The greatest strength of the ASA is its members: we are doing fascinating work, and this is of great interest both inside and outside the ASA. Let’s share it with each other!

If this idea excites you, I would love for you to contact me! We could start by having you send me some written material on the research project that you are passionate about. After I get myself up to speed with your work, then I could call or email you to ask more about your research and your background. Then we could make it into an exciting story that ASA members and potential members would find very engaging.

I will present a prototype of the electronic magazine to the ASA council on September 24, so time is of the essence. But keep in mind that I will do the bulk of the work on these articles, so you won’t have to worry about your contributions being a burden on your busy schedule.

Thanks,
Tom Burnett
tomfiatlux@gmail.com

P.S. You may be curious who I am and how I got involved in the ASA, so let me tell you a bit about myself:

After growing up in a Catholic family that lived in the Bible Belt, I abandoned Christianity while in college because I felt that Christianity did not have solid intellectual foundations. I studied philosophy, physics and evolutionary biology as an undergraduate at Rice University because these fields were asking some of the most exciting questions about life, and they offered rigorous methodologies to search for answers. Of course, they couldn’t answer all my questions, so after graduating, I moved to Austria, hoping that European culture could give me the enlightenment that I sought. It did, but not in the way that I expected!

In Austria, I met a missionary who told me, “Tom, one of the things I hate most is trying to talk to Christians who don’t think. But I can tell you are a thinker. You’d make a great Christian!” He laid down the challenge for me to examine Christianity with my full intellect. And when I did, I found that it was a lot different from what I grew up with in America. Armed with a historically and philosophically sound understanding of the faith, I wanted to become a follower of Christ! God gave me a great brain, and he wanted me to use it for his service.

After two years in Austria, I left for the University of California, Berkeley to start a Ph.D. program in the history of science. Berkeley is a fabulous mission field, and my friend Nick and I founded an organization called Fiat Lux that facilitated the dialogue between science and religion. We found that hundreds of students on campus were hungry to participate and learn, and our work bore tremendous fruit during the years that we were there.

Now I am living in Washington, DC, and I am eager to continue this kind of work on a national level. I have already gotten involved with the National Academies of Science and AAAS, and now that I am a part of the ASA, the sky is the limit! I tremendously enjoyed attending the ASA annual meeting at Catholic University, and I want to get to know lots of you, whether via email, phone, or in person. I’d love for you to contact me!!!

First here is how the results came in for the membership as a whole:

With 2/3 of our members accepting evolution of humans it’s probably pretty surprising to your average church goer. Is it the evil secular universities that Expelled railed against? We can look and see how the answers differed for those who attended secular or Christian universities.

My columns correspond to:

1. The Universe is 14 billion years old
2. The Earth is 4.6 billion years old.
3. Natural evolution. That is plants and animals evolved with natural causes.
4. Generic evolution. That is plants and animals evolved through either natural or non-natural causes. This is calculated by counting up who answered yes to either the natural or non-natural question.
5. Human evolution.

I’ve included a bar called all in all my charts so that the average response can be compared.

Nope. No difference. Another thing to explore is whether there is any difference between scientists who are currently employed full time and those who are retired. Presumably the former would be more aware of the current state of the evidence since they are in the thick of it.

So, at least in the minds of those who are currently full-time scientists, the state of the evidence is moving in the direction of natural and human evolution. The difference between the full-time scientists and the retired ones is 13-14%.

Now let’s look at the employers of the scientists. Since origins is basic and not applied research those who are in education, government, and medical should be more aware of the state of the evidence over and against industry and ministry.

Education, government, and medical all cluster together. I haven’t talked about the age of the Earth or Universe since there is mostly agreement regardless of category. Here we have a drop in support for an old Universe by those in the medical field. Hmm. We see more profound drops in support of natural evolution: 17% for industry and 31% for ministry. Human evolution drops 16% and 29% respectively.

Finally, let’s test my hypothesis that differences in opinions stems from differences in familiarity with the evidence by looking at the specific domain experts. I will look at full-time biologists, geologists, and physicists/astronomers. I will include engineers as a group of non-experts with which to compare.

