Who through him are believers in God, who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God. For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith.
He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? In all circumstances take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one;. No one comes to the Father except through me. And this is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us.
And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men.
The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. I believe that I shall look upon the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living! I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Do not disbelieve, but believe. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance.
Though you do not now see him, you believe in him and rejoice with joy that is inexpressible and filled with glory,. Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb and be born? For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.
For John came to you in the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him. And even when you saw it, you did not afterward change your minds and believe him. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. But as for you, O man of God, flee these things. Pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, steadfastness, gentleness.
Many quotes from students who changed from special creationism to acceptance of evolution indicated that they first perceived evolution was atheistic, but then changed to believing that evolution and Christianity could be compatible before they accepted evolution.
In a study by Scharmann and Butler , the researchers asked nonmajor biology students at a community college to journal about their experiences learning evolution. In the paper, the researchers presented many quotes in which students indicated they did not know that they could believe in God and accept evolution. In a past study in which our research team implemented evolution instruction that was designed to be culturally competent for religious students, we asked students what they appreciated about the instruction and many religious and nonreligious students wrote that that they did not previously know that someone could believe in God and accept evolution Barnes et al.
Brem et al. These data warrant exploring the hypothesis that atheistic perceptions of evolution may be prevalent and may influence acceptance of evolution among college biology students. If atheistic perceptions of evolution are prevalent, then this pinpoints a needed area for instructors to address when teaching evolution, particularly if this perception is related to worse affective evolution education outcomes among highly religious students who are most at risk for rejecting evolution.
We conducted an exploratory study to identify what religious ideas students think they have to reject in order to accept evolution and if writing that evolution is atheistic is associated with lower levels of evolution acceptance. Then, in a subsequent study we explored the prevalence of atheistic perceptions of evolution and whether atheistic perceptions were related to lower evolution acceptance, greater perceived conflict between religious beliefs and evolution, and less comfort learning evolution.
We outline here each of our research questions and hypotheses for each study. Although prior qualitative research has shown that students can have concerns about their ability to maintain their religious beliefs and accept evolution Barnes et al. Thus, in study 1, we asked students to answer an open-ended question about the religious ideas that would have to be rejected for someone to accept evolution.
We hypothesized that some students would say that it is necessary to reject a belief in God in order to accept evolution, and we also hypothesized that highly religious students who wrote that evolution is atheistic would accept evolution less than highly religious students who did not. This exploratory study allowed us to investigate potential student perceptions and their association with student levels of evolution acceptance.
In study 2, we wanted to explore atheistic perceptions of evolution in a large number of biology classes across the nation using a closed-ended survey.
The decision to use a closed-ended survey in study 2 was a natural progression of the research aims; in study 1, we were able to identify students who thought to write about an atheistic perception of evolution, but there may have been a greater number of students who had this perception but just did not choose to write about it.
A closed-ended survey allowed us to determine the prevalence of atheistic perceptions of evolution among students in college biology courses, because each student had to choose whether they had an atheistic perception of evolution.
Further, a closed-ended survey allowed us to give students the option to choose between an atheistic perception of evolution and an agnostic perception of evolution, something they were not able to do with the open-ended question in study 1. For study 2, we hypothesized that a significant proportion of students would have an atheistic perception of evolution. We aimed to explore whether atheistic perceptions of evolution among highly religious students were associated with evolution education variables.
In addition to being less accepting of evolution, we hypothesized that highly religious students who have an atheistic perception of evolution would perceive more conflict between their religious beliefs and evolution and feel less comfortable while learning evolution. This is potentially important, because students who are less accepting of evolution and perceive more conflict between their religious beliefs and evolution may be unlikely to use evolution in their thinking about science in the future or to pursue further learning about evolution beyond what is required of them in the classroom.
Indeed, in group settings, student comfort has been shown to be related to student outcomes such as persistence in a program and final grades in a course Micari and Drane, ; Eddy et al.
We surveyed students from 10 introductory-level majors and nonmajors biology courses at a large public research-intensive university in the southwestern United States in which the population is moderately religious on average Barnes et al. Students were surveyed in the last 2 weeks of their courses and all courses included evolution instruction. Instructors of the courses offered students extra credit as an incentive to complete the survey.
The email recruitment told students that they would be filling out a survey about their conceptions of evolution. Students were surveyed at the end of the semester after most evolution instruction had occurred.
