Rachel Held Evans

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Help me pass as an intellectual at the BioLogos Conference

On Wednesday I head to Boston to attend “A Dialog on Creation”—a workshop hosted by the BioLogos Foundation and Gordon College that explores questions at the intersection of science & faith.

Among those in attendance will be Peter Enns, (a biblical scholar and Harvard Ph.D. who has authored multiple books, including the controversial Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament), Karl Giberson, (a physicist and scholar who has published over a hundred articles, reviews, and essays and authored four books),  Darrel Falk, (author of Coming to Peace with Science, and according to Wikipedia, an expert on the molecular genetics of Drosophila melanogaster and the use of gene cloning technology to characterize damaged chromosomes at the molecular level and PCR and DNA sequencing to compare homologous gene sequences in different species of Drosophila), and me(a girl who wrote a memoir with the word “monkey” in the title.)

I can only assume that my name on the registration list is the result of some sort of clerical error on the part of the BioLogos foundation.  While I’m enthralled by the conversation surrounding the compatibility of evolution and Christianity, I feel a little over my head on this one.  I can’t help but wonder if they would have invited me had they overhead the recent conversation with Dan in which I casually mentioned that thunder is the sound of clouds bumping into one another.

I suppose the good people at the BioLogos Foundation just know that there are a lot of Christians out there like me—Christians who want to honor God and make sense of the universe he created, but who aren’t biblical scholars or biologists or physicists… or, apparently, meteorologists.  What I appreciate most about the foundation is its ability to speak to such people in a way that his helpful and gracious without being condescending.

But I still feel a little like a conference-crashing poser, so I need your help.

I want to ask some good, intelligent questions at this conference, and our little online community is usually pretty good at generating those.

So, what questions would you want to ask a group of biblical scholars and scientists about issues related to faith and science?

I’ll choose my favorite questions, do my best to pose them at the conference, and next week write a post about the responses. (Bonus points for big words that will make me look like the kind of person who knows where thunder comes from!)