As members of the Veritas Forum club at Cal Poly, we would like to address Nicholas Utschig’s guest commentary before potentially well-intentioned students could misrepresent our views.
On the Veritas Forum Cal Poly 2010 Facebook page, the mission statement reads as follows: “The Veritas Forum is a place where students of every worldview can come and engage in a safe, intelligent conversation about life’s hardest questions. Our goal is to introduce the relevance of Jesus Christ to those discussions and all of life.”
So yes, Jesus will be mentioned at events like “Finding God Beyond Harvard: the Quest for Veritas” or “Why a Good God Allows Suffering.” Christianity will also be mentioned at the “Origins of Life Panel Discussion.”
That panel will also include a speaker who professes to be a Christian and believes that the theory of evolution is valid, a view shared by a large portion of the Christian community. Another speaker (Dr. Rainbow) who is “often a Theistic Evolutionist, convinced through the discoveries of Evo-Devo that vertebrate evolution has happened as described, including human evolution, but harboring serious questions … ” and also believes that the theory of evolution is valid.
All three events are formatted so that the Cal Poly community can directly influence the conversation. As a planning team, we bring in well-respected scholars to initiate the conversation and give it direction while the end result of the conversation is dependent on the students who attend and voice their opinions.
Perhaps in the past four years the Veritas Forum has not been interpreted as an open dialogue. The fact is, for every Veritas Forum at Cal Poly, dating back to January of 2001, the format of every speaking engagement has been 45-minute lecture and a 45-minute question and answer session. This Q&A time is designed specifically for any and all students to ask whatever they want about the topic at hand.
For the Forum to be an open dialogue, we depend greatly on students who have world views that are not fundamentally Christian to attend and ask questions during the Q&A times of these events.
We hope you will join us because people like Nick ask excellent questions that force us all to contemplate what Truth is and how to live a true life.
Josh Ceccarelli is an aerospace engineering junior and Veritas Club president. Chelsea Morrell is a biomedical engineering senior and Veritas Club vice president. They are Mustang Daily guest columnists.