Life & Wisdom Quote by Edwin Louis Cole

A tidy bit of rhetorical judo: Cole frames faith as the hard-nosed, evidence-backed position and evolution as the leap in the dark. The line works by stealing the cultural prestige of “proof” and reassigning it. In most public debates, evolution is coded as the scientific default and Christianity as the private conviction; Cole flips that polarity so believers can feel not only faithful but intellectually defiant.

The subtext is less about biology than authority. “Unproved” doesn’t engage evolutionary theory on its own terms (predictive power, converging evidence, falsifiability); it treats science as a courtroom where anything short of absolute certainty is suspect. That sets up “proven” as something closer to testimony: lived experience, scripture, tradition, personal transformation. Cole isn’t offering a lab-grade argument; he’s offering an identity argument. If you accept Christ, you’re not retreating from reason, you’re joining the side that supposedly has the receipts.

Context matters: Cole wrote and preached in a late-20th-century American evangelical ecosystem shaped by the creationism/evolution culture war, where “evolution” often functioned as shorthand for secular elites, permissive morality, and a world without teleology. In that climate, calling evolution “unproved” isn’t primarily a scientific claim; it’s a boundary marker. It reassures a community under pressure that skepticism should be directed outward, not inward - and that spiritual certainty can be worn as intellectual confidence.