“Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
Few things are as fundamental to the Christian conception of God as truth.
It matters that Christ rose from the dead. It matters that our prayers are heard. It matters that the promises to the poor and marginalized are not empty, and it matters that the creator of the universe loves us more than you or I could ever know.
It matters, in short, that we can trust that the Christian witness is one of truth.
And yet, so often today, it isn’t.
It isn’t true that the earth was created six thousand years ago.
It isn’t true that undocumented immigrants are behind a wave of violent crime.
It isn’t true that Trump would’ve won the election if not for voter fraud.
It isn’t true that this level of climate change is a natural, or safe, occurrence.
It isn’t true that COVID is “just a flu”, or that vaccines are a globalist conspiracy.
It isn’t.
I think the (particularly white) Evangelical church in America struggles to find the language we need to talk about the problem. It doesn’t fit nicely into our atomized version of the gospel, where we reduce good and evil to the sins and virtues of individual people.
This works for some problems: I am often self-righteous, or jealous, or self-absorbed, and these (among other) flaws reveal that I am a sinner in need of God’s mercy, and hurt people I care about in ways I need to repent of and make right. The sins are mine as an individual, and so are the amends.
But lots of problems aren’t quite like this. I struggle to get rid of the belief that depression is “my fault”, a sign of a personal selfishness or sin or weakness, and that it therefore makes me a burden on the people who care about me. This is fairly common for people experiencing mental illness, mostly as the result of unhealthy ways we as a society approach mental illness and negative emotions.
This is certainly a problem -- it hurts lots of people I care about, myself included, but it’s also not really anybody’s fault. I don’t think anybody has ever told me I was a burden, or that my depression was because of my sin, and I think that figuring out how much blame each of us deserves is a lot less important than figuring out how we as a society can work together to fix it.
This is, I think, the way we should think of the problem of falsehoods in the church. It’s not that people who don’t understand climate change or vaccines are inherently sinful, or even unintelligent. With the exception of a few who should know better, I don’t think it’s fair to characterize people as lying purely for being mistaken.
But it’s also not fair to say that just because we can’t isolate a specific sinful intent, there isn’t any problem in the church. Climate change is already killing people, and will have killed many, many more people by the time my grandkids (if they exist) are my age. COVID has killed more than 300,000 people in the US alone, and we still don’t know how much it will hurt even asymptomatic patients in the long run. Sometimes election conspiracy theories amount to nothing, but sometimes they result in mass violence.
I can’t tell you how to fix this problem. It reflects a deep systemic failure and will probably take many years of thankless work by many different people. But I can tell you a little bit about a smaller question, one I think we in the church need to really wrestle with: how does an intelligent, well-meaning person end up believing things that are just fundamentally untrue?
Those of you who knew me as a teenager may remember my “arguing on the internet” creationist phase. I was under the impression that I was fighting the good fight, helping to bring people to the faith in Christ I held (and continue to hold tightly), so I’d spend hours writing up my own misconceptions as if they were insights, blinded to the vacuity of my words by my own self-regard. I was a warrior fighting for the truth.
Except, of course, I wasn’t. I was just wrong, and I wasted a lot of people’s time.
(And I'm sorry)
Because not only is the evidence for evolution absolutely overwhelming, but the resulting theory is perfectly compatible with the Christian faith and even, I've discovered in the past few years, is capable of deepening my understanding of and relationship to the One who helped it all unfold. More worryingly, I've seen too many of my friends fall away from faith in Christ after their churches consciously or unconsciously forced them to choose between their faith and observable truth. Was I a part of that? I hope against all hope that I wasn't.
So why was I so off track? Why did I think the entire earth was younger than the city of Jericho? Why couldn’t I be convinced by the abundance of evidence right before my eyes? I wish I could give you a full answer, and even more I wish I could give you an answer where I come out looking good. But, for good or for bad, I think there were a handful of common threads:
The “Christians are being oppressed (in America)” myth.
Overconfidence in superficial “logic”
Failing to distinguish good sources of information from bad
Selective demands for rigor
First is, I think, one of the most pernicious lies in the American church today: that Christianity is “under attack” here. I would like to write about the harm this has caused in more detail someday soon, but today I just want you to understand how easy it is to come to believe this.
As a middle schooler I didn’t have a lot of respect for authority, but I did have a lot of respect for church, where we came to worship the God I already knew from first-hand experience. And I especially had respect for the men and women the church had entrusted to guide my soul, who I’d come to trust after numerous deep and vulnerable conversations.
And so as I listened to what they said about God, tested it against the bible and found it true, I also started to absorb their other beliefs. I heard about how the government was getting rid of prayer in schools because they didn’t want kids to learn about Jesus. I heard about real Christian persecution in other countries and how “it could happen here”. And I heard about brave creationist scientists who’d been kicked out of academia by “evolutionists” desperate to silence them.
