My Journey from Young Earth Creationist to Being Convinced of Evolution
My worldview has shifted quite a bit in the past few years. I think it’s useful to look back on how your ways of thinking have changed over time. You can more clearly see where you have been, and it can provide some epistemic humility when you recognize that something even as fundamental as your worldview is subject to change as you learn and grow over time. In this post I’ll recount how I went from being a Young Earth Creationist to being convinced of evolution.
I grew up in an evangelical Christian household, and was homeschooled through middle school and high school. What I knew about evolution was entirely from Christian homeschool curricula and Answers in Genesis. I was very interested in the topic of Creation vs Evolution, and eagerly read every post on the Answers in Genesis website (and every issue of their magazine for several years) and took their claims at face value. I figured that, because the writers at Answers in Genesis were good Christians who treated the Bible as the Word of God, they were an authority on science and how it relates to faith and scripture. Creationism became very important to me. When I would have doubts about my faith, creationism was something I would fall back on and use to dispel those doubts: Because evolution is false there must be a Creator.
I stilled believed in Creationism when I went to college. I went to a private Christian university where I double-majored in Biology and Biochemistry. Early on in my college education, my confidence in my worldview grew even stronger because my professor for Principles of Biology I was also a creationist. Surely if he could attain a PhD in Biochemistry and have a successful career of industry consulting and being a professor, then being a creationist must not be a hindrance to a scientific career. My professor is a very charismatic and eccentric guy, and he quickly became my favorite professor. He often ranted about how the theory of evolution was in shambles: that the idea of complex structures being formed by chance was stupid, that mutations are always deleterious, and that irreducible complexity shows that evolution by gradual mutations was obviously impossible.
I knew that I wanted to be a scientist and do some kind of genetics/molecular biology research, and I aspired to revolutionize the field of Biology by finding irrefutable proof that evolution was false and creationism was true. I never would have thought that one day I would be convinced of the exact opposite.
My Creationist worldview didn’t come crashing down all at once. Instead, it slowly broke apart piece by piece over the course of a few months. During my last semester of college, I took Principles of Biology III: Ecology and Evolution. Because of a combination of factors (coming to grips with my doubts about my faith rather than just repressing them, some inner turmoil after being rejected from PhD programs, and long conversations with my best friend and college roommate who was also wrestling with doubts about faith), I was willing to take a long, hard look at the evidence for evolution before graduating and going out into the real world. My Ecology and Evolution professor believed in evolution, though he didn’t tell us his view until after the Evolution unit so that students who didn’t believe in evolution wouldn’t be biased against him or the information he was presenting. He explained that if you don’t believe in evolution, you’d better have a good reason for doing so and, therefore, you’d better have a good understanding of what evolution really is. In addition to the standard textbook material on the topic, each week we read a chapter from Mapping the Origins Debate: Six Models of the Beginning of Everything by Gerald Rau and wrote a discussion post about it. In this book, Rau outlines six models of origins: Naturalistic Evolution, Nonteleological Evolution, Planned Evolution, Directed Evolution, Old Earth Creationism, and Young Earth Creationism. Rau discusses not only what the various models are and how they explain the relevant data, but also their philosophical foundations, e.g., does the supernatural exist? what should be done when scientific findings seem to conflict with our interpretation of scripture (reject the science, reject the scripture, try to reinterpret the scripture)? I found the philosophical content of the book to be particularly illuminating, and was willing to reevaluate how I thought about those questions. My previous modus operandi had been to put my understanding of scripture first, and then to try to make my scientific view of the world fit that mold. I decided to try to let the scientific data speak for themselves, and that scripture may have to be reinterpreted if the science and scripture are in conflict.
I learned a lot from my Ecology and Evolution class. My professor did a great job teaching us about phylogeny, the fossil record, mechanisms of speciation, and other topics. I quickly realized that my previous understanding of evolution was a shallow straw man of what is actually contained in evolutionary theory. Some of the data and arguments in favor of evolution that I found most compelling include endogenous retroviruses. Endogenous retroviruses are broken “DNA fossils” of viruses that have inserted themselves into the genome of the host’s germline and consequently were passed down to the host’s offspring. Different species have different endogenous retroviruses present in their genomes, and the pattern of which endogenous retroviruses are shared across species perfectly maps on to the nested hierarchical evolutionary tree generated by other methods. Species predicted to be closely related by evolutionary theory not only have a high percentage of endogenous retroviruses in common, but the endogenous retroviruses are found in the exam same locations in the genome! Because where viruses insert into the genome is essentially random, the odds of this occurring simply by chance rather than by common descent is astronomically low.
If God truly created the world and everything in it over a period of six literal days, why would He make it in such a way that evolution appears to be true? After much reflection and wrestling with cognitive dissonance, I was eventually convinced that the evolutionary model is the best at explaining and making predictions about what see in the natural world. Because Creationism was such an important part of my faith, leaving it behind was one of the things that led to me later having a crisis of faith and my no longer considering myself a Christian, which I may write about in a future post.
