Science and Loss of Faith
Some years ago, during the creation/evolution debates in the Canadian Reformed Churches, the claim was made that young people were losing their faith over evolution. They’d be taught origins from a creationist point of view at their Christian school and church. They would receive superficial or inaccurate critiques of evolutionary theory. Having graduated from high school, they then went on to a secular university and discovered that the case for Darwinian macro-evolution was far stronger than they’d been led to believe. One thing leads to another and then they abandon the faith altogether. So wouldn’t it be helpful if such young people could understand the compatibility of Christianity and Darwinian macro-evolution?
In his recent book Return of the God Hypothesis, Stephen C. Meyer relates a different kind of story:
On a speaking tour of New Zealand several years ago, I met a young science journalist who had grown up in a religious home but lost his faith after college upon reading a book by a prominent theistic evolutionist. The author of the book presented evolutionary mechanisms such as natural selection and random mutation as God’s way of creating new forms of life. The author also denied that life manifested any evidence of intelligent design. The student concluded that if the evolutionary process could produce new forms of life without intelligent guidance or design, then there was no need to posit the existence of God at all.
Return of the God Hypothesis, pp.434-435
In any case, when someone “loses their faith,” there’s always more going on than a judgment between what science allegedly says and what the Bible says. It’s never that simple.