And so, subtly at first, this shifted the framing of the issue for me. Instead of “science vs. weird conspiracy theory”, it became “two equally valid opinions”, and eventually “a bad opinion trying to silence the good opinion”, all of which worked to make creationism a potentially valid idea without reference to a single shred of evidence.
This “they’re trying to silence us” narrative is popular today among people like “the intellectual dark web”, who aren’t particularly silenced but have spun their notoriety for being justttttt on the edge of racism and sexism into fairly successful careers. This works in the same way as creationism did on me: if you can convince enough people that your critics are acting in bad faith, then your views become real options without having to produce any evidence for them. (And better yet, nobody can ask you to produce any evidence without becoming part of the supposed conspiracy to keep you down!)
I should note that plenty of my close friends at the time were atheists, and most did not seem the least bit interested in undermining my faith and were in fact quite supportive of it. So while it was easy for me to buy into the “persecution by secularists” narrative, I don’t want to imply that it was justified or in any way reasonable.
The second piece of my creationist puzzle was a flawed conception of logic. If you read a book on Christian apologetics, you’ll come across a lot of arguments that look something like this:
God is the greatest possible being.
A God that exists is even greater than a God that doesn’t exist.
Therefore, God exists.
As an academic, this argument bothers me because it isn’t valid -- that is, it doesn’t actually prove the thing that it claims to.
As a Christian, it bothers me even more because it reduces faith, the incomparable experience of being confronted by the God who created the universe and his fierce, sacrificial, all-encompassing love, to the level of a silly word game.
But as a teenager who was just learning what it meant to make a logical argument, it was gospel. I already knew I God existed because I had experienced him, and so when arguments were introduced to me as “here’s how you prove that to other people”, I believed them. This must be what logic is.
Or isn’t.
Because what this sort of logic teaches a person isn’t how to better understand the world. No person in the history of the world has thought of these three bullet points and therefore learned something about God. Instead, it works more like a set of magic words to convince yourself that what you already believed is “the logical thing”, without ever making any reference to the real world or checking if your assumptions were true.
And so you don’t have to learn biology if you know that “the second law of thermodynamics” and “irreducible complexity” are the magic words that counter Darwinian natural selection, just as “liberals hate biology” counters the complex scientific world of transgender people’s lives and just as you don’t have to learn epidemiology if you know that “a cost-benefit analysis would show lockdowns are unjustified”, regardless of if you’ve ever done such an analysis or even done a cursory google search to see if maybe someone already did that.
And it means that as long as you say the right words about how “racism is, by definition, discrimination on the basis of race” you can come out against affirmative action or reparations without ever having to look at how race works in the United States or what the effects of these policies might be. And you can produce documents like John MacArthur’s weird race petition (I don’t want to link to the original document, but you can find a summary/critique here) that use superficially logical and theological language to argue for a deeply racist and nonsensical position.
Third, these two issues come together to undermine legitimate sources of intellectual authority. It’s true that biologists make mistakes sometimes -- indeed, this is one of the primary features of science: we keep looking for new ways to test things, specifically because we want to catch any mistakes we might have made!
But, with the black-and-white thinking we talked about last time, this meant that if scientists made errors, then they couldn't claim to be trustworthy. They just were ideologically disposed to believe in evolution, and were trying to cover up that fact by silencing the creationists in the academy. And if the creationist telling me this had made an error? Well, everyone makes mistakes.
What’s dangerous about this is that I could come to the belief that I was incredibly well-informed about evolution. After all, I’d certainly read more books about evolution, and spent more time thinking about evolution, than the average person, even if it was just an echo chamber of nonsense written by other people who also didn’t understand biology. And so I knew "facts" about supposed "missing links" and "statistical proofs" of creationism that were just... made up. I was somehow less informed than if I had read nothing at all, a trend it's easy to spot on vaccine or climate denial websites.
Or worse -- I'd read a mix of creationist literature and actual biology and, believing myself to be an unbiased observer, dismissed the biological literature as "fake" because it contradicted the creationist literature I trusted more, because of parts I thought I understood but didn't, and because of the isolated demands for rigor we'll discuss next. And now I could tell myself I had "done my research" and "come to the conclusion that evolution was not supported by the evidence", when the real problem was that I didn't understand statistics and had bought in to a bunch of bs.
This is my fear when we tell people that it’s important to “think for yourself”. On some level, of course it's important! Evangelicalism would be in a much better place if more people thought for themselves and didn’t give in to the dangerous groupthink we’re now known for.
But at the same time, we aren’t all scientists. I believe the scientific consensus on COVID, and climate change, and so on, because I understand how the scientific method works and trust the expertise and honesty of the people who study these things. But you shouldn’t listen to me if I try to do my own research on COVID (unless I actually gain the relevant background knowledge), because I don’t know anything about epidemiology and (for most of you) neither do you. You have no way of distinguishing an accurate scientific statement about the COVID virus from an inaccurate one, and that’s okay! Neither do I! That’s why we have scientists who specialize in pandemics. But if you’re going to claim that “the scientists are getting it wrong”, you’d better know a hell of a lot more than I do.
