The Evolution of Belief
A Christian Perspective for the Future
by
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Chapter 3: Changing Some Traditional Starting Points.
Back about 1950, I remember my great uncle telling dad that the car he bought with an automatic transmission was a big mistake, because the vehicle would be too dangerous coming down steep slopes. My dad could lose control at the wheel, or burn out his brakes. That kind of car would never sell. My great uncle never ever bought anything except a stick shift. I now laugh about it, because the San Joaquin Valley, where I was born in California, is huge and flat as a pancake, scarcely a hill for miles. Today, not many buy a standard transmission or even know what it looks like. The point in telling this story is that all of us change our attitudes constantly, when we find that events and newer ideas and things make more sense than before. I would like to show how,in our faith, there are times when we need to accommodate and accept a new way of looking at things. The following represent three accommodations necessary for moving our faith forward in today's world. Furthermore, I will tell you why they are important. They are as follows:
- All religious tenets are unverifiable from a physical point of view.
- Matter has a radical capacity for life built into its structure.
- The emergence of Homo sapiens takes place without divine intervention.
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About the Book
The Dalai Lama once said that when science demonstrates something in opposition to a religious tenet, the religious belief must step back. Yet Christianity has often been resistant to such an approach, and many modern, educated Christians find themselves stuck at the intersection of science and traditional religious dogma and doctrine.
The Evolution of Belief provides new ways of thinking about essential items of Christian belief, and the modern Christian is invited to move ahead in a credible way with the use of new analogies applied to creation, incarnation, redemption, and other Christian beliefs and practices. Author J. Gregory Steiner shows how a so-called baggage of beliefs, hung on the clothesline of one’s faith, needs to be continually cleaned out and rejuvenated, insisting that traditional understandings of Christianity should be made more palatable and accommodating of the discoveries of science and technology.
Viewed from an ever-developing saga of historical influences upon Christian belief and the evidence provided by science, there could very well be more questions generated than answers. But this can result in a positive experience, because credible insights into this novel perspective will truly lead one’s faith further into the unending discovery of God.
About the Author
Gregory Steiner, a former Jesuit for 19 years, has postgraduate degrees in biology and theology, and during his career he taught science and religion at the high school level. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, with his wife, Carol, and he has two adult children and four grandchildren. Now retired and seeing the Christian religion positioned on the precipice of irrelevance, he used his professional background to inform The Evolution of Belief, in which he proposes some radical and shocking changes in traditional Christian theology and philosophy. In the meantime, he enjoys hiking, fishing, and having fun with his grandchildren, who are the peaks of his life.