Interim Pastor Jerl Watkins of Arcadia Baptist Church in Santa Fe, Texas, customarily preaches a sermon honoring high school grads each spring (sounds like a long interim). An article posted by USA Today reports that this year he had to modify his message substantially, for obvious reasons. It would be a tough one to get right.
It also reports that Pastor Watkins always includes a denial of evolution in this annual sermon, perhaps wanting to take one last shot at putting what he thinks the Bible teaches in front of the young ones before they are set loose in the big, bad, unbelieving world. He does this, according to the report, because “as a former chemistry student, he wants future college students to know there is no scientific evidence backing evolution.” He found time to include his warning against evolution this year. “‘That’s why they call it a theory,’ Watkins said, which prompted a few of the Santa Fe congregants to yell out ‘That’s right!’ and ‘Amen.’”
There's a host of ways to counter Pastor Watkins’s words, some of them even from a religious perspective. That’s not my interest today.
What interested me today was the report that one of his young congregants hopes to become a pediatrician and another plans to study physical therapy.
Can you become either of those without having to come to terms with evolution, other than by simply denying it? And if you deny it altogether, will you be competent to serve your patients? I’d probably be okay working with an evolution-denying physical therapist, but I am not sure I’d want my grandkids to go to an evolution-denying pediatrician. At the very least, I’d wonder what else they ignored in their studies because it isn’t “in the Bible.”
