Scholarship

Most people believe that evolution provides an adequate account of human origins. But for substantial numbers around the world, that doesn’t preclude divine direction. A new survey spanning North America, South America, and Europe found that 13 to 29 percent of people believe in God-guided evolution.

People Who Say Humans Evolved in A Process Guided by God:

13% Germany

22% United Kingdom

25% Argentina

29% United States

Rap artists Megan Thee Stallion and Missy Elliott have been burnishing their résumés as of late; following entries for “platinum-selling recording artist” there’s a new one: “budding philanthropist.”

Megan Pete, known onstage as Megan Thee Stallion, recently established a scholarship fund at her alma mater Texas Southern University. The $150,000 Flaming Hot Fund was established in partnership with Frito-Lay, and seeks to alleviate outstanding student debt. She said, “I feel like everyone knows I love education and I would definitely advise anyone to pursue a real degree and to finish school.”

The Flaming Hot Fund will be partially funded from sales of a streetwear apparel line inspired by Flaming Hot Cheetos, a favorite of hers. Additionally, Frito-Lay will make a separate donation of $100,000 to the Pete and Thomas Foundation, a non-profit Megan Thee Stallion launched in 2022 to help underserved communities in her hometown of Houston.

As for Missy Elliott, she recently celebrated the one-year anniversary of her street dedication in Virginia by donating to the Portsmouth Redevelopment and Housing Authority. Elliott’s donation of $50,000 was enough to pay the past-due rents for 26 families in the area. She said that she wanted the occasion to be an opportunity to give back to the community that gave her so much.

Patricia Elliott spoke at the Portsmouth ceremony, explaining her daughter’s motivation for giving back: “So when you give, you give because you remember those days when you didn’t have. If each person would give when they get to the top, then, what a real beautiful world we would be in.”

Possible Preaching Angle:

You don't have to be a titan of business to engage in philanthropy; no matter your role, position, or station in life, anyone can make an impact through generosity.

Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School, a leader in the field of behavioral science, and co-author of dozens of papers in peer-reviewed journals, has been charged with falsifying data.

In a 2012 paper Gino and her collaborators reported that "asking people who fill out tax or insurance documents to attest to the truth of their responses at the top of the document, rather than at the bottom, significantly increased the accuracy of the information they provided." The paper has been cited hundreds of times by other scholars.

But recently, three behavioral scientists, analyzing data that Dr. Gino and her co-authors had posted online, cited a digital record contained within an Excel file to demonstrate that some of the data points had been tampered with, and that the tampering helped drive the result.

Harvard has placed Gino on administrative leave.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Employees; Students - We must all be careful of claiming another’s work as our own (especially in the age of AI) or of modifying the facts to prove our point. 2) Pastor; Preacher - The preacher must also beware of dishonesty when preaching. Using someone else’s sermon or personal illustration as your own is a temptation many fall into.

A recent survey polled people with an average age of 38. Eighty percent had college degrees. The results revealed a lot of ignorance about origin of life research and the success of life creating life from nonliving matter (also called abiogenesis).

More than 41 percent thought that researchers had created “complex life forms from scratch,” such as frogs, using simple chemicals and conditions that “approximate Earth’s early atmosphere.” Remarkably, more than 72 percent of respondents thought origin of life researchers had created “simple life forms from scratch,” such as bacteria.

To put it kindly, the respondents’ great expectations about the accomplishments of origin of life researchers are wrong. Wildly so.

Researchers have not created a frog or a bacterium from simple chemicals in the lab under early Earth conditions. They haven’t created a functional membrane, or flagella or cilia, or any of dozens of molecular machines, or the DNA required for even the simplest living bacterium.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The mystery of life is explained in the profound phrase “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well” (Ps. 139:14). We can only understand the origin of life when we turn our minds to our Creator God who is the Source of life.

Wrongly applied, science itself can become a religion, and the scientific method a Bible. In But What If We're Wrong?, Chuck Klosterman addresses the possibility that the greatest certainties might one day be disproven. At one point, he sites previous "certainties" about dinosaurs as an example. They were once known to be cold-blooded like reptiles. But now it is a “fact” that they were warm-blooded like birds. Such reversals are a regular occurrence as the scientific community refines what is known. Klosterman explains how these changes affect how we feel about the new certainties:

Yet these kinds of continual reversals don’t impact the way we think about paleontology. Such a reversal doesn’t impact the way we think about anything. If any scientific concept changes five times in five decades, the perception is that we’re simply refining what we thought we knew before, and every iteration is just a “more correct” depiction of what was previously considered “totally correct.” In essence, we anchor our sense of objective reality in science itself—its laws and methods and sagacity … But what if we’re really wrong, about something really big?