100% of the physicists/astronomers affirm an ancient Universe and 100% of full-time geologists affirm an ancient Earth. 80% of full-time biologists affirm natural evolution and human evolution and 88% of them affirm generic evolution. The difference from engineers is 30% for natural evolution, 18% for generic evolution, and 24% for human evolution. The degree to which there is a difference of opinions on origins is not related to whether Christian scientists went to a Christian or secular school. Rather, it is related to the degree of familiarity with the scientific evidence. The greater the familiarity, the greater the degree of acceptance of mainstream science on origins.

So far, I’ve limited myself to areas where there is scientific consensus. The questions above are more in the developing stage where there is some evidence but more work needs to be done. See my blog post for one example. We still see a similar pattern where the domain experts see more of the evidence, probably because it’s more obscure. Still, only the OOL evidence was sufficient to warrant a bare majority (51%) of the experts. Multiverses were the exception where the physicists/astronomers scored it lower than the non-experts.

CORRECTION:

In the comments our executive director, Randy Isaac, noted a flaw in how I did the calculation and Doug Hayworth noticed my graph format was not helpful (N.B. for those who are unfamiliar with peer review Terry’s, Randy’s, and Doug’s comments are similar to what happens in the peer review process. The difference between this and real peer review is the intensity of the review and the domain expertise of the reviewers.) Randy noted that roughly 8% did not choose to affirm any of the statements. I interpreted this as no answer and didn’t include them in the calculations. For example, a young earth creationist would presumably also not select any of the options and by treating it the way I did his response would not be counted. So, the better approach is to treat this situation as “none of the above”. Treating none of the above as a proxy for YEC and since a non-domain experts maybe hesitant to give an exact answer to the age questions, 8% is probably the upper limit of YEC in our organization.

So, I redid the calculations and here are the comparisons.

There is still no real difference based on going to a Christian or secular college. This doesn’t explain any difference of views.

There is a 14% difference on evolution based on natural causes in the original calculation and 13% with the new one. The difference for human evolution 13% and 12% respectively.

The difference between education and ministry is 31% for the old calculation and 28% for the new for evolution with natural causes. The differences are 29% and 26% respectively for human evolution.

Expertise is the only area where the new calculation shows any substantive differences. 7% of the full-time biologists affirmed none of the statements. All the full-time geologists picked at least one of the statements and all affirmed an old earth. Engineers, physicists and geologists had a response rate than the biologists and had a higher response to the age of the Universe question.

For the old calculation, there is a 30% difference for the natural evolution statement between biologists and engineers and a 31% difference between geologists and engineers. For the new calculation this changes to 27% and 33%. Human evolution showed similar small changes between the new and old calculations.

So, my original thesis still appears to hold. Employed scientists are more likely to accept the consensus science than retired ones. Scientists employed in areas that are more likely to do basic science, likewise. Finally, the areas of expertise closest to the areas of age of the earth and evolution are also more likely to accept this than areas that are further away. Going to a Christian college versus a secular one has no bearing on whether the mainstream science is accepted.

The divide is over the distinction between inerrancy and what we might call limited inerrancy. Inerrantists, as defined by the Chicago statement, regard those who do not hold to this view as “neo-evangelicals”. The view of Rodgers, McKim, Bloesch, Pinnock, etc. would be in this camp. While these theologians may be theologically conservative compared to full-blown liberal theology on some key questions, e.g. the Trinity, Christology, the atonement, justification by faith, the work of the Holy Spirit, etc., as far as inerrantists are concerned, they are with the liberals as a consequence of their doctrine of scripture. These individuals and their associated institutions are not evangelicals–they are neo-evangelicals.

It is clear that the ASA as a whole is on the neo-evangelical side of this divide. Perhaps, even, the ASA helped pioneer this view with the writings of Richard Bube in the Journal of the ASA in the 1970’s. Paul Seely (among others) provided the Biblical scholarship arguments for this. Harold Lindsell’s The Battle for the Bible documents this from a highly critical perspective, and, while I don’t necessarily agree with all of Lindsell’s story, it makes the point. Today’s ASA remains in this camp for the most part. Lamoureux, Seely, Enns, N.T. Wright, etc., either ASAers or favorite theologians of ASAers, are among the ranks of Rodgers, McKim, Bloesch, Pinnock, etc. on the doctrine of Scripture. Biologos.org and those directly associated with it are in this camp as is evident from their books and the way that they address the science/Scripture problem.

