Camel Bones, Confirmation Bias, and American Evangelical Biblicism

by James Davisson

"When I see things like this I like to think about how the Hittites were said to have been a creation of the Bible authors, until they found them. David didn't really exist, until they found proof that he did. Pilate wasn't a real person, except that he was. Coelacanth, Wolemi pine, et al were extinct millions of years ago, until they were discovered alive and well. Countless attempts have been made to show the Bible as inaccurate and it tends to be vindicated in time, so I'm not worried about it."

If you're unfamiliar with the idea of confirmation bias, the quote above is a pretty great example. Confirmation bias is an incredibly common way of processing information among people of all walks of life; most importantly, it's one of the main reasons it's next to impossible to change peoples' minds about subjects they already have strong opinions on. To quote the Wikipedia entry: confirmation bias is "the tendency of people to favor information that confirms their beliefs." This "tendency" is so common that I'd call it nearly universal. If you have strong opinions about guns, gay marriage, abortion, the environment, or, as in today's case, the Bible, you will tend to believe without question anything you hear that confirms your opinion, and you will tend to heavily scrutinize (or outright reject) anything that contradicts your opinion—unless you train yourself and force yourself to do otherwise. And not just you, dear reader—I regularly delude myself with confirmation bias, too.

We've posted a couple times recently about frustrations and struggles with many Christians' inability to accept the theory of evolution—last week, an anonymous guest described his experience with a fundamentalist Christian colleague at a secular university, and before that, I talked about my own confusion and metamorphosing opinion on the subject as I grew up—and I'd like to build on this problem to discuss a deeper and more intractable problem for American evangelicals: their view of scripture.

Let's back up slightly, first. If you didn't click the link in the quote (here it is again), it's referring to evidence that one small detail among many in the Hebrew Bible is probably wrong: while the stories of the patriarch Abraham in the book of Genesis are usually dated to roughly the 20th century BCE, there is no evidence of camels in the region he lived in until nearly a thousand years later. (Specifically: if camels were a part of human life in the region, we would expect to find their bones in the trash heaps of settlements dated to the 20th century BCE. Bones of other livestock known to have been raised in this period are present and widely attested, so the absence of camels is pretty glaring.) Given that Abraham is depicted as owning camels, this information poses a problem for some folks, like our commenter in the quote above. Fortunately for them, confirmation bias can take care of things like this pretty easily: after all, a lack of evidence isn't the same as proof that there weren't camels in Palestine in the ~2000s BCE, right? Why even scrutinize this further—if it contradicts your worldview, it's easy enough to reject.

Fortunately for us, though, this quote reveals a major issue within American Christianity that's worth talking about. A detail this small (is what kind of livestock Abraham owned really all that important to...anything?) bothers this person enough for them to draw comparisons, not only to other claims about Biblical historicity, but also to coelacanths, in order to help them ignore this data, which means that something bigger and more interesting than camel bones is at stake here.

Coelacanths rule, BTW. Did you know a mature coelacanth is the size of a person?

What's at the root of all this is a way of reading the Bible that I'll refer to as biblicism. In his book, The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicicsm Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture, the evangelical sociologist and thinker Christian Smith defines biblicism as a set of widely held beliefs about the Bible in American evangelical Christianity that includes a range of interlocking ideas. The relevant ones for our purposes are the following (though see a full, and very interesting, list of them here):

• Divine Writing: The Bible, down to the details of its words, consists of and is identical with God's very own words written in human language.
• Democratic Perspicuity: Any reasonably intelligent person can read the Bible in his or her own language and correctly understand the plain meaning of the text. 
• Commonsense Hermeneutics: The best way to understand biblical texts is by reading them in their explicit, plain, most obvious, literal sense, as the author intended them at face value, which may or may not involve taking into account their literary, cultural, and historical contexts.
• Inductive Method: All matters of Christian belief and practice can be learned by sitting down with the Bible and piecing together through careful study the clear "biblical" truths that it teaches. 
• Handbook Model: The Bible teaches doctrine and morals with every affirmation that it makes, so that together those affirmations comprise something like a handbook or textbook for Christian belief and living, a compendium of divine and therefore inerrant teachings on a full array of subjects—including science, economics, politics, and romance. (The Bible Made Impossible, pgs. 4-5)