Klosterman concludes by addressing the possibility that some of today’s scientific ideas might be proven false. How would it change the view of the universe? He said, “Philosophically, as a species, we are committed to this. In the same way that religion defined cultural existence in the pre-Copernican age, the edge of science defines the existence we occupy today.” But what if he's wrong?

Since it's opening in 1874 the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England has been the place where many extraordinary discoveries in physics have taken place. Its history of innovation is great. Cavendish professors have completely changed our understanding of the physical world. They discovered the first electron. The same was true of the neutron. The lab laid the foundations for the discovery of quantum mechanics in the 1920s. It also was instrumental in laying the groundwork that led to the determination of the double-helix structure of the DNA molecule by Francis Crick and James Watson in the 1950's.

Of course those are just some of the highlights of the discoveries of that great lab. What's interesting is that at the entrance to the old Cavendish lab the words of Psalm 111 stand above the great oak door—"The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein." The words are carved in Latin. The verse was put there at the instigation of the first Cavendish Professor, James Clark Maxwell. That's not surprising because 140 years ago the Bible and Christianity were held in high esteem in Britain. But what is surprising is that they are also over the entrance to the new lab that was opened in 1973. Andrew Briggs, a PhD student at the time, was so impressed with the words above the old lab that he suggested that the words be put above the new entrance, only that this time they be inscribed in English. Cavendish Professor A. B. Pippard put the proposal to the Policy Committee. He was sure they would veto the suggestion but to his surprise, they approved it.

Possible Preaching Angles: Despite the skepticism in our society, there are some scientists who still recognize that God created all things and that by studying these things we are thinking God's thoughts after him.

Sarah Salviander is research scientist in the field of astrophysics. A lifelong atheist, Sarah became a theist as an undergraduate physics student, when she came to believe that the universe was too elegantly organized to be an accident. She is currently a researcher at the Astronomy Department at the University of Texas at Austin, and a part-time assistant professor in the Physics Department at Southwestern University.

Her parents were socialists and political activists who were also atheists, though they preferred to be called agnostics. In her testimony Sarah wrote:

It's amazing that for the first 25 years of my life, I met only three people who identified as Christian. My view of Christianity was negative from an early age. Looking back, I realized a lot of this was the unconscious absorption of the general hostility toward Christianity that is common in places like Canada and Europe.

So she began to focus on her physics and math studies. She joined campus clubs, started to make friends, and, for the first time in her life, met Christians.

They weren't like [atheists and agnostics I knew]—they were joyous and content. And, they were smart, too. I was astonished to find that my physics professors, whom I admired, were Christian. Their personal example began to have an influence on me, and I found myself growing less hostile to Christianity.

Sarah then joined a group in the Centre for Astrophysics and Space Sciences (CASS) that was researching evidence for the big bang, and that was a turning point in her conversion. She continued: "I started to sense an underlying order to the universe. Without knowing it, I was awakening to what Psalm 19 tells us so clearly: the heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands."

We all have failures in our careers. But usually we keep quiet about it. Not this Princeton professor, who recently shared his CV of failures on Twitter for the world to see. It includes sections titled "Degree programs I did not get into," "Research funding I did not get" and "Paper rejections from academic journals."

Why did he do it? "Most of what I try fails, but these failures are often invisible, while the successes are visible. I have noticed that this sometimes gives others the impression that most things work out for me," Princeton assistant professor of psychology and public affairs Johannes Haushofer wrote on the CV.

