Take it as parable, and try to look at the deeper lesson it's trying to convey. The moral lessons about how to treat others and lead a good life can be very powerful. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.
I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them--bring them here and kill them in front of me. It's so hypocritical and judgmental. People are born LGBS straight yet the Bible says "they must be put to death"; put to death for being born a certain way? I definately believe in God.
God is my main man! But the Bible is a whole other story. However I do believe in Jesus and the lessons and values he taught. So I guess that makes me a Christian who has her own set of views and doesn't follow blinding religion enforced beliefs.
Luke But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them--bring them here and kill them in front of me. Also know that the bible has been translated many times, and some meanings inevitably get lost. There's a good reason why people are working hard to try to interpret the actual meaning behind the bible.
The real question is was he the person he claimed to be. Back to the bible. Well, God. But who God is can only be determined by special revelation. General revelation is sufficient for anyone to know that God exists because of the creation as per Romans , but the details of who God is, what He has done in the past, what He will do in the future, His plan of salvation, His character etc.
So without a trustworthy source of revelation I could not know whether I was trusting in the true God or a figment of my imagination see below. Enns says he used to be orthodox in his thinking. What caused him to view God differently? A Disney movie on a plane trip! In fact Enns reveals that he believes in a god that he wants to believe in rather than the God revealed in Scripture :. But how does Enns know this he seems preoccupied with repeating it throughout his book and sounds quite certain about it?
He cannot point to a specific Scripture to back it up, and even if he tried to use words from the Bible to verify his claim he has already stated that the words in the Bible are not ultimately trustworthy.
So Enns is just relying on his own mind to determine truth. He has become the god he follows. But like most modern theological de-constructionists, he never then gives you a replacement interpretive methodology that should be applied except for his opinion. This is likely to leave any reader that adopts his ideas to logically conclude that there is no universal way to understand Scripture and that whatever you decide to think or feel about the text is OK.
Leelia Carolyn Cornell. Great article! Faith is a word we so often hear everywhere. Please read my blog about The Importance of Having Faith. For if all is theological, what has been revealed? Do we have a true Gospel or a theological counterfeit? But they still take part in a set of spiritual practices, albeit a mish-mash of them.
And why not, considering the real sense of personal autonomy gained from time outside. The first is disenchanted with the church; the second is disenchanted with religion. The former still hold tightly to Christian belief, they just do not find value in the church as a component of that belief. The latter have primarily rejected religion and prefer instead to define their own boundaries for spirituality—often mixing beliefs and practices from a variety of religions and traditions.
Those who love Jesus but not the church are certainly more favorable toward religion and would likely be more receptive to re-joining the church.
So those who do—this group of the spiritual but not religious—display an uncommon inclination to think beyond the material and to experience the transcendent. Such a desire can open the door to deep, spiritual conversations and, in time, perhaps a willingness to hear about Christian spirituality. The bent of those conversations necessarily must be different though than with those who love Jesus but not the church. The wounds and suspicions toward church will come from different places—as will their understanding of spirituality.
But both groups represent people outside of church who have an internal leaning toward the spiritual side of life. Comment on this research and follow our work: Twitter: davidkinnaman roxyleestone barnagroup Facebook: Barna Group.
About the Research Interviews with U. The survey was conducted in April and November of Those who adopt a deistic evolution view may think that their God started the universe but did not have a specific goal or purpose for evolution Yasri and Mancy, Those who adopt a theistic evolution or interventionist evolution perspective may believe that their God created life with a goal or that their God actively intervenes in evolution Miller, ; Collins, ; Yasri and Mancy, The commonality in these views is that all include a belief that life on Earth shares a common ancestor Miller, ; Collins, ; Yasri and Mancy, However, are these views in which God is involved in evolution compatible with the scientific theory of evolution?
It depends on whether one believes that science is, by nature, atheistic. Supernatural entities like God are often described as having characteristics such as omniscience and omnipotence that make them unfalsifiable and therefore unable to be examined through scientific means Popper, This idea that science cannot be used to prove or disprove the existence of the supernatural has been called the bounded nature of science and assumes that science is limited to investigating natural phenomena using natural explanations Southerland and Scharmann, ; Nelson et al.
Although there are vocal scientists who believe that science can disprove the existence or influence of God Harris, ; Dawkins, ; Coyne, ; Krauss, , the majority of scientists and philosophers of science agree that science does not address supernatural entities Barbour, ; Miller, ; Collins, ; Ecklund and Park, ; Ecklund et al.
To make a claim about the existence or nonexistence of a supernatural entity is unscientific according to the bounded nature of science. Therefore, rather than being anti-theistic, science can be considered non-theistic Nelson et al.
Whether someone understands and accepts the bounded nature of science will determine whether he or she considers interventionist evolution, deistic evolution, and theistic evolution as full acceptance of evolution. If one does not understand or subscribe to the bounded nature of science, then one might conclude that evolution is atheistic, which would exclude these views as acceptance of evolution.