If you look carefully, you can see how the earlier items in the list logically seem to lead to the later ones: if the Bible is God's direct, inerrant, written word to people (divine writing), it should be easily understood by anyone who wants to know what God has to say (democratic perspicuity); if something is to be easily understood, it should have only one, plain, surface meaning (commonsense hermeneutics); if God's inerrant word is easily understandable and to be taken at face value, then it can serve as a source of clear, consistent, truths—not just in faith, but in all elements of life (inductive method and handbook model).

If any detail in the Bible were proved, without any doubt, to be wrong, this schema unravels; the Bible can't be God's very own words if parts of it are wrong (because God does not lie), and if any details of the words are wrong, they are all suspect and cannot therefore form the basis of Christian faith and life. This is why even the issue of camel bones can make someone resort to the questionably relevant coelacanths for support; it's too important to risk leaving out awesome ancient fish if that will help bolster the argument!

Buying into biblicism is really great; it allows believers a sense of incredible security and certainty in their faith. Also, it allows them access to a whole world of books and teaching on an incredibly wide range of subjects, all backed up with direct quotes from scripture and all completely "biblical." Take a look at Smith's list of titles:

This is one of several pages in the list.

Biblicism was definitely part of my church culture growing up. I read and was profoundly impacted by books like The Purpose-Driven Life and I Kissed Dating Goodbye, self-help books based heavily on key Bible verses. I wore a shirt as a teenager that said "Lost? Need Directions? Read the Map" above a picture of an open Bible—God's map/handbook for human existence. I saw and heard evidence of these ideas everywhere in my experience of Christianity, from the Christian book store to church camp and beyond.

There are quite a number of problems with these ideas; we've talked elsewhere on the blog about changing our minds on the specific issue of inerrancy (or "divine writing" in Christian Smith's terms above), but I'd like to point out a big problem with the larger, interlocking schema of biblicism as a whole. It's a problem Christian Smith calls "pervasive interpretive pluralism," but which might better be labeled "Christians can't agree on anything."

If it's true that (1) the Bible is God's direct, inerrant word, (2) that it's accessible to anyone of reasonable intelligence, and (3) it means exactly what its "plain sense" says it means, then logically it follows that all reasonably intelligent Christians can read and agree on the meaning of the Bible. And anyone who has met more than one Christian will know that this is, like, laughably the opposite of true. Christians can't agree on issues as diverse as free will/predestination, gender equality, wealth and poverty, charismatic gifts, and atonement and justification. Heck, we can't even agree on which issues are the central issues of the faith:

It will not suffice to respond simply by reciting the mantra: "In essentials, unity; in nonessentials, liberty; in all things, charity," because many of these matters that sustain multiple "biblical" views that cause division are essentials—particularly as viewed by many biblicists. There simply is not unity on many essentials. Furthermore, this response assumes more fundamentally that evangelicals at least agree on what the essentials are, which they do not. For certain kinds of Reformed believers, the sovereignty of God understood in a certain way and double predestination are clearly essentials of the faith—while for others they are not. For Bible-centered Anabaptist Christians, biblical pacifism and nonviolence are central to the gospel—while others serve in the US military with clean consciences. For some biblicists, the penal satisfaction theory of atonement expresses the pure essence of salvation—but for others it is an unbiblical and misguided doctrine. So not only are Christians divided about essential matters of doctrine and faithful practice; they are also sometimes divided on what even counts as essential. (pgs. 24-25, bolded emphasis and links added)