What may surprise ASAers is that the conservative Reformed camp embodied in denominations such as the Presbyterian Church in America, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and institutions such as the Westminster Theological Seminaries, Covenant College, Covenant Seminary, and the various Reformed Theological Seminaries are on the more conservative end of this evangelical/neo-evangelical or inerrancy/limited inerrancy spectrum. There are other denominations and institutions that we would not necessarily label “fundamentalist” that would also be at the conservative end of the spectrum–I’m thinking here of places like Wheaton College. A significant group of ASA members and even leaders are from these denominations and institutions or are strongly influenced by them.

In these institutions to move from the evangelical to the neo-evangelical camp usually means losing one’s job if you are a pastor, college professor, or seminary professor. In making this move you have abandoned a key aspect of the modern conservative evangelical and Reformed faith. Witness the events surrounding Peter Enns at Westminster Seminary.

So what to make of the response to Bruce Waltke? The historicity of Adam and Eve and the Fall is a marker of adherence to the evangelical doctrine of Scripture. Most even go further and make the advocacy of any sort of animal ancestry of Adam or his body to be impossible in the inerrantist perspective. Thus, the reaction to Waltke (and in my opinion a similar fate awaits Tim Keller) for his comments at Biologos. Now for the record I believe that it is possible to maintain an evangelical/inerrantist perspective and to entertain evolutionary ideas, extending even to aspects of human evolution. I believe that both Waltke and Keller do this. If you read their contributions to Biologos carefully, you will see that there is no hesitation to affirm the evangelical/inerrantist view of scripture or to affirm the historicity of Adam and Eve and the Fall. We see this as well in the early 20th century theologian B. B. Warfield. In some respects, Waltke and Keller are finding common ground with neo-evangelicals on these evolution questions at the risk of their reputations as evangelicals.

So why do I engage in this “splitting” (as opposed to “lumping”) activity? Those of us in the ASA in the “evangelical” camp (in contrast with the “neo-evangelical” camp) are fully aware that the ASA is a big-tent organization, especially on this issue. While I can only speak for myself, I suspect that there are others with similar qualms. We are very uneasy with the “neo-evangelical” approaches to scripture/science questions. These approaches will not work in our churches or institutions. Thus, when we use Lamoureux or Collins or Falk or Enns, we have to qualify them, if we use them at all. They often provide good discussions of the science from the theistic perspective; they often point to acceptable ways of reading scripture on some issues (age of the earth, days of Genesis, the Flood, etc.) but often intermingled with these, especially when we start talking about human origins and the Fall, are what we regard to be compromising claims about the character of Scripture.

ASA members, especially those at the neo-evangelical end of the spectrum, should know that they are only preaching to the choir when they root their arguments in a neo-evangelical view of scripture. While some advocate that young-earth creationism is the only consistent inerrantist position, it is clearly not the case. However, arguments for evolution and human evolution need to be cast into an inerrantist perspective in order to be made convincing. This, of course, is a much trickier enterprise. Some ASA members seem oblivious to this divide and in doing so seem surprised when it becomes important. Their ignorance of or indifference to this divide muddles the conversation.

Alternatively, the ASA could just say that these inerrantist/evangelicals have their heads buried in the sand and that the “neo-evangelical” view of scripture IS the basis for a correct understanding of science/Scripture issues. This is largely what the ASA has done with young-earth creationism in practice. In the heyday of the fundamentalist/Modernist debate in the early 20th century, J. G. Machen in Christianity and Liberalism argued that in reality there were two irreconcilable and competing views of Christianity here–two different religions even. The evangelical world (in contrast to the neo-evangelical world) would argue similarly today. ASA could decide to play on only one side of this divide, but if we do, let’s fully understand what we are doing. When we call evangelicals to become neo-evangelicals, it is like asking them to change religions.