However, if one understands and subscribes to the view of the bounded nature of science, then one may conclude that evolution is agnostic rather than atheistic and thus consider views that both include God and do not include God as acceptance of evolution. According to individuals with these views, acceptance of evolution is not contingent on a view of God, because they have aligned their religious view with science, not the other way around.
Huxley wrote: Agnosticism is of the essence of science … It simply means that [we] shall not say [we] know or believe that which [we] have no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe … Consequently, agnosticism puts aside not only the greater part of popular theology, but also the greater part of anti-theology … Agnosticism simply says that we know nothing of what may be beyond phenomena. Huxley, Considering the bounded nature of science and characterizing evolutionary theory as agnostic rather than atheistic clarifies that a Christian student who believes in God can indeed accept evolution.
From our perspective, as well as that of many others, a student who is atheist, agnostic, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, or Buddhist can accept evolution Smith, ; Scott, ; Southerland and Scharmann, However, many students may not be aware of the bounded nature of science, and they may perceive that evolution is atheistic rather than agnostic. Past qualitative data from several studies indicate that students may have the conception that evolution is atheistic, but we do not know the degree to which this perception exists among biology students.
Winslow et al. Many quotes from students who changed from special creationism to acceptance of evolution indicated that they first perceived evolution was atheistic, but then changed to believing that evolution and Christianity could be compatible before they accepted evolution.
In a study by Scharmann and Butler , the researchers asked nonmajor biology students at a community college to journal about their experiences learning evolution. In the paper, the researchers presented many quotes in which students indicated they did not know that they could believe in God and accept evolution.
In a past study in which our research team implemented evolution instruction that was designed to be culturally competent for religious students, we asked students what they appreciated about the instruction and many religious and nonreligious students wrote that that they did not previously know that someone could believe in God and accept evolution Barnes et al.
Brem et al. These data warrant exploring the hypothesis that atheistic perceptions of evolution may be prevalent and may influence acceptance of evolution among college biology students. If atheistic perceptions of evolution are prevalent, then this pinpoints a needed area for instructors to address when teaching evolution, particularly if this perception is related to worse affective evolution education outcomes among highly religious students who are most at risk for rejecting evolution.
We conducted an exploratory study to identify what religious ideas students think they have to reject in order to accept evolution and if writing that evolution is atheistic is associated with lower levels of evolution acceptance. Then, in a subsequent study we explored the prevalence of atheistic perceptions of evolution and whether atheistic perceptions were related to lower evolution acceptance, greater perceived conflict between religious beliefs and evolution, and less comfort learning evolution.
We outline here each of our research questions and hypotheses for each study. Although prior qualitative research has shown that students can have concerns about their ability to maintain their religious beliefs and accept evolution Barnes et al. Thus, in study 1, we asked students to answer an open-ended question about the religious ideas that would have to be rejected for someone to accept evolution.
We hypothesized that some students would say that it is necessary to reject a belief in God in order to accept evolution, and we also hypothesized that highly religious students who wrote that evolution is atheistic would accept evolution less than highly religious students who did not. This exploratory study allowed us to investigate potential student perceptions and their association with student levels of evolution acceptance. In study 2, we wanted to explore atheistic perceptions of evolution in a large number of biology classes across the nation using a closed-ended survey.
The decision to use a closed-ended survey in study 2 was a natural progression of the research aims; in study 1, we were able to identify students who thought to write about an atheistic perception of evolution, but there may have been a greater number of students who had this perception but just did not choose to write about it.
A closed-ended survey allowed us to determine the prevalence of atheistic perceptions of evolution among students in college biology courses, because each student had to choose whether they had an atheistic perception of evolution.
Further, a closed-ended survey allowed us to give students the option to choose between an atheistic perception of evolution and an agnostic perception of evolution, something they were not able to do with the open-ended question in study 1. For study 2, we hypothesized that a significant proportion of students would have an atheistic perception of evolution.
We aimed to explore whether atheistic perceptions of evolution among highly religious students were associated with evolution education variables. In addition to being less accepting of evolution, we hypothesized that highly religious students who have an atheistic perception of evolution would perceive more conflict between their religious beliefs and evolution and feel less comfortable while learning evolution. This is potentially important, because students who are less accepting of evolution and perceive more conflict between their religious beliefs and evolution may be unlikely to use evolution in their thinking about science in the future or to pursue further learning about evolution beyond what is required of them in the classroom.
Indeed, in group settings, student comfort has been shown to be related to student outcomes such as persistence in a program and final grades in a course Micari and Drane, ; Eddy et al. We surveyed students from 10 introductory-level majors and nonmajors biology courses at a large public research-intensive university in the southwestern United States in which the population is moderately religious on average Barnes et al. Students were surveyed in the last 2 weeks of their courses and all courses included evolution instruction.
