Professional danger comes in many flavors, and although Richard Colling doesn’t jump into forest fires or test experimental jets for a living, he does do the academic’s equivalent: He teaches biology and evolution at a fundamentalist Christian college.
At Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbonnais, Ill., he says, “as soon as you mention evolution in anything louder than a whisper, you have people who aren’t very happy.” And within the larger conservative Christian community, he adds, “I’ve been called some interesting names.”
But those experiences haven’t stopped Colling – who received a Ph.D. in microbiology, chairs the biology department at Olivet Nazarene and is himself a devout conservative Christian – from coming out swinging. In his new book, “Random Designer,” he writes: “It pains me to suggest that my religious brothers are telling falsehoods” when they say evolutionary theory is “in...