Most obviously, unlike my Christian family members, I don’t take the creation story in Genesis as a literal, historical account of how God created the world. I think the creation story in Genesis is a myth, meant to convey the truth that God created the world, and wanted humans to bear His image (AKA the Imago Dei). 

But, when I’m asked how I think the world was literally created, I’d answer it happened over billions of years. And we came about via Darwinian evolution. That means that, scientifically speaking, we are animals, and we are genetically related to every other living thing on earth, including and especially apes. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that we are apes. We just happen to be far smarter than chimpanzees and orangutans. 

If I were to say exactly that at the Christmas Eve dinner table, World War Three might start. 

But evolution’s just one of the many sensitive topics I pretty much refuse to discuss with my Christian family members, even though I sometimes really want to. 

On the other side of the coin, I can comfortably talk about science and biology with my atheist dad. He's the only person in my life who laps up documentaries as much as I do. But the second I open my mouth to entertain the mere possibility of there being a Creator behind it all, my dad’s eyes glaze over. He doesn’t argue with me, but he’s obviously been burned by the church many times, especially when it came to asking the question, “Why does a loving God allow bad things to happen to innocent people?”

I mean… my paternal grandpa suffered a brain aneurysm that almost completely took away his ability to walk and talk when my dad was in kindergarten. Years later, I was born, and my dad had to watch me suffer for my entire life while he couldn’t do much of anything about it except make me take my pills and do my treatments. 

Naturally, when my dad asked that very important question about suffering to his fundamentalist, Lutheran pastors, he was given less-than-satisfactory answers, to say the least. Couple that with my dad’s childhood love for science and science-fiction, and the fact that he was desperate to leave the farm he was raised upon for the city, and you get… well… the fervent, jaded atheist he is today. 

Again, I don’t blame him one bit. 

However, I wish there was a way to marry the hours-long spiritual conversations I can have with my Christian family members, with the hours-long conversations about science I can have with my dad.

Good news is, there is a way to marry those two. Youtube is a thing, after all. But, now the question is: do I have the balls- er I mean ovaries- to do it?