Smith's proposal for a better, "more evangelical" reading of scripture is an elegant and worthy one, neither liberal nor conservative, but simply Christian: read the Bible as, above all else, a book about Jesus. Smith challenges biblicists, and all Christians, to remember that Christ is the "real purpose, center, and interpretive key" to the Bible. If we read the Bible this way, our focus is not on what a Bible verse can tell about us "biblical" dieting or romance or the origins of the universe, but instead on how it relates to our understanding of Jesus Christ. In Smith's words, "We do not then read scripture devotionally to try to find tidbits there that are 'meaningful to' or that 'speak to' us, wherever we are in our personal subjective spiritual experiences. We do not read scripture as detached historians trying to judge its technical accuracy in recounting events. We do not read scripture as a vast collection of infallible propositions whose meanings and implications can be understood on their own particular terms. We only, always, and everywhere read scripture in view of its real subject matter: Jesus Christ."

In the middle of that quote is a sentence that strikes me at least as hard as it does any biblicist; too often I can be a "detached historian" when reading scripture, allowing myself to revel in the literary details of the text without thinking even for a moment how it enriches the picture of Christ, points to an idea about Christ, or relates in any way to Christ and Christian faith. I am as guilty as anyone of misreading the Bible for my own ends, of bending it so that it says what I want it to say rather than coming to it and asking what it says, and particularly what it says about the fact that God came to earth as Jesus, and in the process, taught us, led us, and saved us for God's own better, fuller purposes.

If you are a Christian, and this is not how you have been reading scripture, I challenge you: why not? In the face of evidence that the Bible is not for communicating dating advice or exact knowledge about ancient Palestinian ungulates, would you not rather believe that it is God's written word, sent to tell us about and remind us of God's lived Word in the world, Jesus Christ? It's something to consider, friends.

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Photo sources:
1. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/manojvasanth/4119668254
2. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marjorie_Courtenay-Latimer_and_Coelacanth.jpg
3. The Bible Made Impossible, pg. 9

Religion in the Workplace: A Story

by an Anonymous Guest Poster¹

I want to introduce myself before I begin, as I’ve never written here before. I’m a graduate student in the physics department at a large research university. James Davisson is a friend of mine from college. I am not a particularly religious person, but some events that happened a couple years ago got me thinking about combining religion with professional life. James invited me to write about it here.

The following stories feature a former colleague and classmate of mine, who I will call Quentin. Quentin is an Evangelical Christian whose personal faith came up against the secular world of academic research. His very public enthusiasm for Christianity led to him becoming isolated from the rest of his colleagues, who largely did not understand his views or how to react to his behavior. At the same time, Quentin’s inability to separate his personal religious life from his work life seemed to indicate a misunderstanding of how one should behave at work. Eventually, he decided that Christianity was more important to him than physics, and left the department to pursue a stint of missionary work in Africa.

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I first encountered Quentin over the Internet: before myself and my cohort of graduate students arrived in the Fall, he started a Facebook group to help all of us get to know one another. About a week into our first semester, he posted a note to all members of the group. Being physicists, he knew that we would all appreciate the challenge of an order of magnitude problem. Instead of asking us to estimate the number of piano tuners in New York City, his note used scripture and a great deal of jargon to argue that Jesus is Lord with probability 1.

Quentin’s argument began:

The basis of this argument is the idea that information cannot travel backwards in time, which is a fundamental principle of general relativity. In other words, one cannot accurately predict the future. I hold that the Old Testament scriptures contain enough accurate prophesy [sic] that they seemingly demonstrate a violation of this Physics “law.” Further I hold that there are no other religious documents that foretell the future as accurately, specifically, and abundantly enough to rule out statistical chance. A violation of this Physical “law” is really a way that God demonstrates his sovereignty, not a violation of physics itself.

Upon seeing this, a lot of us were perplexed to say the least. Wasn’t the Facebook group intended for a secular, academic group? If Quentin really believed that the acts of God superseded physical laws, what was he doing studying physics in graduate school? There was also a great deal of derision that followed – people found it very easy to dismiss the post as evidence of craziness or stupidity.

