Editor's note: Dr. Mitchell is Professor Emeritus, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Alberta.
SPEAKING OF CREATION
Seeing Creation as the Dynamic, Multifaceted Work of a Loving God, who is also our Father
This series of essays is written with Christian students in mind. Even in this new millennium tens of thousands of university students find little support in their home church, family or community for dealing with the intellectual challenges to their faith that they will encounter in the modern, secular university. Worse, those in Bible schools and Christian colleges will often still find reactionary curricula that want to explain away, debunk or simply ignore established evidence gained by the last hundred years of recognized scholarship. As a lifelong Christian, and an experimental biologist with more than thirty years research and teaching experience in a major secular university, it saddens me to have to acknowledge the truth of the sentences that I have just written.
This series of essays is offered in the hope and with the prayer that some students will find herein some intellectual and spiritual footholds that will help them come to a combined understanding of faith and science that is a blessing to them. All truth is from God, so we are most content when the truths we know, regardless of their source, fit together to form a consistent world view. So, humbly, these essays are presented to help you find a worldview that is a blessing to you, so that you may better bless others.
A major result of recent advances in science and other scholarship is to encourage many believers to enlarge their views of God, sometimes appearing to come into conflict with traditional views. Tradition is, of course, very important, and we must make progress together with a clear understanding of what our ancestors believed, and to the fullest extent possible, why they believed it and why they expressed their beliefs as they did.
Yet, like us, they were fallible, and adjustments to our thinking will always be necessary. We really do want to have the living faith of the dead, and to avoid having the dead faith of the living.
Download the full article on Speaking of Creation
Comments