I don’t know what to say about this event. Yesterday, Rose and I found out about Dr. Bechly’s passing. He was the guest on our most recent episode of Knight and Rose Show. We knew that we wanted to do an episode on the fossil record and intelligent design, and we wanted to get the best person we could. Dr. Bechly was our first choice. Let’s find out about what he was really like.

So, previously, I blogged about his testimony, and on Tuesday night, I posted our episode of Knight and Rose Show with him.

What really impressed us about Dr. Bechly is how rigorous he was about forming his views of what was true. And how much integrity he had to pay the consequences of coming out in favor of intelligent design and eventually Christianity, in a very secular environment.

This article by David Klinghoffer at Evolution News told me a lot more about the man.

Excerpt:

We are shocked and grieved to report the death of our friend and colleague Günter Bechly, on January 6 in an auto accident in Austria. He was 61. “There is no easy way to say this,” said Center for Science and Culture Managing Director John West yesterday morning when we all found out. I could feel my scalp tighten from the grim tone of his voice before I even knew what was coming. Now try in vain to imagine how Bechly’s wife, Luise, and his two young sons are feeling. It seems beyond inadequate to wish them comfort.

Dr. Bechly, a paleontologist who was pushed out of his position as a curator at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany, after becoming persuaded by the evidence for intelligent design, was not just a gifted and prolific scientist. He was a hero. Changing your view about a controversial matter when it costs you nothing is one thing. When it costs you, in the professional context, everything — that is quite another.

I’ve said before on this blog how weird it is for me to see how so many Christians in America think that Christianity will make you happy, successful, and popular. Christians in places like Africa do not usually hold these views. How Christians in America can get ideas like that from a suffering Savior is a mystery to me. But what we loved about Dr. Bechly was that he just loved to puzzle about what was really true. And when he decided that something was true, he lived by it, and no one else could shake him off it.

More from the article:

As an academic field, evolutionary biology is a bully’s playground where the use of intimidation to silence doubters is just the way things are done. Bechly refused to be bullied and thus gave courage to many in the science world, including friends of ID that you will be hearing more about in years to come. It could be called (not my formulation) the Bechly Effect. One person gives courage to others, and it builds from there.

He wanted to know what was true. In Germany, in organizing an exhibit at his museum celebrating the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth, he almost on a whim decided that if he was going to mock intelligent design, as he intended, he really ought to read a few books by those ID rascals. The experience changed him profoundly. That story is memorably told in the documentary Revolutionary. The switch to ID cost him his job but it won him many friends in the ID world. He will be terribly missed.

The rest of the article goes on to talk about what projects he had in the works, his most recent lecture at Cambridge University, his personal character, his spiritual journey. I recommend that you read it, because I think that Christians need to recapture what it is like for someone not raised in the church to work through the evidence, and decide that Christianity is the correct worldview.

Everywhere I look today, I see elite Christian leaders whose first priority, it seems, is to be liked by non-Christians. In every area, we ask non-Christians what their problems are, and what they would like us to do to solve their problems. We’re falling over ourselves trying to appease non-Christians because we want them to like us so badly. We have lost confidence in the Bible as an authority that tells people what their real problems are, and what their real solutions are, and what their real priorities should be, and how to be wise about making plans to achieve what really matters. On issues of race, climate change, sexuality, etc. elite Christian leaders just don’t believe that the Christianity can be recommended to a non-Christian based on the evidence. They don’t know what that evidence is. They never did the work themselves. And we – the rank and file – keep choosing them to lead. We disregard their laziness and ignorance, and choose them for their appearance and charisma.

But Dr. Bechly knew what that evidence was. He investigated. He found it. And he followed the evidence to a true worldview. If only we could convince our Christian leaders that this is the right way to go, the normal way of evangelizing others. Jesus used evidence.