http://michaeldowd.org/index.htmlAmerica's Evolutionary EvangelistenMichael DowdCopyright 2009 The Great Story2008-02-28T17:19:55-08:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 Wed, 06 May 2009 18:54:13 -0700Michael DowdHome2008-02-28T17:19:55-08:00http://michaeldowd.org/news/print/files/7f8aa89c09681ef103acd735eb397a15-67.php#unique-entry-id-67http://michaeldowd.org/news/print/files/7f8aa89c09681ef103acd735eb397a15-67.php#unique-entry-id-67Ventura County Reporter

By Joan Trossman Bien

The Rev. Michael Dowd began life as a born-again evangelical believing Darwinian biology to be the work of the devil. Now, he preaches the gospel of science.

The Rev. Michael Dowd is making the rounds in Ventura County this week, delivering speeches and workshops at churches in Ojai and Ventura. The topic of his considerable passion: evolution.

For Dowd, a trip through the cosmos ends at your front door. Actually, Dowd and his scientist-author wife, Connie Barlow, don’t really have their own front door. They have lived on the road for six years, preaching the excitement of science as religious inspiration. They roam North America appearing at venues both secular and sectarian, attempting to convince their audience that each individual person is the result of 14 billion years of evolution.

Dowd did not come to this intersection of science and religion in a predictable way. He says he had an epiphany when he was in the Army.

]]>Michael DowdHome2007-04-25T17:01:33-07:00http://michaeldowd.org/news/print/files/d4d5436f3520792b67f593ea586d13c0-66.php#unique-entry-id-66http://michaeldowd.org/news/print/files/d4d5436f3520792b67f593ea586d13c0-66.php#unique-entry-id-66San Francisco Chronicle

By David Ian Miller

The evolution-versus-creationism debate is one of those perennial hot-button issues, like abortion and school prayer, that almost invariably leads to polarization. It seems as if you either think there's a place for teaching a biblical perspective in the schools, as many fundamentalist Christians contend, or you believe evolution, grounded in scientific fact, is the only paradigm worth exploring.

Michael Dowd is an itinerant preacher who believes he has found a middle path that transcends and includes both camps. For the past three years, Dowd, a nondenominational Christian minister, and his wife, science writer Connie Barlow, have been driving across the country, stopping at Christian and Unitarian Universalist churches, Jewish synagogues, Quaker meeting houses and Buddhist meditation centers to teach religious audiences about evolution. Their goal is to present a story of the universe, which they call the "great story," in a way that people -- whatever their spiritual orientation -- can embrace.

Dowd spoke with me on Friday from Sonoita, Ariz., where he stopped for a few days before hitting the road again. He'll be in Los Angeles later this week.

]]>Michael DowdHome2008-10-23T16:44:14-07:00http://michaeldowd.org/news/print/files/c8753e82fd9f609fa3f8d0da475fd7c5-65.php#unique-entry-id-65http://michaeldowd.org/news/print/files/c8753e82fd9f609fa3f8d0da475fd7c5-65.php#unique-entry-id-65Chicago Daily Herald

By Marni Pyke

In 1925, the Scopes monkey trial generated headlines, hoopla and hate between proponents of teaching Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in schools and those who called it blasphemous.

It wouldn't be the last time questions of faith have divided the body politic as overtones of religion in this year's presidential contest show.

The Rev. Michael Dowd wants to change that.

]]>Michael DowdHome2008-06-20T16:40:43-07:00http://michaeldowd.org/news/print/files/6bfc6b7336b83fd1e7f032a771dee338-64.php#unique-entry-id-64http://michaeldowd.org/news/print/files/6bfc6b7336b83fd1e7f032a771dee338-64.php#unique-entry-id-64Washington Post

by Claire Hoffman

I was just about to toss my New York Times Magazine this morning when this article on Darwinists for Jesus fell open. It's about evolutionary evangelist Michael Dowd who, with his wife, has been traveling the nation and preaching on the sacredness of evolution. I love stories like this, that show the ways that religious thinking can adapt and synthesize to totally modern theories.

