After being raised as a creationist, Jennifer Colbourne falls in love with evolutionary science.
Jennifer Colbourne is a graduate student at York University where she is currently researching raccoon intelligence. She is interested in how animals are adapting to cities, and how to improve animal-human interactions in the urban environment.
This story originally aired on August 24, 2018 in an episode titled “Leaving Home.”
Story Transcript
More than anything, when I was a kid, I wanted a testimony. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Christian evangelicalism, a testimony is when you get up in front of your church and tell everyone about how you found Jesus. The best testimonies are full of trials and tribulations and how finding Jesus transformed your life from darkness to light. I never had the chance to have a testimony.
I was a born Christian. Sure, when I was six I repeated the Sinner’s Prayer after my parents and invited Jesus into my heart but even then I thought that was a strange formality because I felt like Jesus always had been in my heart. It was the same when I got older and it was time to get baptized. I didn’t feel like I was making a decision. I felt like that decision had been made for me. The thing is, when you're a kid, whatever your parents tell you as real becomes part of your reality.
I was told that the world was round so I believed the world was round. And I was told that if you didn’t wash your hands, these invisible little germs would make you sick. So I washed my hands. And I was told that God created the heavens and the earth in seven days and sent his only Son to die for our sins so I wouldn’t be tortured in hell for eternity. So I believed that too.
The thing was, though, strangely I didn’t like that I had been born a Christian. I really wished I had had the chance to find Jesus for myself. It would have felt more genuine. I wanted to experience firsthand the supposed life-changing effects of finding our Savior, but I had to resign myself to my faith as a Born Again Christian.
I was also a born researcher. Ever since I was little, when I was interested in a subject, I had to learn everything about it. The librarians always got such a kick out of me because I would leave the library with a stack of books right up to my chin. When I was nine, my obsession was all volcanoes. I read everything you could think of even though I was kind of terrified of volcanoes because I had seen Dante’s Peak and, of course, Volcano, and I was kind of convinced that the mountains nearby were actually unknown dormant volcanoes and one day I'd wake up to lava flowing into my living room.
Through volcanoes I discovered Pompeii. Then I became obsessed with ancient civilizations. When I was ten if you asked me what I was going to be when I grew up, I would tell you in all sincerity that I would be an archeologist, travel around Egypt in a motor home full of cats.
That was the year I ended up in Mr. Pew’s class. Mr. Pew is the kind of teacher every kid should have. His classroom was like a natural sciences laboratory. We had snakes, toads, frogs, we had geckos and salamanders, hedgehogs, six actually, and a Cayman. Like those little alligator things. Yeah, we had one of those.
Mr. Pew was a paleontologist so he brought the neatest things to class to teach us about. He brought an actual mammoth hair, which we got to touch. He brought in dinosaur bones and, to our amusement, dinosaur poop. We even did a project where we got to clean amber for scientists at a university so that they could look at the insects inside.
Mr. Pew could pick up on my keen interest and I quickly became a teacher’s pet. In fact, he even gave me a few fossils of my own and it became my most treasured possessions. I had a secret, though. I felt a little sorry for Mr. Pew. The thing was, he seemed really convinced that these fossils of his were millions of years old when in reality they were six thousand years old and have been created by Noah’s flood.
I knew this was a problem and a lot of scientists have been taken in. I kept running into the same stuff with volcanoes millions of millions of years, totally not true. And what bothered me more was that some scientists did know the truth. If other scientists could just look at the evidence unbiased they would see that it was ridiculous that the world was so old.
It really turned me off that scientists were keeping this big secret and from what I've heard, it was to turn people away from God. I just didn’t want to be part of that. So after Mr. Pew’s class, I really started to drift away from my early interest in the natural sciences.
When I was twelve, the moment I had been dreading came. We had to learn about evolution in class. Now, my parents have prepared me. They said, “You know what? Whatever they say, just put it on the test. You'll know in your heart that it’s not true.”
And I did know it wasn’t true because my cousin had a written a book for junior high students called Somebody’s Making A Monkey Out Of You and I had read it. It explained just how carbon dating was just a huge accident. They were getting all the dates wrong. They were misidentifying the bones and sometimes even just making stuff up.
My dad had big books on his shelf by scientists that explained, in detail, just all the things that were wrong with the theory. I felt that if I could just bring one of these big books to my teacher, he could see that he had been duped.
So I asked my dad, “Can I borrow one of these books to show my teacher?”
And he said, “Well, yes, Jennifer, but maybe you should read it first.”
I tried flipping through it but it was pretty hard to understand but I knew it was smart because it had graphs and big words and I knew my teacher was smart enough that just reading this book he would be completely convinced of the conspiracy.
