I Wonder Who Designed the Logo…

September 6, 2008 by Guest Contributor

You may have seen this already, but it’s worth a second look.

Texas Christian University is hosting a Family Weekend next month. This is the logo they are using:

Ironic? Possibly.

But they do teach an evolution course at the university that seems, well, intelligent.

BIOL 50303 – Evolution

Three hours lecture per week. Prerequisite: BIOL 10504 and 10514. Concepts and principles of organic evolution. Topics include natural selection, adaptation, quantitative genetics, sexual selection, kin selection, life history characters, speciation, and phylogeny.

I’d love to know if there was any negative reaction to that image from students or donors to the school.

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Justin

There are loads of Xians who have no problem reconciling evolution with an ongoing reinterpretation of Christianity. They’re considered edgy and all that, but they’re real.

I’m about to do a weekend event in Shawnee, OK, home of Oklahoma Baptist University, invited there by religious leaders in the community. They want, specifically, an outsider to say what they cannot about how faith has to change in light of contemporary human knowledge.

I don’t believe in gods, but they don’t either, really. They aren’t yet willing to put it like that, so they’re searching for something else to call what they are feeling when they feel spiritual. It’s almost as if they have a sincere faith, but they don’t really know what to call the thing they have faith in, so they use the old words to describe a very recent, very a-theistic development in Xian culture.

My point in mentioning that is this: it’s happening all over the place. The Ray Comforts of the world are the minority. They’re just louder is all.
Dawn

For frig’s sake, just because something has ‘Christian’ on it does not mean people have to react with astonishment when it turns out that, OMG, they have something to do with evolution or have nothing to do with creationism.

A little research would have gone a long way here. The university in question is affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) who are a mainline protestant denomination with no official interpretation of the bible. Look on their sites and you see lots on issues of social justice but little to nothing on creationism. Telling people how to read the bible doesn’t seem to be their thing.
Jasen

TCU is pretty much a secular school.

In case you didn’t know, that animal is a horned frog, the school mascot. (Unfortunately most of them have been killed off by fire ants).
Mike Haubrich, FCD

Texas Christian University in Fort Worth is a serious university where students get a very good education. So is Southern Methodist in Dallas, and not too far south is Baylor Baptist University.

It digs at the heartstrings of people such as William Dembski that schools sponsored by church funds actually research and teach real science, but the Northern Texas has some very good Universities (even if they do obsess a bit too much about football.)
James

I think there really is more teaching of evolution and generally academic freedom in many Christian colleges than many think. I went to Gardner-Webb University which is a traditional Baptist college, and my Old Testament taught (in layman’s terms) that the Old Testament stories are parables and not to be taken literally. My biology teacher taught evolution and did not take the Bible literally either.
Vincent

Justin!
Say hi to my old stomping grounds for me. I went to junior college at St. Gregory’s Abbey just a stone’s throw down the road from OBU and I took Microbiology from Prof. Hurley at OBU. I went on to get an ivy league degree and a law degree and still that Microbiology class was the hardest I have ever had. Good science being taught there, and thoroughly.
Becky Robinson

As mentioned, TCU is a Disciples of Christ school, the religion in which I was raised. It is very progressive. They even have their own gay and lesbian alliance: http://www.gladalliance.org/about.html

It is not surprising that they would accept evolution and even promote it.
miller

There are loads of Xians who have no problem reconciling evolution with an ongoing reinterpretation of Christianity. They’re considered edgy and all that, but they’re real.

Edgy? Who considers it edgy? I never considered it edgy. I thought it was absolutely normal, until I met the internet.
Pseudonym

Edgy? Who considers it edgy? I never considered it edgy. I thought it was absolutely normal, until I met the internet.

I was wondering that myself. Maybe you have to have grown up in the Deepest Darkest Bible Belt (which is, theologically speaking, an exception to pretty much every rule).
Richard Wade

Justin, please give us a report when you return. It sounds like it will be fascinating. Email to Hemant, and I think he’ll publish it as a post.
Sarah

I’m confused. Is the point of this post that a school with “Texas” and “Christian” in the name is teaching a course on evolution? Disregarding the fact that TCU is not an evangelical or conservative college, but rather a mainstream or even liberal one? With a reputation for solid academics, especially in biology and the other sciences? I’m not a Christian anymore, but it’s rather offensive to assume that all Christians or Christian organizations believe the same drivel that the Vocal Right believe.
Justin

Edgy? Who considers it edgy? I never considered it edgy. I thought it was absolutely normal, until I met the internet.

Just a hair of background: I’m in Tulsa, OK, and was, in fact raised in a deeply fundamentalist version of the religion. I was unclear. Fundies often think the evolution-accepting Xians are edgy as in on the edge of damnation. Non-fundie Xians often think the Fundies are silly as in silly in the head.
miller

LOL, too true.
ATL-Apostate

Just to echo another respondent:
TCU is a fairly secular school. They do have a Divinity school (as do other secular schools, e.g., Duke), which tends to be fairly “liberal.” It should come as no surprise to a Christian (fundy or otherwise) or an atheist that TCU has classes that teach evolution.

ATL-Apostate
TXatheist

Wow, if TCU, Baylor and SMU are secular what is UT-Austin? Sorry, but of the family/friends I know that went to the first 3 it most certainly is a conservative school that places the bible in high regard instead of a scholastic position of plagiarized mythology like secular colleges do.
Jason Wyrick

I’m a TCU alumn and I can say, at least while I went there, that TCU was very involved in the sciences and did not bring up Creationism in the classroom. Definitely a secular school that just happens to be funded by the Disciples of Christ. They were open enough that they even allowed our ridiculously named club, Pagans for Hedonism and Darwinism, to operate for awhile (they eventually made us change the name because it was an acronym for PhD, which we did intentionally.) 🙂

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I Wonder Who Designed the Logo…