Is a literalist interpretation of the Bible creating ‘schizophrenic’ Christians? A provocative question to ask on a Monday morning to be sure, but I ask it following a comment I heard over the weekend. Let me put the comment in its context before I tell you what it was: this person was emphasising the need for believing truth if we are to have a strong, healthy, and intimate relationship with God as Father. I have no disagreement at all with that claim and as someone who has had a lot of lies changed into truth through personal ministry I have benefited a great deal from that process. So no arguments there – not from me anyway.

But as one example in a list of ‘lies’ many Christians believe this person said something like this: ‘Some people believe we all descended from monkeys’. His target, quite obviously, was the science of evolution. The implication of what he was saying was that if we believe what the scientists say to us about this subject and how we have evolved from very simple organisms over many hundreds of thousand of years, then we will not be able to form a relationship with God our Father and Creator. Maybe you would agree with that. Personally my response would be – poppycock.

But it got me thinking: in many churches there is this tendency to devalue science, to degrade analytical, reasoning skills, and to suggest that we should stop thinking for ourselves but should just believe everything that is told us from the front without any question whatsoever. And many do just that. Keen to belong to the crowd, keen to hold onto the ‘faith’ they have, they are quick to deny the many truths that science has uncovered for us over the years. But then … they leave the church meeting, re-enter the world, and depend on the very science they were so willing to dismiss minutes previously. From the chip in their washing machine, to the chip in their computer; from the pills they take for headache to the pills that kill their cancer – time and time again their lives revolve around the basic scientific values and knowledge that have become so important in our world.

And so back to the original question, which you may like to ponder, is a literalist interpretation of the Bible creating ‘schizophrenic’ Christians?