I still remember vividly my march up to his desk. I plopped the book down and said, “The Theory of Evolution is false. Look at all the problems with it.”
He turned bright red and, with some self-restraint, I may add, he said to me, “Yes, there are some small holes in the Theory of Evolution but there are even bigger holes in your Theory of Creationism.”
I was taken aback. I never really thought of what I believed as a theory requiring evidence before. It was the divine truth, wasn’t it?
After that, I disengaged from science even further. The conflict was just too much. Even for an evangelical Christian, my sect was considered extreme. Pentecostalism. We’re talking faith healing, casting out of demons, speaking in tongues. We’re talking no sex, no alcohol, no non-Christian music or TV. We’re talking being convinced in your hear that your non-Christian friends were going to be tortured for eternity in hell and feeling guilt and shame that you hadn’t tried harder to save their souls.
Science just didn’t line up with the young earth creationist narrative that the people I loved and respected assured me was true. So in high school I focused on music. And when I went to university, I focused on English and history.
History is my next big challenge, though. The archeological evidence just seemed so clear that other civilizations had existed for thousands and thousands of years before Abraham came along, before technically the beginning of earth was supposed to happen. Even worse, the Bible stories that I had taken as history seemed to appear in other cultures as myths long, long, long before the Old Testament times. I had this feeling that if I kept going to university, I was going to lose my faith.
So I stopped going to university. But I came back the next year because I was so bored. I had been working as a house painter and, let me tell you, that’s as boring as watching paint dry. But sure enough, I lost my faith. To be an evangelical Christian you have to believe the Bible is 100% true and I just couldn’t believe that anymore.
I felt like a hypocrite. I stopped going to church and I broke my mother’s heart. I still remember my mother saying to me, with all sincerity and no irony, that she wished that she and my father hadn’t taught us kids to think for ourselves. I felt alienated from my family, my community and my friends. It was the hardest decision I've ever made.
At this time, I was taking an English course with one of the most brilliant women I've ever met in my life, Miriam Nichols. And I still remember sitting in on a lecture on T.S. Eliot and it was as if a light had gone on in my head. I could suddenly think of things in a deeper way that I've never thought before and I had started my journey to becoming a critical thinker.
Dr. Nichols encouraged in me a love for great ideas and I soaked up as many perspectives in the world as I possibly could. I quickly began to excel as a student and started to think that maybe I would fit in academia.
However, at this time my plan was that I was going to be a literary critic and I was about to graduate. It was my honors year. I was doing an honors thesis with Dr. Nichols on Gertrude Stein and sex and I had to take a required social sciences course. Almost at a flip of a coin, I ended up in psychology.
In psychology, I learned about the scientific method. And maybe most of you learn about that in high school but somehow I had missed the memo and it just blew me away. The logic and simplicity of science.
This time with an open mind, I learned about natural selection and I was as excited as if I had discovered it myself. When I was little, I had always had a fascination with animals but I had been told animals had no souls and that they were unimportant compared to humans. Now, learning about the evolutionary continuity between their minds and mine I just wanted to know everything I possibly could about how they thought and I was filled with the conviction that I knew what I wanted to do with my life.
But I already had a degree and a career path. So I took a year off and I thought, well, and I started paying off my substantial student loans. And I came to the quite cheesy resolution that, you know what? I only have one life to live so I might as well do what I really want to do. I went back to school part time and upgraded my degree to psychology and focused on animal cognition.
While I was doing this, it came to my attention that primates and apes were not the same as us. I had been taught that we descended from apes but now I was learning that they were our cousins. And I learned about just how similar their minds were to us and that it was ridiculous the idea that we descended from them because, in fact, they were our cousins.
Then I finished my animal cognition upgrading and at this time I was living very close to my family. I couldn’t tell our family about what I was learning because it ultimately meant I was talking about evolution. They also though it was crazy that I wanted to know anything about animal minds.
However, when I was just about to leave for grad school, I was in the car with my mother and out of nowhere she mentions that God created evolution. My jaw almost hit the floor. I knew they had been going to less radical churches. They had left the Pentecostal church, and my dad’s best friend was a Christian biologist. I think he had helped them reconcile their faith and science. It was one of the greatest moments of my life.
Now, I am a researcher. I’m just a master’s student but I’m learning all about raccoons. And everyday I’m amazed by their adaptability and tenacity. I've become passionate about urban animals. I want to know just how the cities are shaping them and how we are living with them. I think I might be the only person at downtown Toronto who gets a giant smile on my face every time I see a pigeon.
It’s been a long journey but I think I’m finally living my best life. So no, I didn’t get to have a testimony. If anything, losing Jesus radically transformed my life. But this is the closest I’m ever going to get to having one, so thank you for listening.