I think I’ve posted about this once before, but the fracas at Bryan College in Dayton Tennessee (a fundamentalist college named after William Jennings Bryan, and located in the town where he had his Scopes Trial debacle and then died) is continuing, and is described at Inside Higher Ed in a new piece by Coleen Flaherty, “Too small a box.”
Bryan College has long had a “Statement of Belief,” which begins like this:
“the holy Bible, composed of the Old and New Testaments, is of final and supreme authority in faith and life, and, being inspired by God, is inerrant in the original writings”
and goes downhill from there. Every faculty member and all the staff have to sign this annually (I guess that’s to prevent change of belief).
Last February, the College’s Board of Trustees issued a “clarification,” which it claimed was really inherent in the original statement. The clarification read:
“We believe that all humanity is descended from Adam and Eve. They are historical persons created by God in a special formative act, and not from previously existing life forms.”
This, of course, was meant to counteract the new scientific evidence that modern humans never went through a bottleneck of 2, but remained at a size of about 12,000 (10,000 of those in Africa, the remainder those who left Africa about 60,000 years ago to colonize the rest of the world). The College’s explanation, which came with a threat, was this:
In an email, [President Stephen] Livesay, who formerly was a faculty member at Liberty University, said the clarification was necessary “to maintain the historical and current theological position of the college with respect to the origin of man.” Those faculty members who don’t sign the updated statement for next year will have “rejected” the college’s offer of employment, he said.
In other words, Adam and Eve talks, science walks. This caused at least two faculty members to resign, several others to leave for unspecified reasons, and the university’s faculty to give Livesay a 30-2 vote of “no confidence.” The student government also opposed this “clarification” on various grounds, including the claim that it isn’t really a clarification but a change in a statement that was supposed to be immutable.
Curiously, both Professor Ceiling Cat and Karl Giberson were interviewed for this (I suggested Giberson as an evangelical Christian who would probably oppose this), and we came to some kind of agreement. But he still doesn’t get to be called “Uncle”:
Jerry Coyne, professor of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, has written extensively about creationism, including on his blog, Why Evolution Is True. He said he’d been following the Bryan case, and saw it as a larger trend among evangelical Christians to assert the historicity of Adam and Eve in a new kind of “Darwin moment,” facilitated by DNA and other scientific discoveries challenging the concept of humanity descending from just two individuals.
“It’s sort of amazing to see this clash between religion and science all over again, except that this is kind of sad,” he said. “As soon as you say something about the historicity of Genesis, science education is compromised.”
Coyne added that any kind of statement of faith was an affront to science, since it’s rooted in the exploration of new ideas, not swearing “fealty” to any particular belief.
Coyne is a declared atheist, but Bryan’s move has raised concerns even among Christian scholars. In an email from Brazil, where he is lecturing on the creationism debate, writer and physicist Karl W. Giberson called the new language “alarming.”
“[Religious] colleges should become more accepting of science, not less,” he said. “Bryan’s stance is quite extreme, requiring faculty to sign on to young earth creationism, which includes the belief that the earth is 10,000 years old.”
He continued: “In my opinion, schools like Bryan should lose their accreditation. There should be no government approval of any sort for an institution that forces people to affirm that the earth is 10,000 years old, when we know it is 4.5 billion. It is also unconscionable to expect a scientist who knows the earth is 4.5 billion years old to suddenly start believing it is 10,000. How is that supposed to work?”
Good for Karl! But he should have added that there should also be no government approval for an institution that forces people to affirm that humanity descended from only two ancestors described in the Bible. After all, Giberson’s former home, BioLogos, takes no stand on historicity of Adam and Eve, an act of sheer cowardice (and capitulation to fundamentalists) on their part.
Finally, I told Colleen that it’s not unusual for religious schools to have oaths and belief statements that all faculty must sign, and that these are often in direct conflict with science. Here in Illinois, Wheaton College is also an evangelical Christian school, but one I thought was a bit more liberal than Bryan. But looking at its website, I found a “statement of faith” preceded by this (my emphasis):
The doctrinal statement of Wheaton College, reaffirmed annually by its Board of Trustees, faculty, and staff, provides a summary of biblical doctrine that is consonant with evangelical Christianity. The statement accordingly reaffirms salient features of the historic Christian creeds, thereby identifying the College not only with the Scriptures but also with the reformers and the evangelical movement of recent years. The statement also defines the biblical perspective which informs a Wheaton education. These doctrines of the church cast light on the study of nature and man, as well as on man’s culture.
Again the annual affirmation to weed out those whose faith might waver! The statement itself is like Bryan’s, resembling the Nicene Creed, but also includes this:
WE BELIEVE that God directly created Adam and Eve, the historical parents of the entire human race; and that they were created in His own image, distinct from all other living creatures, and in a state of original righteousness.
WE BELIEVE that our first parents sinned by rebelling against God’s revealed will and thereby incurred both physical and spiritual death, and that as a result all human beings are born with a sinful nature that leads them to sin in thought, word, and deed.
And yet they not only teach biology at Wheaton, but have a course on ecology and evolution. How they can do this and yet affirm such a statement (it doesn’t mention a young earth or ex nihilo creation, though) is beyond me.
What is interesting, and which I mention in the piece above, is that the new genetic data on human population size is taking us back to the days of Darwin, when evolution threatened to bring down the edifice of Christianity. Thanks to the judicious manipulations of theologians, and the will to believe, it didn’t, but the Adam-and-Eve challenge is in some ways more serious than was Darwin’s book. For if they didn’t live, and weren’t humanity’s ancestor’s, whence original sin? And if no original sin, why Jesus? The fact is that if Adam and Eve weren’t real people and the parents of all of us, then the whole edifice of Christianity collapses like a house of cards. At least it does to rational people, but of course theologians are busy reverse-engineering this problem as I write.
Religion and science compatible? Clearly not in places like Bryan or Wheaton!