Over the next few months, the other graduate students learned more and more about Quentin’s beliefs and religious practice. He thought evolution was a lie. He had very negative things to say about homosexuals and same-sex marriage. Outside of his office, he posted a large, friendly sign proclaiming that the Kingdom of Christ lived within him, and offered laying on of hands and prayer to whomever wanted it (I emphasize: this was at work, at a secular university). At one time, he claimed that he could raise the dead. His beliefs were baffling and offensive to many in the department. Quentin’s colleagues began to talk about him behind his back. He became a topic of conversation at parties, a focal point of derisive curiosity. Most of the mockery took place from afar (although there were a number of passive-aggressive flame wars that took place over Facebook). Needless to say, my colleagues’ (and perhaps my own) reaction to Quentin was not kind.

A lot of us scientists are vexed by the counterfactual beliefs maintained by many Americans. Creationism, for example, doesn’t make any sense to us, and to hear about how so many people cling to the notion that evolution must be wrong² (a hyperbolic example here), is deeply frustrating. At best, it reveals poor education. At worst, it is an attack on our modern, secular way of understanding the world. I believe that to some of his colleagues Quentin became the perfect picture of mindless, backwards ignorance. It is no wonder that so many people reacted with frustration and anger at Quentin’s presence in the department.

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During our second year Quentin offered to give a presentation at the Physics Graduate Student Organization-sponsored lunch seminars. At the time, I was part of the PGSO (our department’s student organization), and organized some informal talks where students were invited to present and discuss their research interests or other ideas. A week before his presentation, Quentin emailed me his title and abstract:

Authority Theory
Have you ever wondered what exactly it is that makes right things “right” or wrong things “wrong?” In this seminar I will unveil a brand new philosophical argument about the nature of authority using very simple ideas from graph theory mathematics to help answer such questions. We start with some definitions, use some logic, and demonstrate some interesting and important philosophical implications that impact our society at every level. Lastly, I will show the proof of the following theorem: God exists if and only if a finite number of beings with authority exist. This discovery has many interesting implications which we can hopefully discuss.

I replied to Quentin that his talk did not seem to be within the purview of physics. I suggested to him that he focus on the graph theory and mathematics, rather than proving that God exists. I also requested that mentions of God be removed from his abstract. Quentin agreed, on the condition that I substitute “exactly one being with ultimate and final authority” for God. I made the changes and notified my fellow graduate students of the upcoming talk. Within minutes I had received several complaints that the talk was obviously religious in nature, and that our academic student organization should not be sponsoring a Christian polemic. I wanted to keep Quentin’s talk on the schedule if possible. I didn’t want him to feel separated from or censored by the department because of his interest in religion. But at the same time, the students who complained were right that a religious talk would not be appropriate in that academic setting.

Kicking myself for not talking to Quentin about this before making the announcement, I talked to him about whether or not his talk did contain academic content. I told him that several people had complained because of what seemed like a religious agenda. Was there any way for him to remove the religious emphasis and focus instead on his mathematical or philosophical interests? Quentin told me that he had been confused: His talk had no physics in it, but I had never explicitly told him that the talk needed to be related to physics or research. (To be fair, he was right in that regard.) There was no way for me to allay the suspicions of the grad students who had complained, so I canceled his talk. I told Quentin that the PGSO’s lunch talks were not the appropriate venue for him to publicly discuss his interests, but encouraged him to find a different venue. At the time, I felt bad that I had to reject Quentin’s talk (and embarrassed that it had been made public before), but was relieved that his talk would not be associated with the PGSO.

