I follow Christianity because I find that if one decides to be humble, living in accordance to Jesus’ command of “loving others” as “loving one-self” this world would be a better world to live. I also feel that much of Jesus’ life reflects this ideal.  Of course, this is my last and greatest frustration in reading the comments of those who cowardly confront you in anonymity and call themselves Christian.  I feel that many Christians are extremely hypocritical and know nothing of love.  They are supposed to follow Jesus in how they live their lives but are instead extremely self-righteous and arrogant always being right and tearing others down.  If the identifying trait of Christianity is meant to be love, we do an extremely terrible job of making that known to the world; in fact, I would say the identifying trait of Christianity in today’s world is hypocrisy.

As a Christian, it did take me time to get used to your blog as much of the anti-religious topics and comments were hard to get through.  In honesty, they still can be.  However, when I first started reading your blog, I figured that many of the anti-religious comments were unprovoked, malicious and hateful.  Now, after seeing how combative the Christian world is, how malicious and hateful they can be, I can say that the views of your readers can be seen as justifiable.

This email was meant in sincerity.  My faith is a journey that has changed much through the years with studying and critical thinking.  In the beginning of this email, I said I wish I could apologize.  This is 100% accurate.  I wish I had a position of influence in the Christian community where I could speak for them.  I do not.  I wish I could influence people to think critically and learn how to study properly.  I do not.  All I can do is come here and express my sadness in how a supposedly “loving” community treats a fellow man and his profession in the institution of science at large.  I can apologize for times that I may have contributed to their arrogance (in the past before I began studying the topic).  I can also apologize for being silent when mistruths about creation were taught in the Churches I lived in but that is the extent of it.

For my contributions I am sorry.  For the actions of others, I am simply ashamed.

Sincerely,

Jim P

Now I could go on and ask Jim why he doesn’t just adhere to the “love” part of his faith and jettison the superstition, or I could question whether it’s a good strategy to unconditionally love everyone, but why bother? Jim is a gracious person who took the time to write a thoughtful and kind letter about the pushback I got for criticizing religion at Appalachian State.  As Steven Weinberg famously said, a bit hyperbolically, “With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”  This is a case of a good person with religion doing good things.  And if all the faithful were like this, and didn’t impose their revelations on everyone else, I wouldn’t worry so much about religion.

This email meant a lot to me, and I’ll acknowledge that the only way I can: by putting it up and sending Jim an autographed copy of WEIT with a cat drawn in it.  It’s a good reminder that, in the end, we must judge religious people by both content of their character and their effect on the world.

Reply to Jim if you want, but I think you’ll agree with me that lecturing him or trying to dispel his notion of Christianity isn’t really the thing to do here.