Patrick
August 21, 2018, 4:16am
139
Freshman biology did not make me an atheist.
It was doing research with real scientist that exposed me to evolution in a way that I finally understood it. They were not polemic at all. They just non-judgmentally heard my questions and answered them. It did not take much. There is one 5 minute conversation I had that stunned me. They explained Kimura’s work on introns vs exons, as a test of neutral theory. I was surprised at how easy it was to understand, and such a clear test of common descent.
I’d never heard about this from ID or YEC, and realized this was from 40 years previous. It did convince of evolution immediately, but it did clarify that I was not getting an accurate representation of evolution from ID and YEC. They were not telling me the whole story. Just 5 minutes of conversation between a student and a couple professors changed everything. They were not polemic, and non judgemental. They did not even care to convince me to change my mind. They just gave me clear evidence.
Despite what you think, none of this pushed me to atheism. None of this conflicts with what I know of Jesus, and what I read in Scripture.
Good. Science shouldn’t impact one’s faith as science is neutral on such matters. I think it is important that young people have the opportunity to learn science correctly without having to worry about it impacting their faith. There are plenty of other things that will test young people’s faith. Science education shouldn’t be one of them.
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