What followed was this: several weeks later, Quentin scheduled the use of a classroom himself and gave his presentation publicly. Almost fifty people showed up. A few of them were interested in learning about Authority Theory, and how one could use graph theory in the context of theology and philosophy. Many others, by contrast, were there to nitpick Quentin’s arguments. They interrupted him while he spoke. They peppered him with questions and made it hard for him to work through the talk. They wanted to see him fail. Frankly, they were very rude to him, in the loud, smug way that arguments are made anonymously in Internet forums. At one point, Quentin’s former office mate spoke up and told everyone to be quiet and let him finish.

As for the content of the talk itself, it would be an exaggeration to say that Quentin had thought everything through clearly or argued convincingly. His talk borrowed concepts from graph theory as a way to justify the belief in a single God.³ It was clear that he had begun at the conclusion and worked backwards, as the assumptions were nonsensical, and the argument itself didn’t actually prove his thesis in the end. A friend of mine said to me later, “If this is what he spent a year thinking about, and then presented it as a completed project, then something is wrong.” Quentin’s talk certainly didn’t deserve the scorn that it received from some people, but it was very, very flawed. It seemed to confirm what many people already believed about him: that he was so distracted by his creed that he was incapable of reasoning.

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I want to be clear: I’m not writing about this because I want to reveal the hypocrisy of non-religious liberals. It would be easy to interpret these events that way, after all, since this does seem like an example of how self-professed free-thinking academic types turned on one of their colleagues for being a Christian. This story is more complex than that. Yes, Quentin was a Christian, and yes, my colleagues (and, I admit, myself at times) were rude to Quentin and marginalized him because his beliefs seemed foolish. But, as time has passed, I have come to think of Quentin’s presence in the department not as a reaction to Evangelical Christianity, but how any average social group will react to an outsider who does not know how to behave.

There are plenty of religious people in my department. I have friends who go to Church and shul regularly. A couple of my coworkers wear kippahs, and a collaborator in my research group wears Sikh religious articles. A Christian colleague I know would wear a cross but cannot do so at work for laboratory safety reasons. So these colleagues of mine are openly religious, and in conversation they will occasionally bring up their religious practices. The community doesn’t react badly to this kind of casual behavior at all. Personally, I’m quite comfortable living in a work environment that accommodates people who follow different religions.

Quentin, as anyone, was entitled to his personal religious beliefs and practice. That being said, Quentin decided to bring his religion to work with him and advertise it loudly and up front. I have no idea why he thought this was a good idea, although I speculate that part of his faith included active pursuit of disseminating his religious ideas to others.

The first impression Quentin made with his Facebook message, his public display of evangelism in his office, his attempt to deliver a theological talk at a venue for discussing scientific research, and other events all seemed to indicate that Quentin was confused about what was appropriate for work and what needed to stay at home. Quentin’s colleagues turned against him not because he was a religious conservative, but because he that he was aggressive about advertising his enthusiasm for Christianity in a professional context where nobody else talked about religion in the same way. His behavior was far enough outside the established norm that he made the people around him uncomfortable. I don’t know whether any of his mentors in the department, his academic or research advisors, ever confronted him about mixing work and religion, but it certainly seems that conversation might have helped Quentin fit in a little better.

Overall, Quentin seemed to lack a degree of what is often called common sense, meaning an understanding of tacitly agreed-upon rules of social engagement. In this case, his lack of common sense manifested itself in such a way as to present to his colleagues the image of a ludicrous religious fundamentalist. He did not deserve the mockery that was directed at him, but I find myself wondering whether there was a way for him to keep his personal beliefs private so as not to confuse or annoy others in the workplace.

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Quentin left the department after two years, completing a Master’s but not a PhD. He worked as a missionary in Africa for six months, and has moved on to work as a programmer for a large software company. I wish Quentin well for the future. I hope he figures out what he wants from his career, and that he finds a work environment that’s a little more accepting of him than we were. I hope he figures out how to balance his professional and private life.

