The Sacred Chain: How Understanding Evolution Leads to Deeper Faith

Introduction

I sat by myself at one end of the boardroom, fidgeting with a few notes on the table in front of me. At the other end were about ten older men in suits and ties peering over their tables, arms crossed. It wouldn’t have been difficult for someone just walking in to determine which end of the room held the power.

After my brief opening statement, the rest of our time was set aside for discussion. The two-hour meeting felt more like an inquisition. The first questioner hardly let the silence settle after I spoke: Jim, I went to school with your father. We even went on a mission trip to Mexico together. I’ve known you since you were a kid. What happened to you?

I’ve replayed this scene in my head a hundred times, varying what I say in an attempt to get my accusers to stand up, shake my hand, and say, "Oh, now we see. That makes sense. Sorry for the trouble." But every time it ends the same way: I have to give up my position as a tenured professor of philosophy and leave the college I’ve served for seventeen years.

My crime? Believing what 99 percent of those who have a PhD in biology or medicine believe: that human beings evolved over time and share common ancestors with every other life-form on the planet. But this was a small Christian college, one of the places where evolutionary theory is deemed incompatible with Christian beliefs. And not just incompatible—evolution is considered dangerous. These men believed that hearing anything positive about evolution would make students doubt the Bible: if you can’t believe the creation account in the very first chapter of the Bible, their thinking goes, then why believe any of it?

I do not believe faith is so fragile. I’d already shared with the panel examples of the ways faith and science can not only coexist but actually strengthen each other. But the rhetoric of prominent creationist groups—groups whose rigid interpretations are rooted in a creation science movement less than a hundred years old—so unsettled the college leadership that, after questioning me, they changed the official statement of beliefs that faculty have to sign each year. Not only was I forced out of my job, but my students would no longer be able to learn from a professor who openly affirmed the scientific consensus on evolution.

To be fair, I wasn’t technically fired. I could have stayed if I agreed to the new rules. There are still a few other faculty members there who would admit behind closed doors that they accept evolution. But they can’t teach it as true, like they do photosynthesis or germ theory. They can’t publish scholarly work that defends it. And they certainly can’t have leadership positions in organizations that advocate for evolution—even if that advocacy comes from a Christian viewpoint.

That last point was the kicker for me. I had been working with one such organization, BioLogos, for a couple of years by that time. BioLogos was founded by Dr. Francis Collins—the scientist who led the international Human Genome Project and later served as director of the National Institutes of Health under Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden. In 2006, Collins published a bestselling book, The Language of God, about his adult conversion to the Christian faith and how he made sense of his religious beliefs alongside the science he practiced. BioLogos was founded to spread that message of harmony to others: you don’t have to choose between the well-established science of our day—including evolution—and authentic Christian faith. That news clearly has not gotten out to everyone yet.

I had taken on a part-time position at BioLogos in 2013 with full approval from the college administration. When I first brought up the role, the president was not only supportive but enthusiastic. He wanted the college to be part of these important conversations at the intersection of faith and culture. But he was new to our community, having just been hired from the outside. He understood that evolution could be a controversial topic, but he was confident that we could handle it well. Maybe too confident.

Some of my friends and colleagues had wondered how this arrangement would go over with the broader constituents, but most of them thought I’d be safe because I was an insider. I did my undergraduate degree at that same college, and one semester when I was there, eight of my first cousins were enrolled there too! We got our picture on the front page of the local newspaper. My parents both went to college there, along with a bunch of my aunts and uncles. There are even two buildings on campus named after my ancestors.

Yes, my roots ran deep in that institution. I wasn’t coming in from the outside to stir up trouble. I wasn’t even trying to stir up trouble from the inside. I was simply tired of hearing that former students had given up their faith over a supposed conflict with science. They had been given a view of science—sometimes intentionally, sometimes simply absorbed from their surroundings—that just didn’t hold up when they got out into the real world. These were not a few isolated cases. Science in general, and evolution in particular, have been responsible for the deconstruction of religious faith for many people. But I had learned from my own experience that a better understanding of evolution could actually lead to a deeper and more authentic faith.

So I started talking more frequently about the relationship between science and faith. I tried to show students ways of understanding the Bible that don’t require us to dismiss the work of experts in the sciences. I did that with the explicit approval of the administration. But word got out in wider circles that the college had an evolutionist on the faculty. And when I started working with BioLogos, my views were not limited to classrooms or conversations in my office. They were published on a website that was becoming a little too popular for me to stay out of the public eye. Influential people in the college community were upset, and the wheels were set in motion that led to my departure. My picture appeared on the front page of the local newspaper again, this time with the headline, Professor Resigns After College Stance on Human Origins. To this day, I don’t know how the story got out.

