Flat-Earth Faith vs. Evolutionary Faith

Historians, I believe, will look back at the opening decades of the 21st Century as ‘The Great Turning’, a period of unprecedented religious revival, when billions of human beings were inspired to let go of flat-earth interpretations of their faith in order to wholeheartedly embrace evolutionary interpretations. In so doing, religious believers will beome religious knowers on every continent. The devout will soon discover that their core doctrines, spiritual insights, and understandings are more universally experiential, more meaningful, and more grounded in measurable reality than their grandparents could have possibly known. People from very different traditions will experience, many for the very first time, common conceptual ground that will naturally facilitate an expansive sense of care and consideration. Billions of human beings transitioning from flat-earth faith to evolutionary faith over the next two generations will change everything.

By ‘flat-earth faith’, of course, I am not meaning people who believe the world is flat. What I mean is any perspective in which the metaphors and theology still in use came into being at a time when peoples really did believe the world was flat. Flat-earth Islam is not the same thing as Evolutionary Islam. Flat-earth Hinduism is not the same thing as Evolutionary Hinduism. And, of course, the same is true for Christianity.

Flat-earth Christianity is where “sin”, “salvation”, “heaven”, “hell”, “the kingdom of God”, “the second coming of Christ”, and other core Christian concepts are understood in abstract, imaginary, otherworldly ways—still reflecting a premodern, flat-earth cosmology. Evolutionary Christianity cherishes these same doctrines, yet holds them in a postmodern and far more realistic (REALized) way because it interprets them in light of an evolutionary cosmology—as experiential and measurably real. For more on this distinction, see the first question under the video player on the FAQ page of my Thank God for Evolution! website, as well as either the PDF version or HTML version of a conversation I had with my publicist—which is the single best introduction to date to the ideas presented in my new book, Thank God for Evolution!.