Lastly, and perhaps most dangerously, is what Scott Alexander calls the “isolated demand for rigor.”
The pseudo-logic I had internalized only had room for three options: certain that a claim was true, certain the claim was false, and completely uncertain. As a result, I thought that if I could show there was any chance whatsoever that a given scientific statement was false, I had rendered it (at best) completely uncertain.
It didn’t matter if someone did the same to me -- I was happy to admit that creationism and evolution were two equally valid options everyone should just make up their own minds about. This would be a huge shift from the (supposed) silencing of creationist scientists!
The problem with this sort of thinking is that every human thought process involves some level of uncertainty. I don’t believe evolution is true because I think it’s 100% certain to be true -- I’d say I’m closer to 99.9% certain. It’s certainly possible that the millions of pieces of scientific evidence for evolution just appeared by some bizarre coincidence. But I think the probability is so low that to believe this happened is fundamentally unreasonable.
(This is a standard in conservative media: demands that liberals admit voter fraud is possible, or that science can get things wrong, followed by discussions of “hypocrisy”. But this just isn’t how evidence works -- I certainly believe election-changing voter fraud is possible, but it’s insane to act on the idea that it happened without evidence! Imagine if a prosecutor sought to jail somebody because “technically we don’t know that they didn’t do it!”)
Here’s an example: one piece of the evidence for evolution comes from the fossil record. We have a series of transitional fossils showing ape-like species slowly evolving into early hominids, which slowly evolve into distinctly human skeletons.
An open-minded observer might take this as evidence that humans evolved from other primates. (Not necessarily conclusive proof, but evidence.) But I, wise creationist that I was, noticed a flaw: perhaps fossils change when they spend time in the ground, and perhaps these changes were causing older human fossils to look more apelike! (I did not, of course, provide any mechanism by which this could happen.) Because there was technically some small chance the fossil record was wrong, I chose to completely ignore it.
This is an isolated demand for rigor: I demanded that others’ points of view have evidence much stronger than I demanded for my own, and used this demand to sustain my belief in the face of all evidence to the contrary. But worse than that, this was a demand for rigor whose answer I wasn’t willing to listen to, because I’d fundamentally misunderstood why evolutionary biologists believe what they believe.
Because what makes the evidence for evolution so powerful isn’t fossils. It’s that we have multiple lines of evidence making the same prediction.
As my freshman biology professor explained to me, we can assemble the fossil record into a pretty complete tree of when and how different species evolved. We can also look at DNA and how it changes over time, and assemble a completely independent tree of when and how different species evolved. And miraculously, we get the same tree both times.
This explanation played a big role in finally getting out of my creationist bubble. Whereas I’d seen scientists as dogmatic, unwilling to see how devastating the creationist critique was, it turned out that the biologists had already thought of all of that, and checked whether or not it was true.
Because, to paraphrase Randall Munroe (the alt-text here), they weren’t using science to show that they were already right. They were using science to become right.
And I think the more people understand that, the harder it will become to maintain the anti-science bubble.
So what can we do?
All of these things --- myths of Christian oppression, overconfidence in superficial “logic”, trust in bad sources of information, ignoring evidence using isolated demands for rigor --- come together to form a sort of web that ensnares people in service of the father of lies. If we as Evangelical Christians really want to live in service to the truth, I think we need to fight against all four simultaneously. This means:
Being honest about the generally privileged position white Christians hold in the US, and how we relate to oppressed and marginalized people and groups.
Teaching each other to think critically, and especially how to distinguish real arguments from superficial “gotchas”.
Learning to have humility when we're outside our field -- if we're going to accuse (e.g. biologists) of getting the science wrong, we need to be really sure we're basing our opinion on actual scientific data and not on something we saw on twitter once. (Or even a thousand times!)
Educate each other about how science actually works, and the many ways we test and retest hypotheses to be as sure as humanly possible that things are true.
Speaking out against purveyors of falsehood, especially in the church. People like Dinesh D’Souza, Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, Mark Levin, OANN, Newsmax, etc. are charlatans and frauds, and we should be just as quick and forceful to denounce them as we are purveyors of the prosperity gospel or cult leaders. We need to think hard about how to help people stuck in patterns of this sort of belief see the fraud for what it is -- if you have any insights please let me know! Maybe the professionals who help deprogram people leaving cults might have some insights.
Similarly, lift up truthtellers, including groups like Biologos who are hard at work seeking to understand what the bible and biology can together tell us about God.
Being honest with ourselves about the standards of rigor we have for our own evidence and that of others, and cultivating intellectual honesty as a virtue.