[Denis] Noble is neutral on religious matters. Yet he sees compelling evidence that purpose may be fundamental to life….Noble’s critics worry that entertaining religion-adjacent views subverts established science and the entire scientific project.

What if the formation and function of organisms requires design and reflects purpose? And what if these phenomena suggest the reality of a transcendent, intelligent Designer?
When it comes to the development of organisms, the current scientific narrative is
a reductionist, gene-centric model that forfeits natural phenomena like purpose due to its association with intelligent design and a transcendent, intelligent designer.
Yet, according to a recent Forbes article, an increasing number of scientists have concluded that organisms do, in fact, exhibit purpose.
[Denis] Noble is neutral on religious matters. Yet he sees compelling evidence that purpose may be fundamental to life. He’s determined to debunk the current scientific paradigm and replace the elevated importance of genes with something much more controversial. His efforts have enraged many of his peers but gained support from the next generation of origins-of-life researchers working to topple the reign of gene-centrism. If successful, the shift could not only transform how we classify, study and treat disease, but what it means to be alive….
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So what can we conclude about the infamous dropout numbers? The rates of dropout and return are far less bleak and more complex than we’ve been led to believe. The claim that 90 percent of kids drop out after high school clearly needs to be left behind.

Debunking the Dropout Myth

“Well,” the pastor said, “nine out of 10 kids drop out of church after they graduate. Evidently, what we’re doing isn’t working.”
“Mm-hmm,” the children’s director agreed. “We just want to do so much better than that.”
“Is your church actually losing that many?” I asked. They looked at each other before shrugging.
“I don’t really know,” the pastor replied. “We don’t see them after they graduate. Sometimes that’s because they’re involved in another church, I guess.”
The children’s director continued, “If we had programs to teach parents how to grow their kids spiritually, we could stop the loss.”
“I’ll do everything I can to help your church,” I said. “But first, let’s rethink your reasons for considering these changes because the problem you think is the problem is probably not the problem at all.”
Here’s why these two ministry leaders—and scores of others like them—need to rethink their motivations: The nine-out-of-10 dropout number isn’t true. It was never true, yet many church leaders still believe it. Take a trip with me to the origins of this statistic and why it’s long past time to lay this lie to rest.
Gut Feelings Aren’t Good Statistics
This lie didn’t start as a lie. It was a well-intended, casual survey that metamorphosed far beyond what anyone envisioned. Some years ago, a doctoral student named Brandon Shields discovered the earliest sources of the 90 percent statistic. Apparently, it began in the 1990s when Jay Strack, a popular conference speaker, invited a roomful of youth ministers to share their gut feelings about how many youth were dropping out of church after high school. When Strack summed up the responses, he came up with a 90 percent dropout rate.
Strack later reported that he never intended his statistic to be interpreted as fact. Once he repeated the information a few times, though, other leaders began to reiterate the 90 percent dropout rate as truth. It spread quicker than a stomach virus in a cabin full of middle schoolers halfway through a week of camp. There’s nothing wrong with asking a few people how they feel about an issue. But conversational “surveys” will never result in reliable statistics. In this instance, the collective estimates of a few ministers resulted in exaggerated percentages that received tremendous publicity and eventually ended up in ministry resources.
Later claims escalated the hysteria. A popular book published in 1997 claimed that only four percent of young people surveyed at that time were born-again Christians. As a result, the author claimed, “According to present trends, we are about to lose eternally the second largest generation in America’s history.” The truth is, this survey spanned only three U.S. states and included information from a mere 211 youth. (To be fair, at least the author was transparent on his methodology.) Other leaders then trumpeted the “trend” as a harbinger of impending doom.
Bad News Is Big News
It’s easy to point accusing fingers at the sources of statistics—but the problem isn’t really the numbers. These numbers arose from well-intended attempts to assess the effectiveness of church ministries. The more problematic question is, Why are we so willing to wallow in the worst possibilities, even when those possibilities aren’t well-founded?
We get excited about bad news.
Human nature relishes the discovery of a hidden crisis. Once we’ve discovered that crisis, we rarely keep the news to ourselves. We spread bad news and, with each retelling, we tend to stretch it. That’s why God warns: “Do not go about spreading slander” (Leviticus 19:16). In a Wall Street Journal article, Rodney Stark and Byron Johnson provided a clear example of this phenomenon: “The national news media yawned over the Baylor Survey’s findings that the number of American atheists has remained steady at 4 percent since 1944, and that church membership has reached an all-time high. But when a study by Barna Research claimed that young people under 30 are deserting the church in droves, it made headlines and newscasts across the nation.”
The tendency to turn bad news into big news doesn’t completely explain how rapidly these numbers spread through churches. I suggest an additional reason. Since the 1950s, a fun-and-games approach dominated many youth ministries. In the 1990s, a new generation of youth ministers emerged.
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Parallels in other ancient religions neither prove nor disprove the authenticity of the New Testament documents. They simply demonstrate the common expectations of people in the first century AD. Even if some clear parallel did exist between the story of Jesus and previous religious expectations, this wouldn’t warrant the belief that the apostle Paul or the Gospel authors “borrowed” the tenets from other faiths.