It was a very hard year for my family and me. But with some distance, I now see that trying time as a net positive. It might not have been a good thing in and of itself, but I can affirm that God used it for good. I began working full-time at BioLogos and discovered a rewarding second career there. I know personally half a dozen other faculty members who have had to leave Christian colleges over their affirmation of mainstream science, and I’ve heard of many more. Most of them did not have a place to land like I did, where they could earn a living doing what they’re passionate about. I was the fortunate one. But our collective experience underscores the need for a book like this.

* * *

A word about the title: as we were preparing the proposal to send to publishers, Gail, my literary agent, said, We need to settle on a title and subtitle to submit. I had been using a working title we weren’t in love with for various reasons. One of her colleagues, Dara, was part of our conversation, and she immediately produced a list of possible titles.

Gail said, Wow, did you just come up with those?

Dara responded, No, I just asked ChatGPT to suggest some titles.

These were the days when ChatGPT was new to the headlines as the latest artificial intelligence bot that users could interact with. The title that stood out to us from its list was The Sacred Chain.

The word chain evokes the DNA molecule, and calling it sacred makes us think God might have had something to do with it. There is also a chain of religious doctrine and tradition that links us to the past. I usually get nervous when we combine scientific and theological claims too intimately. For example, I don’t think it’s properly scientific to say and then a miracle happened nor properly theological to think science can explain God. But the title of a book about science and faith might be the place for an exception to that rule. It’s tantalizing to suggest that there could be more going on in the evolution of our bodies than science alone can describe and that science places parameters on the development of our spiritual lives.

With a little more poking around the internet, I discovered that a chain is also a unit of measurement used predominantly by surveyors. A chain is 66 feet, which means there are exactly 80 chains in that otherwise curious total of 5,280 feet in a mile. And an acre is exactly equal to ten square chains. So here’s another (admittedly looser) connotation of my title: a book that surveys a vast swath of our species’ past and finds important and sacred features of that landscape.

Furthermore—and even more loosely (though this is what really sold me on the title)—the chain unit of measurement is what is used to set the distance between stumps on a cricket pitch. For the majority of Americans who don’t know what those words mean, a pitch is what the Brits call a field on which sports are played, and cricket is one of those quintessentially British sports during which everyone stops to have tea. I learned the basic rules of the game when my family took a trip to Oxford one summer for a fellowship I had there, and we were renting (I should say letting) an apartment (I mean a flat) from a family. We met them for an afternoon and decided to let the kids run off some energy in the backyard (er, garden).

They had a cricket set and got a pretty big laugh about our last name and our three kids, because the stumps in cricket are the three poles that are driven into the ground and on top of which the bales are balanced. (We attempted to line up the kids and balance a stick on top of them, but their significant height differences made this impossible.) The batter stands in front of this contraption, collectively called a wicket, and tries to protect the bales from being knocked off the stumps by the bowler on the other team who throws a ball at them. Exactly one chain away is another set of stumps the batter runs to when the ball is hit.

It seemed just too good that ChatGPT would come up with a title that had a connection to my last name. So I asked Dara if she had given it any information about me as the author. She had not. It turns out that there are some coincidences—both in AI and in the history of life!

* * *

We still needed a subtitle. After much discussion with the publishing team, we settled on How Understanding Evolution Leads to Deeper Faith. That’s really the point of the book. Too many loud voices proclaim that science has shown religion to be silly at best and dangerous at worst. And too many people feel that the only alternative to this view is to join with the loud voices on the other side of the conflict who reject the findings of modern science in order to preserve their understanding of religious faith. I think there is a better way—one that not only preserves faith in the face of modern science but, through significant engagement and dialogue with science, leads to a deeper, stronger, and more relevant faith in today’s world. At least, that’s what it did for me.

This book shows how I worked through the challenge of reconciling religious truths with scientific ones and found new and more profound insights about God and humanity along the way. As I tested out approaches to bringing these two ways of seeing the world into alignment, it felt a bit like adjusting a pair of binoculars this way and that until the complete image came into focus. I gained both clarity and perspective. But some areas remained blurry longer than others.

The book is organized around my explorations of these initially blurry areas, which presented challenges to seeing evolution and Christian faith as one coherent picture.

The chapters in part I are about the challenge of the Bible—why does evolution pose such a threat to so many American Christians’ view of the Bible, and how might we think differently about it? I give some statistics showing that the United States is a significant outlier when it comes to evolution acceptance, and I tease out some consequences of how creationists use the Bible. Finally, I look to C. S. Lewis for a better way of understanding scripture. This not only helped me reconcile modern science and the Bible but also gave me tools for tackling the other challenges.

