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What is your sense of the place for a Christian in the university today?
The universities that I'm most familiar with—Colorado, Harvard, and Brown, and I've been to lots of other universities as well—are typical of most American universities, I think. They are profoundly secular places in the sense that they are open and committed to the American ideal of free expression, free exercise of religion, and tolerance of religious views.
But tolerance doesn't always mean the kind of acceptance that we would hope for. When I say that universities are profoundly secular, I mean that they are open to religious ideas but not necessarily respecting of them. It is difficult to live a life as a committed person of faith in most American universities, not because faith is persecuted or suppressed, but rather because faith is not taken seriously. Students will ask other students when they see them fasting during Lent, or going to church on Sunday morning, or wearing a yarmulke to class, "You don't really believe that stuff, do you?"
I think students who are committed people of faith, whether Christians or adherents of other religions, have a difficult time overcoming that sort of well-meaning disbelief—the incredulity that anyone who is well-educated, "one of us," could take religion seriously.
I'm occasionally visible as a Christian or as a Roman Catholic at my university, and my colleagues are profoundly tolerant. I have many colleagues who are observant Jews, deeply religious Christians in other denominations, and a few who are practicing Muslims. My faculty colleagues respect that, even though many of them respect it in an almost condescending way, as if to say, "Oh, it's fine that you or someone else practices this, but everybody knows that serious scientists are just too smart to give any credence to religion."
If I had to say anything about the general intellectual climate of American universities with respect to faith, addressed to young believers entering such an institution, I would warn them. I would say, "Watch out, because they are going to kill you with kindness." You'll be allowed to practice and express your faith openly, but you will not be taken seriously.
In addition to your career as a teacher and a research scientist, you have become deeply embroiled in America's controversy over origins. What led you to enter into the fray of creation and evolution?
I had just begun to teach general introductory biology during my last two years at Harvard, so that meant I was speaking to a crowd, which I enjoyed. I enjoyed teaching very much, I enjoyed working with students, and I enjoyed teaching what you might call general biology because it forced me to expand the range of what I understood. Rather than just talk about my own specialties, suddenly I had to learn something about muscle contraction, the way the nerve impulse works, the way the digestive system works, and even the way in which organisms are structured in the ecosystem.
When I started teaching at Brown, that was one of the kinds of courses I taught. In my second semester here, a group of students came to me. They said that a fellow named Henry Morris, the founder of the Institute for Creation Research from California, was coming to campus, and he had challenged anyone in the department of biology or geology to debate him on the validity of the theory of evolution. Several of these students who had taken a class from me the previous semester said, "You're a pretty good public speaker. You seem to know something about science. Would you like to debate him?"
Had you heard of Henry Morris before this point?
No, I had not. I hadn't heard of him at all, and I immediately said no to the students. I told them I was a cell biologist and I didn't know anything about evolution. And they came back to me and said, "Well, does that mean he's right?" And I said, "No, of course he's not right."
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