We used two separate measures of evolution acceptance that served different purposes. One measure let students define evolution acceptance for themselves self-defined measure and asked students to rate on a scale from 0 to the extent to which they accepted evolution; this is similar to measures used in other foundational studies in evolution education Bishop and Anderson, ; Sinatra et al. The second measure we used is a published instrument called the Inventory of Student Evolution Acceptance I-SEA that predefines evolution acceptance for the respondents as the extent to which they agree with 24 items on a five-point Likert scale Nadelson and Southerland, The I-SEA has three subscales: acceptance of microevolution e.
We chose to use the I-SEA instead of other published instruments e. Further, there are claims that the I-SEA addresses many limitations of other evolution acceptance instruments Barnes et al. We measured student religiosity using a previously published scale Cohen et al. List as many things as you can think of. Inductive methods were used, because this specific question had never been explored among students, and we did not want to bias our findings, so we let themes emerge from the data.
A rubric was created by M. Next, the rubric was used independently by H. We used multiple linear regressions to determine whether writing that evolution is atheistic was related to lower levels of evolution acceptance depending on student religiosity level. After each regression model was fit to the data, we performed full regression diagnostics to make sure the statistical assumptions of this method i.
All results we report in the Results sections have passed the full diagnostics. Seventy-one percent of students were biology majors and the average end-of-semester GPA for these students was 3.
This is similar to the overall student population at this institution, although the Asian students are slightly overrepresented in our sample compared with the broader population at the university, but that may be because Asian students tend to be overrepresented in biology National Science Foundation, National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, Students reported an average of 80 out of on the 0— self-defined evolution acceptance measure.
A list of subthemes and their descriptions can be found in Section 1 of the Supplemental Material. Forty-one percent of students correctly reported that to accept evolution, a person would have to reject a literal interpretation of Judeo-Christian religious texts.
Most biologists would agree that one would not be able to believe literally in many of the creation stories in the Judeo-Christian Bible to accept evolution. TABLE 1. Students in this category most often indicated that a person would have to reject the existence of God or reject that God was responsible for the creation of life if that person were to accept evolution Table 1.
We call this an atheistic perception of evolution Smith, ; National Academy of Sciences, , ; Gould, ; Scharmann, ; Nelson et al. This suggests that perceiving evolution as atheistic is prevalent among highly religious students as well as students who score low on religiosity.
For instance, the least religious student who is a biology major with a 4. Figure 1 illustrates this interaction effect of student religiosity and writing that evolution is atheistic on evolution acceptance scores from all four evolution acceptance measures. Unstandardized predicted values from regression models predicting evolution acceptance scores plotted against student religiosity and labeled by whether the student indicated an atheistic perception of evolution.
In our exploratory study 1, a large percentage of college biology students wrote that evolution is atheistic, and this was prevalent among both religious and nonreligious students. Further, we found that writing that evolution is atheistic was associated with lower levels of evolution acceptance, particularly among the most religious students. However, using an open-ended response item may have caused us to misestimate the prevalence of atheistic perceptions. First, students could have had an atheistic perception of evolution but did not think to write about it; this would lead us to underestimate the number of students with an atheistic perception of evolution.
Thus, to estimate the rate of atheistic perceptions of evolution, we developed a closed-ended survey in study 2 that asked students to choose whether evolution is atheistic or agnostic. Students were surveyed at the end of their courses, and all courses included evolution instruction. A summary of the courses recruited for this study can be found in the Results section.
The research team sent emails to the instructors of the courses asking them to disseminate the survey link to their students after the students had been taught evolution.
Instructors offered extra credit to students who completed the survey. We used similar instruments to measure evolution acceptance in study 2 as in study 1. Further, we wanted to reduce survey fatigue among students in our studies, and in think-aloud interviews some items on the full religiosity survey were confusing for nonreligious students i.
Thus, eliminating these items increased the content validity of the measure for nonreligious students. To determine whether students perceived evolution as atheistic or agnostic, we adapted a published instrument originally created to categorize the views that students have on the relationship between religion and evolution Yasri and Mancy, This instrument was not published when the data from study 1 were collected.
The instrument lists different views on the relationship between religion and evolution and asks students to choose among the views in a closed-ended survey Table 2. TABLE 2. Options students were given for their personal view of evolution and then what they thought most closely represented the scientific view of evolution. The list of views includes young Earth creationism, old Earth creationism, creationism with some evolution, humans-only creationism, interventionist evolution, theistic evolution, deistic evolution, agnostic evolution, and atheistic evolution.