Part II begins with a fun exercise to help us grasp the incredibly vast stretch of time our universe has existed. Humans are just a tiny blip on this scale. What does this say about God’s priorities? I describe my visits to some very old calendars and explain other methods scientists have developed to keep track of time. This understanding of time prompts me to go back to the origin stories in the Bible and read them less like newspaper accounts and find richer insights about the human condition. And I benefit from the insights of another Brit, G. K. Chesterton, and from Indian author Arundhati Roy. They helped me see God less as an engineer and more as an artist who delights in small and seemingly insignificant details.

The challenge of part III is the concept of a species. I had been led by my theological tradition and by the hard-wiring of our brains to think of species as fixed and unchanging. But evolution reveals that the boundaries between them are fuzzy and constantly changing. What does that mean for humans, who according to the Bible are created in the image of God? Is that designation just for Homo sapiens? What about the cast of other humanlike characters that scientists have discovered and that the biblical authors knew nothing about, like Neanderthals? Do we really differ in kind from all other creatures, or is it only a difference of degree? I unsuccessfully tried to visit a couple of ancient archaeological sites but then was successful in visiting ancient cave paintings and old-growth redwood trees. These failures and successes gave me fresh insights about our species and a better understanding of our place in creation.

Part IV considers the challenge of how we can understand the soul if the human body is the product of evolution. Saint Gregory of Nyssa (along with an Eastern Orthodox priest whose church in San Diego supposedly has a relic of Saint Gregory) helped me sort out the importance of our physical bodies for the capacities of our minds and souls. Walking upright on two legs had a surprisingly significant effect on the kind of creature our ancestors became over the last several million years, including the game-changing ability to speak. I describe some of the fossil discoveries that have shed light on walking and talking, and I consider the testimony of Helen Keller about the different world that opens up to us when we have language. We see how that world allows us to talk about souls.

The challenge in part V is the hardest. I won’t pretend to neatly solve the age-old problem of why there is pain and suffering in a good world created by God. But I do believe that bringing this problem into conversation with evolutionary science points to a more satisfying solution than that of my theological tradition. The evolutionary development of our capacity to love takes center stage here, and I use the ideas of French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil to contemplate how God might use pain and suffering for important and good purposes.

In the conclusion, I reflect on what the role of suffering in our past means for our present and future. This involves speculation about the ultimate fate of the universe and ourselves from the perspectives of science and faith. But I suggest that there are legitimate grounds for hope—not just wishful thinking—that the present order of things is not the end.

This book should not be understood primarily as a Christian book, one relevant only for followers of Jesus. There is no denying that I write from the Christian tradition; I was born into it, and it has shaped my thinking and imagination. And no matter how embarrassed I am by the words and deeds of some others who identify as Christian today, I continue to belong to a generous Christian community that attempts to live and love according to the example of Christ. But I am not arguing that mine is the only authentic articulation of faith, and I hope this book will appeal across traditional lines and be relevant to anyone who believes (or simply hopes) that there is a personal Being at the core of the universe who loves us.

* * *

My engagement with science has led me to a deeper, more authentic faith. This book tells the story of how that happened through lots of conversations with interesting people and visits to remarkable places. All of the personal anecdotes I tell are true, but this is not a strictly chronological account of my life. In real life, working through ideas like these happens simultaneously on many fronts, rather than sequentially. But my goal here is conceptual clarity, so I’ve taken conversations and episodes from my life and packaged them so they might be most easily understood. In that sense, my story is an everyman story—a kind of archetype for others who have wondered how science and religion might fit together.

As such, reading this book about my journey might be the start of one’s own journey for some readers. Perhaps you will find yourself considering ideas your religious community has told you to stay away from; you might come to see that evolutionary science can help us better understand a God who intentionally created human beings. Or perhaps you will begin to wonder if there is more to our story than what science can tell; maybe you’ll start to think that religion, as flawed and shot through with human ineptitude as it is, might really be pointing at something beyond what science can explain. Maybe some minds will be changed as a result.

I know this book will probably not convince everyone. But I’m hopeful that many people will find in these pages a better (and more accurate!) account of the whole scope of our humanity—that they will follow the sacred chain that links our biological past with our present capacity for morality and even the hope for future immortality.

Part I

Bible

1

Communities of Origin

My journey to understanding science and faith began where everyone’s does: in the community I was born into. I come from a very religious family. Every week