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1. Editor's Note: Today's guest poster wishes to remain anonymous for reasons that will probably be clear from reading the post. If you're offended, confused, or delighted about this, email us about it at theologyinprogress@gmail.com. The title picture are not related to the author of the post; we just thought it looked nice.
2. Editor's Note: Evolution and creationism is actually a subject which we've tackled on the blog before from a Christian perspective; read about it here.
3. Quentin tried to model the relationships between all beings as master-slave, where the upper tiers commanded the lower tiers, allowing him to "model" everyone as belonging to a directed graph.  Quentin then tried to argue that the "authority structure" meant that those graphs must be treelike (having no loops).  He disregarded (or at least, had no convincing argument against) the possibility of having two "ultimate authority" nodes in the same graph, as well as the possibility of having two disjointed graphs.  In other words, even if you did buy his argument that there was an ultimate authority figure, there could have been more than one of them.  So, for all we know, there is an equally powerful God on Neptune who has never been to Earth

Photo source: 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/joeshlabotnik/1198523560/

Becoming an Evolutionist

"One might say that whereas the Stoic and Josephus reason like contemporary advocates of Intelligent Design, inferring a supranatural power from the symmetries (or, in Josephus's case, the asymmetries) in nature, Jubilees and Philo speak of a self-revealing God who controls nature but is not readily or fully inferable from nature alone. If nothing else, this issues a caution about scientific arguments developed for or against the existence of God. For the God therewith affirmed or denied may not be the God of Abraham."

Inheriting Abraham, Jon D. Levenson, pg. 131 (emphasis added)

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A few weeks ago, I got a Facebook message from a conservative Christian friend who wanted to pick my brain on some religious issues we disagree about. As I skimmed the message before preparing to dig in and prepare my arguments, I noticed that there, nestled down in the middle of it, was a word I hadn't seen in a long time, a word my friend was applying to me: "evolutionist." As in, the opposite of a "creationist." And seeing the word gave me pause. Am I an evolutionist? And if so, how did I become one?

As a kid, I was never all that invested in a strictly literal interpretation of the Bible. My parents were pastors (and not fundamentalist ones) so I heard too much exegesis and application of the Bible to really think that all of it could be understood from its plain sense alone. In particular, I never learned to think of the six days of creation in Genesis as a literal fact. For one thing, it seemed to conflict with what I knew from my books about dinosaurs and outer space; for another, I was well aware that there were people who thought of it and the rest of Genesis in non-literal terms.

I was, however, very invested in the idea of Creation, that God was the creator of the universe, of life, and especially of humanity. So I was open to persuasion on the matter of just how Genesis was to be interpreted. I remember being around eight years old and picking up a creation science book in my church's nursery/playroom, which was devoted almost entirely to providing evidence that people and dinosaurs co-existed. As a huge dinosaur fan I was, of course, totally blown away.  Thanks in no small part to a dearth of critical thinking skills, I remained convinced for years that ancient legends about dragons were describing real encounters with dinosaurs. (Also, that the T. rex had sharp teeth for eating pineapples, not meat, because creation science.)

Wouldn't this be great? This would totally be great.

While this conviction wore off eventually, a new one sprang up in its place. Sometime during my teenage years, I encountered Darwin's Black Box, a book by Intelligent Design advocate Michael Behe. In the book, Behe lays out a case against the evolutionary origins of certain biological structures on the grounds of irreducible complexity; in essence, he argues that no one has been able to explain how these things arose by evolution, therefore, they didn't. Today I tend to think of this as the creationist version of Bill O'Reilly claiming that You Can't Explain how tides work,* but at the time I was enormously engaged by the idea that there was a real, live scientist (Behe is a biochemist) who had found physical proof of Creation.

Three things eventually changed my mind. The first was, of all things, Catholicism. As a student at a Catholic high school, I was subjected to various classes under the heading of "religion" (barf, amirite?), including a class on the Bible.** I learned in class that the position of the Catholic church was, surprisingly, that evolution is pretty legit. While I remained unconvinced, I was intrigued that Catholics took a less conservative position on the matter than many American Protestants.