Projecting only success and never recognizing failure has damaging effects, Haushofer wrote. So he decided to do something about it. "[People] are more likely to attribute their own failures to themselves, rather than the fact that the world is stochastic, applications are crapshoots, and selection committees and referees have bad days. This CV of Failures is an attempt to balance the record and provide some perspective," he said. But here's what Haushofer called his "meta-failure": "This darn CV of Failures," he wrote, "has received way more attention than my entire body of academic work."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Though we often fail, we can rise up again because of God's forgiveness; (2) God will lift up all those who humble themselves, but the proud he rejects

One of the most astonishing discoveries astrophysicists have made in recent decades is that if gravity were just 0.000000000001 (one-trillionth of one) percent stronger, our universe would have reversed course long ago. It would have collapsed catastrophically, ending in a big crunch, the opposite of the big bang. Likewise, if gravity were just 0.000000000001 (one-trillionth of one) percent weaker, our universe would have flown apart so rapidly that planets, stars, galaxies—all the basic constituents of the universe—would never have had a chance to coalesce. We'd all be dust in the wind.

Is it an accident that everything turned out so well? That gravity is not too strong, not too weak, but just right?

Sir Fred Hoyle, the late University of Cambridge astronomer and avowed atheist, didn't think so, not for a second. After doing innumerable computations, Hoyle discovered that the odds of our being accidents of nature are comparable to the likelihood of a tornado sweeping through a junkyard and assembling scrap metal into a fully functioning Boeing 747. "'So small as to be negligible," he said, following his calculations, "even if a tornado were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole universe." Hoyle said, "One arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing measure or order must be the outcome of intelligent design."

In his book Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus, Nabeel Quershi explains how an insight from organic chemistry helped him, as a young Muslim, to accept the truth of the Trinity.

We sat front and center in Mrs. Adamski's lecture hall, not more than three feet from her as she taught. I vividly remember the exact location of my seat because it was there that I first opened up to the Trinity, a moment still etched in my mind.

Projected in the front of the room were three large depictions of nitrate in bold black and white. We were studying resonance, the configuration of electrons in certain molecules. The basic concept of resonance is easy enough to understand, even without a background in chemistry. Essentially, the building block of every physical object is an atom, a positively charged nucleus orbited by tiny, negatively charged electrons. Atoms bond to one another by sharing their electrons, forming a molecule. Different arrangements of the electrons in certain molecules are called "resonance structures." Some molecules, like water, have no resonance while others have three resonance structures or more, like the nitrate on the board.

Mrs. Adamski continued: "These drawings are the best way to represent resonance structures on paper, but it's actually much more complicated. Technically, a molecule with resonance is every one of its structures at every point in time, yet no single one of its structures at any point in time." My eyes rested on the three separate structures of nitrate on the wall, my mind assembling the pieces. One molecule of nitrate is all three resonance structures all the time and never just one of them. The three are separate but all the same, and they are one. They are three in one.

That's when it clicked: if there are things in this world that can be three in one, even incomprehensibly so, then why cannot God? And just like that, the Trinity became potentially true in my mind.

The astronomer Allan Sandage was hailed as "the most influential astronomer" of the 20th century. For six decades, Dr. Sandage played a key role in increasing our understanding of the Universe and determining the Hubble Constant, which describes the Universe's expansion. He was awarded the Crafoord Prize, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for astronomy. Prior to his death in 2010 at the age of 84, Sandage had also quietly but boldly confessed his faith in Christ.

But Sandage's journey to belief wasn't quick or easy. As a boy he was "almost a practicing atheist" who was nevertheless nagged by the mysteries of space. Early in his career he was convinced that science—without reference to a Creator—could explain everything about the Universe. In his own words, Sandage believed that "Reality was the equations. Reality was the interconnection of the laws of physics."

But as his knowledge of the Universe increased, Sandage slowly opened his mind to faith in God. He recounts the story of a science writers' conference when he was struck "for the first time" by the "intricacies of the human body," not to mention the entire Universe. He started to question if life could really have happened by pure chance. And so at the age of 50 he said, "A door opened and I gradually went through it with a different view of things …. Faith means you have to go all the way, accept Christianity totally or reject it totally." Sandage totally embraced faith in Christ.

As he continued to explore the Universe and write scientific papers, Sandage never saw any conflict between his faith and science. He claimed that his conversion was helped along by Christians who were also scientists. They showed him that "it was possible to do science and have a faith [in Christ]." He argued, "It was my science that drove me to the conclusion that the world is much more complicated than can be explained by science …. If there is a God, he must be true both to science and [Christianity]."

It is better to be a saint than a scholar; indeed, the only way to be a true scholar is to be striving to be a true saint.