]]>Michael DowdHome2008-02-23T16:33:52-08:00http://michaeldowd.org/news/print/files/8575ea07652146adb9172e17442c6ffb-63.php#unique-entry-id-63http://michaeldowd.org/news/print/files/8575ea07652146adb9172e17442c6ffb-63.php#unique-entry-id-63San Diego Union Tribune

By Sandi Dolbee

Rev. Dowd in San DiegoSome say you can tell a lot about people from the cars they drive. The Rev. Michael Dowd drives a camper van with drawings of two fish, one labeled “Jesus” and the other “Darwin,” who are kissing each other with red hearts above them.

For nearly six years, Dowd, a former United Church of Christ minister, and his wife, science writer Connie Barlow, have traveled the country preaching the gospel of evolution with evangelistic zeal.

It's time to declare an end to the war between science and faith, he argues. He says the facts are indisputable: Earth and its inhabitants evolved over billions of years. But that's OK, he adds, because God, or whatever name you want to give to a higher power, was and is still involved.

“Imagine a realm of nothingness,” says Dowd, invoking an image of the beginning of time. “God is the essence of that everything. Everything that emerges is not emerging outside of God, but within God.”

]]>Michael DowdHome2007-01-06T16:21:53-08:00http://michaeldowd.org/news/print/files/b15e5a616b93e999945b92e591c72cc6-62.php#unique-entry-id-62http://michaeldowd.org/news/print/files/b15e5a616b93e999945b92e591c72cc6-62.php#unique-entry-id-62Wired Magazine

By Brandon Keim

The Rev. Michael Dowd is preaching a surprising message: Evolution is real and science points to the undeniably reality of God.

For the last five years, the author and former evangelical pastor has lived out of a van with his wife, crisscrossing the nation to deliver the good news.

His latest book, Thank God for Evolution!, drew endorsements from five Nobel laureates and dozens of religious leaders. With the battle between science and religion at a fever pitch, it couldn't come at a better time. Just last week Texas papers reported that a curriculum director had been fired in October for forwarding information about an evolution lecture to friends and colleagues.

Dowd wasn't always an evolution proselytizer. Presented with an evolution textbook on his first day of biology classes at Evangel University, he stormed out and told his roommate that Satan had a foothold in the Christian school. But after encountering the teachings of Catholic eco-theologian Thomas Berry, Dowd embraced what's known as evolutionary theology.

Wired News spoke with Dowd by phone about science, religion and his belief that "a holy understanding of evolution will usher the world's religions into their greatness in the 21st century."

]]>Michael DowdHome2007-09-17T16:17:10-07:00http://michaeldowd.org/news/print/files/f47a05991af2394591ea05e2048a8e01-61.php#unique-entry-id-61http://michaeldowd.org/news/print/files/f47a05991af2394591ea05e2048a8e01-61.php#unique-entry-id-61Newsweek

By Sharon Begley

Evolutionists Fight the ‘Godless’ Rap

There may be some battlefields where the gospel's "blessed are the peacemakers" holds true. But despite the work of a growing number of scholars and millions of dollars in foundation funding to find harmony between science and faith, evolution still isn't one of them. Just ask biologist Richard Colling. A professor at Olivet Nazarene University in Illinois and a lifelong member of the evangelical Church of the Nazarene, Colling wrote a 2004 book called "Random Designer" because—as he said in a letter to students and colleagues this year—"I want you to know the truth that God is bigger, far more profound and vastly more creative than you may have known." Moreover, he said, God "cares enough about creation to harness even the forces of [Darwinian] randomness."