It’s an accusation that’s been around a long time. Even in ancient times, critics of Christianity noticed some parallels between Christian beliefs and pre-Christian myths. In the late second century, a pagan philosopher named Celsus charged, “The Christians have used the myths of Danae and the Melanippe, of the Auge and Antiope in fabricating this story of virgin birth!” In more recent times, skeptical scholars such as Marvin Meyer and Robert Price have claimed close connections between the resurrection of Jesus and the myths of dying and rising deities that marked many pagan myths.
In the simplest possible terms, here’s what these critics contend: The most marvelous claims in the Gospels—a miraculous birth, for example, as well as the idea of a deity who dies and rises again—are paralleled in pagan religions that predate Christianity; therefore, early Christians must have fabricated these miracles based on their knowledge of pre-Christian religions.
To be sure, there are some surface-level similarities between ancient myths and certain events in the Gospels. Long before the first century AD, the myths of Egyptians deities such as Osiris, Adonis, Attis, and Horus included tales of death and rebirth. The Persians venerated Mithras, a deity who (according to some claims) was born of a virgin and who died and then rose from the dead. Sacramental bread and the fruit of the vine make appearances in a few mystery cults as well.
So why should anyone see Jesus as being distinct from the pagan gods? Could it be that the New Testament stories of Jesus represent the fictive myth of an ancient mystery cult that’s survived for 2,000 years? Or is there something different about the accounts of Jesus’s time on earth?
When these claims are compared carefully with the New Testament Gospels, the distinction between Jesus and the supposed pagan parallels becomes quite distinct, for at least two reasons: first, the pagan parallels aren’t as parallel as the proponents claims; and second, many of the supposed parallels confuse later Christian practices with the actual affirmations in the New Testament Gospels
1. The Parallels Aren’t So Parallel
First, it’s important to be aware that most of these supposed pagan parallels aren’t nearly so parallel as the skeptics suppose. When the actual sources behind the myths are closely examined, the supposed parallels have little in common with New Testament narratives.
For example, there are dying and rising gods in some pagan myths—but these deities died and arose each year, certainly not the same pattern as Jesus’s substitutionary once-for-all sacrifice. And the pagan myths of miraculous births are closer to divine impregnation—a mortal woman conceives a child as a result of sexual relations with a god—than to the virgin conception described in Matthew and Luke.
Example: Jesus vs. Mithras
To exemplify how these supposed parallels aren’t nearly as parallel as the critics claim, let’s look at the myth of Mithras, which is often presented as a predecessor to the New Testament.
So what about Mithras’s miraculous birth?
According to some reconstructions of the ancient sources describing the Mithras’s birth, Mithras was born from solid stone, and he got stuck on the way out. Some nearby persons in a field pulled him from the stone, which left a cave behind him. Some skeptics connect this birth to the birth of Jesus in a stable with shepherds arriving soon afterward. A few even refer to Mithras’s birth as a “virgin birth.”
But referring to the rescue of Mithras from stone as a “virgin birth” seems to me a stretch.
I mean, I guess that birth from a rock is sort of a virgin birth. But how can you tell if a rock is a virgin, anyway? And how do rocks lose their virginity? Parallels of this sort are too vague and too dissimilar to support the claim that Christians borrowed their beliefs from pagans of previous generations.
James Tabor, a professor at University of North Carolina, doesn’t believe in the virgin conception of Jesus, and he denies that Jesus rose from the dead. Yet even he is able to see how radically Jesus’s birth in the Gospels differs from any supposed pagan parallels:
When you read the accounts of Mary’s unsuspected pregnancy, what is particularly notable . . . is an underlying tone of realism that runs through the narratives. These seem to be real people, living in real times and places. In contrast the birth stories in Greco-Roman literature have a decidedly legendary flavor to them. For example, in Plutarch’s account of the birth of Alexander the Great, mother Olympias got pregnant from a snake; it was announced by a bolt of lightning that sealed her womb so that her husband Philip could not have sex with her. Granted, both Matthew and Luke include dreams and visions of angels but the core story itself—that of a man who discovers that his bride-to-be is pregnant and knows he is not the father—has a realistic and thoroughly human quality to it. The narrative, despite its miraculous elements, rings true.
Let’s take a quick look at a few of the supposed parallels between Jesus and Mithras:
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