On being a Christian

The dis-oriented author is a Christian. Denominationally I am a Baptist but I am equally comfortable in Bible Church circles. I consider myself a conservative Evangelical. I am also a student of mathematics, science, languages and history. As my book reviews on this blog show I have widely varied interests. I am not really a polymath, I am a dabbler. But from my father, I learned a love of learning.

People still find these interests incompatible with being a Christian.

Recently I flew home from Detroit and the woman sitting next to me struck up a conversation. I discovered that she has a degree in measurement and evaluation (a study involving both statistics and educational psychology). She had been a high school biology teacher in Wisconsin and now works for a testing company.

I was reading Jared Diamond's excellent, Guns, Germs and Steel which looks at the reasons human societies have developed over time. Diamond discusses several issues relating to biology and ethnobiology. So I recommended the book. Our conversation for that hour-and-a-half was wide-ranging. We talked about history, philosophy, the life of Richard Feynman, education, and of course our children.

Before we landed, I mentioned that I had worked for several years developing Bible study software. When I mentioned this, her face registered a moment of surprise. She recovered gracefully but I could see she was thinking how to reconcile something as backward and un-scientific as faith with the discussion we were having. She did mention some surprise.

I run into this from time to time. People who believe that I am too well-educated to be a Christian. That is part of the reason I enjoyed Don Knuth's unusual book, Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About. Knuth is a renowned computer scientist and his three volume The Art of Computer Programming is a classic of the industry. Knuth is a believer and both writes and speaks about her faith. In his book, he suggests that maybe only 5-10% of his colleagues are religious in any form. If people look at me the same way they look at Don Knuth — I'll take that as a compliment.

At home, I have a stack of books on my desk that I am planning to read. They range from treatises on artificial intelligence and language understanding to a biography of Abraham Lincoln to a modern work on the Peloponnesian war. But next to all of these books (well not really next to since I read computer Bibles on my laptop and PDA) is my Bible. When I read the works of historians, physicists, mathematicians or even evolutionary biologists (like Diamond), they are not an affront to my faith — rather, I find that they strengthen my faith.