Goal

To understand how Charles Darwin was driven by his ‘sacred cause’ to challenge slavery by unleashing his ‘dangerous idea’ as he announced his theory of natural selection and man’s common descent with all other life forms. This will be an opportunity to read selections of Darwin’s own primary writings. If we are indeed made from dust and to dust we shall return, how does this conflict with the biological theory of common descent? At the end of his life, Darwin rejected the Anglican Church without explicitly rejecting God. We shall consider why his views were so differently received in the UK and in the USA.

Application

To develop your own apologetic to the current crisis that the American evangelical Church faces today – how can faith in Jesus co-exist with evolution that developed from Darwin in 1859, and why it does not seem to bother Christians from other countries. .

Who will teach this seminar

Dr Ron Choong has spent most of his adult life thinking about these questions. He became a Christian at 16 and began studying biology and chemistry in college. He went on to study stellar evolution as a branch of cosmology. At seminary, he continued research into the philosophical and theological implications of biological evolution in his masters’ thesis. Hs doctoral examinations included an appraisal of post-Darwinian theories for the doctrine of creation.

Who should take this seminar

If you have always wanted to have a directed reading of Darwin’s major works within a community committed to studying and developing a Christian apologetic, then put the matter to rest once for all – make the time to do this. There is no other program dedicated to a confessional response to a science and religion course of this comprehensive survey over a six week period.

Readings

We shall read and discuss selections from the primary texts The Voyage of the Beagle, On the Origin of Species and the Descent of Man, as well as chapters from secondary sources including Ronald Numbers’ The Creationists and Adrian Desmond and James Moore’s Darwin’s Sacred Cause.

Project Assignment:

• To propose a common Christian critique of Charles Darwin or Darwinism, specifying the theological challenge of evolution by natural selection to Christian theology 
• To provide a response based on the actual writings of Charles Darwin to develop a credible and theologically constructive model evolutionary creationism.