The second thing was college. Not so much listening to professors extoll the virtues of evolutionary theory (though that played a small part), but having a chance to discuss my ideas with a friend who actually studied biology. I brought up irreducible complexity to her, wondering what her perspective would be, and she told me that it was not considered legitimate science! In fact, she had major issues with the way the arguments about it had been advanced, and thought that the whole Intelligent Design movement stood on extremely shaky ground.

I was shocked. I started researching Intelligent Design and Michael Behe in the college library, and I discovered that my friend was correct: irreducible complexity had been rejected and discredited as mainstream scientific theory. I was all set to do what humans normally do when confronted with evidence that contradicts a strongly held belief, namely, do everything I could to strengthen said belief. What stopped me was the third thing: another conversation.

I had started to dig in to defend my position on Intelligent Design, checking out library books and brooding about the issues at stake, when I happened into a conversation on the subject with one of my mentors at church. "What do you think about evolution?" I asked, preparing to hear him affirm my stance on the subject, or something like it. "It doesn't matter," he said. My mentor explained that he was a Christian, he believed in God, in Christ, in salvation and freedom from sin and death. The exact terms of how the world came to be were irrelevant to those beliefs; no theory of biology was going to do anything to confirm or refute his belief in a loving God, because that God stood outside of such things.

Thankfully, this broke my resolve, and I did not spend months, years, or a lifetime trying to use science to prove that God, or Creation, is a thing. What's more, today I can pursue any interest I may have in evolutionary biology or related fields, as I would not have been otherwise. Because of two conversations and a high school class, I can read Stephen Jay Gould or Steven Pinker with delight instead of tension or anger. Because a few people took the time to speak gently to me, I can get excited about new research into genetics or paleontology. Because I became an "evolutionist," I was set free.

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Like most liberal Christians, I love the Bible. I really love it. I spent all of last year reading it, and now I love it even more. But loving the Bible means taking it seriously; and taking it seriously means trying to read it as honestly as I can.

An honest reading of the Bible can reveal the truth of Creation and God's care for it, without insisting that the Bible has all the historical details of Creation. For me, an honest reading of the Bible includes research about the cultures it was written in and the historical events that took place during its composition. It includes hard thinking, praying, and discernment about what needs to be taken in its plain sense, at the literal level, and what has value on other levels. And that discernment should be based not on my instincts about what is right, but on external principles that can guide me and other Christians.

One of these principles is this: when interpreting the Bible, take into account what humans learn about our world through careful study. This includes not only the careful study of the natural world, which has yielded the theory of evolution, but also the study of human history, which has shown that some parts of the Bible record historical details accurately, and that others seem to have been written not to convey exact history, but messages about historical events or instructive stories about certain historical periods.

At the heart of this principle is Genesis 1, in which God creates the land and the sea, the sun and the moon, the plants and the animals—all of which God declares to be "good"—and last of all, God creates human beings, declaring the Creation that has been completed with them to be "very good." Creation is good, and humankind is good, and studying ourselves and Creation should also be good, because such study can tell us more about their origins in the ultimate Good. If we learn new facts from studying ourselves and our world, this principle implies, should they not be read as a complement to, rather than a contradiction of, the truths found in our Bibles?

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*Okay, I confess that I actually think it's the creationist version of Insane Clown Posse asking F@#&ing Magnets, How Do They Work?, but I was uncomfortable saying so in the body of this post. Now you know, O footnote reader.
**This was actually a pretty good class, at least in terms of shaping my views of scripture going into adulthood: it was also the first place I encountered the documentary hypothesis and other historical criticism of the Bible.  

Photos:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Huxley_-_Mans_Place_in_Nature.jpg
2. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Largesttheropods_2.svg 
3. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/vinothchandar/7696925948/
4. https://secure.flickr.com/photos/tfjensen/8056427807/