5. A Bit of Light Reading

This is the fifth in a series of posts describing my transition from young earth creationist to theistic evolutionist. In the first post, I described how Alan Roxburgh's 5-phase description of paradigm change describes this transition well, and I have been using his framework to shape this discussion. See the introduction for a list of all the posts in this series.


A Bit of Light Reading

In the process of paradigm change, the third phase (according to Roxburgh) is disembedding. He describes this phase as:

"...when we begin to feel that the current system is insupportable and we begin to disconnect from it - like Dorothy [in The Wizard of Oz] being carried away from Kansas by a tornado."

As I described in the last post, my disembedding process began by shedding my long-held beliefs in a young universe/earth in favor of old earth creationism. This included extensive reading of Hugh Ross' books which left me with a significant interest in cosmology and theoretical physics. I began to read books on these subjects and was fascinated by this new window in to the world.

Bill Bryson's book A Short History of Nearly Everything really kicked things off for me. It was an incredible description of the unfolding of the universe, from the very beginning to this very moment. It gave me an appreciation for the process of science, and helped me understand not only what science says about the history and operation of the universe, but how we figured this stuff out. It helped to whet my appetite for more.

Stephen Hawking's The Universe in a Nutshell was next. I was awed by his description of the beginnings of the universe and the nature of time. Brain-bending concepts like supergravity, supersymmetry, p-branes and imaginary time were fun to tackle and I was surprised at Hawking's ability to explain these complex ideas so accessibly.

Richard Feynman and Ralph Leighton's Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! made me want to become a theoretical physicist. Its informal character stood in stark contrast to Hawking's books, but Feynman made the process of pursuing authentic knowledge seem so interesting and important. This, along with another book, Feynman's Rainbow, helped me understand that one can make profound advances in science without leaving ones desk.

I also read a bit more on evolution: Richard Dawkins' spectacularly written story, The Ancestor's Tale traces our ancestry from the present to the past, in an incredibly compelling survey of the theory of common descent. Also, Stephen J. Gould's essays in Evolution and Extinction were vital in understanding some of the nuances of natural selection, speciation and punctuated equilibrium.

Steven Weinberg's Dreams of a Final Theory blew my mind. Half-way through I was ready to pack my bags and head back to grad-school to become a particle physicist. I loved the idea that it might be possible to finally join the worlds of quantum physics (which I had studied in grad school) with cosmology (in which I was beginning to dip my toes) into one complete theory of everything.

Okay, I'm leaving something out. All this exploration of ideas that were previously deemed outright wrong across the board had brought me to the conclusion that I had been duped. The wool had been pulled over my eyes. I now saw that the universe was utterly ancient, and it was fascinating. This previously forbidden territory had opened up countless avenues of exploration, and each one I ventured down turned out to be more exciting and compelling than the next. But there was a profound and dire problem that I had yet to face: I had been taught that all of this was a lie; each exciting detail was in some way a deception perpetrated by Satan. Either the entire picture of the universe that had been painted for me was false in every detail, or my faith in God was a total sham. These two armies had become firmly entrenched in my mind, and it was only a matter of time before the battle would begin.

It didn't turn out to be much of a battle. My faith didn't put up much of a fight.

The first significant blow to my faith came from the final chapter of Weinberg's Dreams of a Final Theory entitled What About God?. In it, he discusses the implications of the search for a theory to describe everything on the existence of God; generally answering the question of whether the final theory will say anything about God, or even prove or disprove His existence. I'll discuss specific ideas in my next post, but I remember spending my lunch hour in the parking lot at my work, devastated by the feeling that my faith was gone. I remember talking myself through the steps that would be required to break the news to my friends and family. It wasn't pretty.

Well, feelings come and go, and apparently so does faith. I regained my composure, walked back into work, and proceeded to live my life. I continued to go to church with my wife, and existed in a state of denial for a while.

I should note that faith had never worked very well for me. I had never developed much of a relationship with God. My personal Bible reading and prayer time had always been boring and seemed pointless. It's easy to see why the battle was almost over before it began.

Curiosity made me pick up The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. [You should be hitting your forehead with your palm right about now...] Although Dawkins' tone was quite off-putting and condescending, I still got his message: I was raised by Christian parents, so I was a Christian. I want God to exist to make myself feel better about death. My faith is wishful thinking, nothing more.

At about the same time I read Bertrand Russell's Religion & Science and Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things. Both reinforced the conclusion I was quickly reaching: My faith was a sham. I was a fake. Faith had never worked for me because it wasn't true! I knew science was right, and Christianity was wrong. Evolution made sense; I saw it everywhere I looked. I was forced to choose between science and God. Science seemed so real. God seemed so fake.

In my next post, I'll finish describing the disembedding phase of my transition from YEC to evolutionist. I'll discuss a few of the specific problems that really bothered me in the reading I described above, especially those which became significant in the later phases of this transition.