The procedures for adapting and validating the instruments in their entirety are available in Section 3 of the Supplemental Material. We also created two new instruments see Section 4 of the Supplemental Material for development and validation of these measures. Students were asked to select from 0 none at all to 10 a lot for each of these items. Unlike other instruments in which the respondent can only choose a binary option Nehm et al.
The second instrument measures how comfortable students felt while learning evolution and has eight items e. Students were asked to answer on a six-point Likert scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. No previously developed instruments existed at the time of the study to measure either perceived conflict or comfort learning evolution.
These instruments are available in their entirety along with the procedures for development and validation in Section 4 of the Supplemental Material. Although it was not our main research aim, our research design allowed us to examine the percentage of college biology students who believe that life shares a common ancestor.
Because these data have never been collected among college biology students across this many U. Therefore, we examined the percentage of students who chose special creationist options for their personal view on religion and evolution and report those percentages. To examine whether students perceived evolution as atheistic or agnostic, we calculated the percentage of students who chose atheistic evolution and agnostic evolution as the most representative descriptions of evolution.
We were interested in exploring differences among highly religious students who perceived evolution as atheistic versus agnostic. The same model diagnostics were performed on these data as in study 1 i. Of these students, TABLE 3. Summary of courses recruited and student response rate by course. After they had learned evolution, we found that Finally, See Table 4 for the percentage of students who chose each view on religion and evolution. TABLE 4. We identified students as highly religious, and within this sample of highly religious students, Prior to their discovery, the oldest manuscript copies for the Old Testament were from the 9 th century AD.
Since the Dead Sea Scrolls are from the 1 st -3 rd centuries BC, they provided an opportunity for comparison and, ultimately, increased confidence in the reliability of the text. Extraordinarily early: One of the criteria that historians use to evaluate the authenticity of a historical account is to determine how close the reporting is to the actual event. Legends take time to develop, but Christianity sprang up and grew right in the time and place where a multitude of eyewitnesses were able to confirm or deny the accounts being circulated, such as the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus.
Scholars have been able to trace the text in 1 Corinthians back to an earlier oral creed that dates to just a few years after the crucifixion. In Can We Trust the Gospels? It is rarely appreciated that for us to have four Gospels about Jesus is remarkable…. Jesus has more extended text about him, in generally closer proximity to his life, than his contemporary Tiberius, the most famous person in the then-known world.
Williams also cites numerous pieces of evidence that the gospels bear the marks of genuine eyewitness testimony. Their detailed knowledge of the people and places they describe would have been nearly impossible to discover by someone not living in that time and place. This evidence sets the gospels apart from the books in the pseudepigrapha such as the Gospel of Thomas , which gives us a good example of the lack of details that would be present if the gospels were simply made up centuries later.
Genuineness of belief in the appearances of Jesus: Many unresolved enigmas stand witness in the historical record for those who deny the resurrection. For example, the first century Jew Saul of Tarsus had a sudden, inexplicable conversion to Christ and his subsequent preaching of the gospel under heavy persecution contributed to an explosion of growth in Christianity.
The Bible answers the mystery of what happened by recording an encounter Saul had with the risen Jesus Acts The modern visitor to the museums and lands of the Bible cannot help but come away impressed with the real geographical and historical backdrop of the biblical text. Many have spoken well of the Bible, but no endorsement is as compelling as that of Jesus of Nazareth. While millions of other titles come and go, the Bible is still the book by which all other books are measured.
In times of personal temptation, public teaching and personal suffering, He made it clear that He believed the Old testament Scriptures were more than a national tradition Matthew ; Matthew From the days of Moses, the Bible predicted events no one wanted to believe.
Before Israel went into the Promises Land, Moses predicted that Israel would be unfaithful, that she would lose the land God was giving her, and that she would be dispersed throughout all the world, regathered, and then re-established Deuteronomy The books of Moses were written years before the earliest Hindu Scriptures.
Moses wrote Genesis 2, years before Muhammad penned the Koran. During that long history, no other book has been as loved or as hated as the Bible. No other book has been so consistently bought, studied and quoted as this book. While often ignored by those who are uncomfortable with its teachings, it is still the central book of Western civilisation.
The Psalms of David have offered comfort in times of trouble and loss. Even entire nations or tribes, like the Celts of Ireland, the wild Vikings of Norway, and the Auca Indians of Ecuador, have been transformed by the Word of God and the unprecedented life and significance of Jesus Christ.
Visit their outreach website for more evangelistic and follow up resources.
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