iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ray Curenton @raycurenton.com · 09/03/2026

My sexuality was already causing a rift all through my adolescence but engaging with the materials put together for this NOVA series on evolution for my high school Biology B course is what really began breaking that dam. youtu.be/mg0oMzshT9Y

Morgana@plantthugy.bsky.social

For those of you that abandoned organized religion, what was the “spark” that started your deconstruction arc?

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Ray Curenton @raycurenton.com · 09/03/2026

Hearing/reading scientists who happen to also be devout Christians say they believe in both God and evolution and have no trouble reconciling that—that I could be an intellectual and still leave room for the supernatural—was groundbreaking to me. www.pbs.org/wgbh/evoluti...

Francisco J. Ayala:

Well-informed Catholics do not see conflict between their religious beliefs and the Darwinian theory of biological evolution. In 1996, Pope John Paul II stated that the conclusions reached by scientific disciplines cannot be in contradiction with divine Revelation, then proceeded to accept the scientific conclusion that evolution is a well-established theory.

The Pope went on to point out that science deals with material reality, while questions of "moral conscience, freedom, or … of aesthetic and religious experience, fall within the competence of philosophical analysis and reflection, while theology brings out [their] ultimate meaning according to the Creator's plans."

For more than a decade, I have taught the theory of evolution to freshmen. During the early part of the course students come to me, year after year, to express their reservations based on their perceived contradiction between Christian beliefs and the theory of evolution. I treat these students with the great respect they deserve, but respond to them with two considerations very similar to the points made by John Paul II. One is that the evolution of organisms is beyond reasonable doubt, so that the theory of evolution is accepted in this respect with the same certainty that we attribute to Copernicus's heliocentric theory or the molecular composition of matter. The second consideration is that science is a very successful way of knowing, but not the only way. We acquire knowledge in many other ways, such as through literature, the arts, philosophical reflection, and religious experience. A scientific view of the world is hopelessly incomplete. Science seeks material explanations for material processes, but it has nothing definitive to say about realities beyond its scope. Once science has had its say, there remain questions of value, purpose, and meaning that are forever beyond science's domain, but belong in the realm of philosophical reflection and religious experience.

Mark Noll:

Some evangelical Christians have trouble reconciling evolution and a traditional belief in God as creator and sustainer of the world, but I do not. Within the evangelical tribe, I belong to the Calvinist wing, where a long history exists of accepting that God speaks to humans through "two books" (Scripture and nature), and since there is but one author of the two books, there is in principle no real conflict possible between what humans learn from solidly grounded science and solidly grounded study of the Bible. Of course, if "evolution" is taken to mean a grand philosophical Explanation of Everything based upon Pure Chance, then I don't believe it at all. But as a scientific proposal for how species develop through natural selection, I say let the scientists who know what they are doing use their expertise and whatever theories help to find out as much as they can. On the Bible side, I do not think it is necessary to read everything in early Genesis as if it were written by a fact-checker at the New York Times. But as a persuasive basis for believing 1) that God made the original world stuff, 2) that he providentially sustains all natural processes, and 3) that he used a special act of creation (perhaps out of nothing, perhaps from apelike ancestors) to make humans in his own image, the Bible is not threatened by responsible scientific investigations.

As a historian I am impressed by words of 19th-century conservative Presbyterian, Benjamin B. Warfield: "if we condition the theory [of evolution] by allowing the constant oversight of God in the whole process, and his occasional supernatural interference for the production of new beginnings by an actual output of creative force ... we may hold to the modified theory of evolution and be Christians in the ordinary orthodox sense." These words still hold true today.

Arthur Peacocke:

From my scientific background as a physical biochemist who, for nearly three decades in the mid-20th century, was much involved in unravelling the relation of the double-helical structure of DNA to its solution properties, I have long had an interest in the relation of genetics to biological evolution. The sequencing of DNA and proteins in a large range of species from bacteria to Homo sapiens has now crowned the previous strong evidence for the historical interconnectedness and a common origin of all living organisms and for evolution. The role of natural selection in this process is proven dominant, though I do not exclude the possibility that other natural factors*, widely discussed at the moment, may also be operative. The whole process is entirely natural and explicable by the sciences without requiring any special, non-natural, "lures" or influences.

As a theist -- one who considers that the best explanation of the existence and lawfulness of the natural world is that it depends for its existence and inbuilt rationality on a self-existent Ultimate Reality (a Creator "God") -- I find the epic of evolution, from the "Hot Big Bang" to Homo sapiens, an illumination of how the Creator God is and has been creating. Evolution enriches our insights into the nature and purposes of the divine creation -- its fecundity, variety, its ability to manifest an increase in complexity to the point where the physical stuff of the world acquires the (holistic) capacity to be self-conscious, to think (in "mental" activity), to instantiate values and to relate to its Creator (in "spiritual" activity). I regard God as creating in, with, and through the natural as unveiled by the sciences; hence I espouse a "theistic naturalism."

*To name a few: the possible operation of self-organising principles; how the evolution of an organism can depend on its innovative behaviour; and "top-down causation" through flow of information from the environment to the organism.

Robert Pollack:

Evolution is interesting to me because natural selection explains certain facts of life that touch on matters of meaning and purpose, and because the vision of the natural world these explanations produce is simply too terrifying and depressing to me to be borne without the emotional buffer of my own religion. This buffer is simple to describe: a Jewish understanding of our appearance by evolution through natural selection introduces an irrational certainty of meaning and purpose to a set of data that otherwise show no sign of supporting any meaning to our lives on Earth, beyond that of being numbers in a cosmic lottery with no paymaster.

I acknowledge there is a wholly consistent alternative description of the natural world and our place in it, which can lead one to exactly the actions I may wish to take or encourage others to take, all without any belief in God. Nothing is wrong with that position. It used to be my own, but as I have gotten older, I find I no longer can honestly hold to it. When I asked my teacher Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz how to respond to this criticism of my position by non-believing friends, he said, "If you know someone who says the Throne of God is empty, and lives with that, then you should cling to that person as a good, strong friend. But be careful: Almost everyone who says that, has already placed something or someone else on that Throne, usually themselves."

I find myself accepting the God of my ancestors in part because it is my way of discovering meaning and purpose without denying or distorting the data of science, and in part because otherwise I might put some person, some ideology, some dream of completed science in God's place.

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