A Yale doctor’s wrestle with evolution and faith – By Mariya Manzhos (Deseret News) / March 9, 2024
Mariya Manzhos is a national writer for the Deseret News based in Boston, Mass. She focuses on culture and the complexities of the human experience.
Dr. Samuel Wilkinson was in his first year of medical school at Johns Hopkins University when the question that was percolating in his mind came to a head: Was his belief in God compatible with the theory of evolution? This question stirred up a kind of existential debate in Wilkinson, who at the time had just graduated from Brigham Young University, gotten married and moved to Baltimore.
“The theory of evolution has been a stumbling block — more than a stumbling block — for people of faith for a long time,” said Wilkinson, an associate professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine. “This time, it seemed to be at the core of the wrestle I had.” He became immersed in reading, studying and praying about evolution and faith, and whether the two could be reconciled, hoping for some clarity. Without a clear answer at the time, he decided to hold on to both and move forward. Months later, threads from different disciplines he’d been researching began to take shape into coherent and satisfying answers.
Wilkinson shares his intellectual and spiritual journey in the preface of his new book, “Purpose: What Evolution and Human Nature Imply about the Meaning of Our Existence,” released March 5. At the core of Wilkinson’s book is an attempt to challenge the longstanding assumption that evolution has no overarching purpose, and that, in fact, the way we have evolved holds important and applicable lessons for building a good life. “The notion of purpose in biology has been heretical,” he told me in a recent interview. As he writes in the book, “If biological life is merely the result of the blind forces of nature, then why are we — as products of a random biological process — so driven to find meaning and purpose?”
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