I was disappointed that your April 17 issue contained a large ad for the movie Expelled. Although it is not improper to accept such advertising, I would like to inform your readers that many careful analyses have shown this presentation to be deeply flawed and deceptive.
Apart from many blatant mischaracterizations, the movie systematically excludes any people of faith who practice and praise scientific discovery. Such prominent believers include Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, and popular biology textbook author Keith Miller, both of whom have widely witnessed to the enriching of their Christian faith through their scientific discipline.
Most troublingly, the movie portrays the Holocaust as the direct result of evolutionary science — what some religious figures have egregiously styled “No Darwin, no Hitler.” Its unbounded conspiracy paranoia paints a distorted view of the practice of science as untrustworthy and destructive. Yet this is the very time we need to encourage students to pursue scientific careers to help address a wide range of global concerns about energy, environment, medical care, food and resource use.
To reject the process and products of our God-given intellect applied through scientific investigation is theologically unnecessary and pragmatically damaging.
We should take to heart Augustine's warning: “Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on [scientific] topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men.”
As a contemporary commentator (Charles Krauthammer) has observed, “The relentless attempt to confuse [science and religion] by teaching warmed-over creationism as science can only bring ridicule to religion, gratuitously discrediting a great human endeavor and our deepest source of wisdom precisely about those questions — arguably, the most important questions in life — that lie beyond the material. How ridiculous to make evolution the enemy of God. What could be more elegant, more simple, more brilliant, more economical, more creative, indeed more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein?”
I am proud that my home congregation, Peakland Baptist, recently helped sponsor an ecumenical series of events, including prominent theologian John Haught, on “Harmonizing Science and Faith: Integrating Our Understandings of Evolution and Creation.”
We recognize and worship the Creator and should thus celebrate the wonders of our created universe, commit to responsible care of creation, and support scientific inquiry and factual education about creation.
Taz Daughtrey, Lynchburg