My wife and I recently went to see Stanford Professor and author Joan Roughgarden give a presentation on her new book, Evolution and Christian Faith. As a Christian who studies and teaches science, I was very interested in what she had to say.
I will preface my comments by stating that in her presentation and her book, Dr. Roughgarden demonstrates VERY clearly that she is a sincere Christian and a dedicated scientist. Her views and her book are an attempt to rectify differences between her faith and her science and to bring harmony to what is often a very vitriolic debate.
However...
What I see in her book and heard from her personally suggests to me VERY strongly that she is looking at the Bible through evolution-colored glasses. She attempts to use scripture to bolster evolutionary theory, but the verses she chooses and the connections to evolution are a bit of a stretch. For example, she uses the Biblical account of the creation of flora and fauna to demonstrate the evolutionary "tree of life" commonly found in Intro Bio textbooks. She speaks of Biblical accounts referring to Christians being of "one body" and concludes that Christ Himself alluded to common evolutionary ancestry.
It seems very clear to me that Dr. Roughgarden is unwilling to give up any what she has been taught and has taught about evolution, even if a literal interpretation of the Bible says differently.
I recognize this clearly because that is where I used to be in my faith. As my depth of understanding of scripture has changed, so too my view of the sciences has changed. Rather than simply accepting evolutionary theory as taught in the secular Universities, I default to the Biblical account. Unless a scripturally sound compromise is presented, I cannot believe otherwise.
The root for Dr. Roughgarden's difficulty, I wager, is described on page 10 of her book where she concedes that her depth of understanding of the Bible is far from her depth of understanding in evolutionary theory. As she points out, she has been teaching evolutionary biology and ecology for thirty years and has made a lifelong study of the subject.
This is a very large investment of herself and it is fully understandable that she is loathe to recant what she has promoted for three decades. What she needs to realize is that you cannot compromise on scripture simply because it doesn't agree with your worldview. God's law is based on love and it is just, but it is absolute.
No "ifs" "ands" or "buts" about it.
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