Instructors of the courses offered students extra credit as an incentive to complete the survey. The email recruitment told students that they would be filling out a survey about their conceptions of evolution.
Students were surveyed at the end of the semester after most evolution instruction had occurred. We used two separate measures of evolution acceptance that served different purposes. One measure let students define evolution acceptance for themselves self-defined measure and asked students to rate on a scale from 0 to the extent to which they accepted evolution; this is similar to measures used in other foundational studies in evolution education Bishop and Anderson, ; Sinatra et al.
The second measure we used is a published instrument called the Inventory of Student Evolution Acceptance I-SEA that predefines evolution acceptance for the respondents as the extent to which they agree with 24 items on a five-point Likert scale Nadelson and Southerland, The I-SEA has three subscales: acceptance of microevolution e.
We chose to use the I-SEA instead of other published instruments e. Further, there are claims that the I-SEA addresses many limitations of other evolution acceptance instruments Barnes et al. We measured student religiosity using a previously published scale Cohen et al. List as many things as you can think of. Inductive methods were used, because this specific question had never been explored among students, and we did not want to bias our findings, so we let themes emerge from the data.
A rubric was created by M. Next, the rubric was used independently by H. We used multiple linear regressions to determine whether writing that evolution is atheistic was related to lower levels of evolution acceptance depending on student religiosity level.
After each regression model was fit to the data, we performed full regression diagnostics to make sure the statistical assumptions of this method i. All results we report in the Results sections have passed the full diagnostics.
Seventy-one percent of students were biology majors and the average end-of-semester GPA for these students was 3. This is similar to the overall student population at this institution, although the Asian students are slightly overrepresented in our sample compared with the broader population at the university, but that may be because Asian students tend to be overrepresented in biology National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, Students reported an average of 80 out of on the 0— self-defined evolution acceptance measure.
A list of subthemes and their descriptions can be found in Section 1 of the Supplemental Material. Forty-one percent of students correctly reported that to accept evolution, a person would have to reject a literal interpretation of Judeo-Christian religious texts. Most biologists would agree that one would not be able to believe literally in many of the creation stories in the Judeo-Christian Bible to accept evolution.
TABLE 1. Students in this category most often indicated that a person would have to reject the existence of God or reject that God was responsible for the creation of life if that person were to accept evolution Table 1. We call this an atheistic perception of evolution Smith, ; National Academy of Sciences, , ; Gould, ; Scharmann, ; Nelson et al.
This suggests that perceiving evolution as atheistic is prevalent among highly religious students as well as students who score low on religiosity.
For instance, the least religious student who is a biology major with a 4. Figure 1 illustrates this interaction effect of student religiosity and writing that evolution is atheistic on evolution acceptance scores from all four evolution acceptance measures. Unstandardized predicted values from regression models predicting evolution acceptance scores plotted against student religiosity and labeled by whether the student indicated an atheistic perception of evolution.
In our exploratory study 1, a large percentage of college biology students wrote that evolution is atheistic, and this was prevalent among both religious and nonreligious students. Further, we found that writing that evolution is atheistic was associated with lower levels of evolution acceptance, particularly among the most religious students. However, using an open-ended response item may have caused us to misestimate the prevalence of atheistic perceptions.
First, students could have had an atheistic perception of evolution but did not think to write about it; this would lead us to underestimate the number of students with an atheistic perception of evolution. Thus, to estimate the rate of atheistic perceptions of evolution, we developed a closed-ended survey in study 2 that asked students to choose whether evolution is atheistic or agnostic.
Students were surveyed at the end of their courses, and all courses included evolution instruction. A summary of the courses recruited for this study can be found in the Results section. The research team sent emails to the instructors of the courses asking them to disseminate the survey link to their students after the students had been taught evolution.
Instructors offered extra credit to students who completed the survey. We used similar instruments to measure evolution acceptance in study 2 as in study 1. Further, we wanted to reduce survey fatigue among students in our studies, and in think-aloud interviews some items on the full religiosity survey were confusing for nonreligious students i.
Thus, eliminating these items increased the content validity of the measure for nonreligious students. To determine whether students perceived evolution as atheistic or agnostic, we adapted a published instrument originally created to categorize the views that students have on the relationship between religion and evolution Yasri and Mancy, This instrument was not published when the data from study 1 were collected.
The instrument lists different views on the relationship between religion and evolution and asks students to choose among the views in a closed-ended survey Table 2. TABLE 2. Options students were given for their personal view of evolution and then what they thought most closely represented the scientific view of evolution. The list of views includes young Earth creationism, old Earth creationism, creationism with some evolution, humans-only creationism, interventionist evolution, theistic evolution, deistic evolution, agnostic evolution, and atheistic evolution.
The procedures for adapting and validating the instruments in their entirety are available in Section 3 of the Supplemental Material.
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