]]>Michael DowdHome2008-06-15T16:10:31-07:00http://michaeldowd.org/news/print/files/e473cea3ff52eba94176fb0cb37fcb36-60.php#unique-entry-id-60http://michaeldowd.org/news/print/files/e473cea3ff52eba94176fb0cb37fcb36-60.php#unique-entry-id-60New York Times Magazine

by Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

In 1981, Michael Dowd would have counted himself among the millions of conservative Christians who blame Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and the idea of a godless, purposeless universe for the moral decline of society. That year, as a freshman at Evangel University in Springfield, Mo., Dowd felt a rush of indignant anger in biology class when the professor held up a textbook that taught evolution. As he stormed out of the classroom, Dowd could not have imagined that he would come to view evolution as a spiritually inspiring idea that religion must embrace.

In the years that followed, Dowd shed his more conservative views and served as a pastor in the liberal United Church of Christ. Today he calls himself an evolutionary evangelist. For the last six years, he has traveled across North America with his wife, Connie Barlow, in a van that displays an image of two fish kissing each other — one labeled Jesus, the other Darwin — explaining to conservative and liberal congregations why understanding and accepting evolution will bring them closer to spiritual fulfillment. The religious advantage to embracing the evolutionary worldview, Dowd says, is that it explains our frailties, our addictions, our infidelities and other moral deficiencies as byproducts of adaptation over billions of years. And that, he says, has a potentially liberating effect: never mind guilt; once we understand our sinful ways, we can get past them and play a conscious role in the evolution of humanity.

]]>Michael DowdHome2009-03-01T16:01:27-08:00http://michaeldowd.org/news/print/files/b2f459808a3f2ef86c91cd4f2b180c46-59.php#unique-entry-id-59http://michaeldowd.org/news/print/files/b2f459808a3f2ef86c91cd4f2b180c46-59.php#unique-entry-id-59Discover Magazine

by Karen Wright

You could call Helen Fisher a Darwinian matchmaker. The acclaimed anthropologist from Rutgers University is also a best-selling author of books on love and the chief scientific adviser to an online dating service called Chemistry.com. This service utilizes a questionnaire that Fisher developed after years of research on the science of romantic attraction. It reveals which of four broad, biologically based personality types an applicant displays and helps identify partners with compatible brain chemistry. In designing the questionnaire, Fisher relied on the principles of evolutionary psychology, a field inspired by Charles Darwin’s insights. She has even used those principles to size up Darwin himself. (He is a “negotiator,” “imaginative and theoretical,” “unassuming, agreeable, and intuitive”—but also married, alas, and dead.)

Fisher’s work is just one of the innumerable offshoots of Darwin’s grand theory of life. In the 150 years since the publication of On the Origin of Species, it seems no sphere of human thought or activity has been left untouched by Darwinian analysis. Evolutionary theory has infiltrated the social sciences, where it has been used to explain human politics and spending habits. It has transformed computer science, inspiring problem-solving algorithms that adapt and change like living things. It is cited by a leading theoretical physicist who proposes that evolution helped shape the laws governing the cosmos. A renowned neuroscientist sees ideas of selection as describing the honing of connections among brain cells. Literary critics analyze the plots, themes, and characters of novels according to Darwinian precepts. Even religion, the sector most famously at odds with Darwin, now claims an evolutionary evangelist.

]]>Michael DowdHome2009-02-09T15:55:08-08:00http://michaeldowd.org/news/print/files/f31a0c7ffc193b07affd8be976229d67-58.php#unique-entry-id-58http://michaeldowd.org/news/print/files/f31a0c7ffc193b07affd8be976229d67-58.php#unique-entry-id-58Houston Press

by Olivia Flores Alvarez

It's been 200 years since the birth of Darwin, and 150 years since the publication of his book, On the Origin of Species, so we guess it's about time that religion and science stopped fighting and figured out some common ground.

The Reverend Michael Dowd, an ordained evangelical preacher, and his wife Connie Barlow, an atheist, are doing their part to make that happen. They travel the country with The Gospel of Evolution Roadshow (it's really just Dowd and his wife in a camper), preaching the marriage of science and faith, God and technology, and they've made it to Houston.

Dowd says you can't truly have one without the other and he's got a pretty good argument as to why.

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