One of the main pages on my new blog has a brief account of my journey towards accepting ID. I’ve taken a few different stances on the biological origins question in the past so it’s been a bumpy ride for me. This article is mainly autobiographical, but it gives me a chance to lay my cards on the table so I don’t have assumptions made about me and so readers know roughly where I’m coming from.
Here’s a snippet:
So, how and why did I become an intelligent design advocate? It’s a long(ish) story…
I am, perhaps unsurprisingly, a Christian. I was raised in a Christian home and, with the exception of a period of ephemeral teenage agnosticism, I have remained a Christian my whole life. But that’s not why I support ID. Over the years my views on origins have fluctuated several times. As a teenager, when I began to give my Christian faith some thought, I became interested in the creation/evolution dispute. At that point I basically assumed the Young Earth Creationist (YEC) position and stuck with it for a while. After a little research however, I soon changed my mind and rejected YEC for a theistic evolutionary perspective.
Why the change of mind? Whilst perusing the shelves of my local Waterstones one day, I noticed a book in the science section. It was Finding Darwin’s God: A Scientist’s Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution written by Kenneth Miller, a cell biologist at Brown University. Being a YEC, I was naturally intrigued by the title of the book, so I eagerly found the nearest counter and purchased it. After some assiduous reading, I came to the realisation that YEC and anti-evolutionism is a profoundly mistaken viewpoint.
What interested me most about Miller was that in addition to being an orthodox neo-Darwinian, he’s also an orthodox Catholic. Of course, I was previously well aware that there are many good Christians who do reconcile their faith with evolution, but I had never taken the time to hear their side of the story.
You can read the rest of my account here.