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Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution
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Average Rating:  out of 20 Reviews
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Price: $24.95
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Sale: $13.41
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Manufacturer: HarperOne
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EAN (European Article Number): 9780061228780
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Number of Items: 1
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Binding: Hardcover
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Author: Karl Giberson
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Publisher: HarperOne
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Edition: 1
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Dewey Decimal Number: 231.7652
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Publication Date: 2008-06-01
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Reading Level: 256
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Description: Intelligent design, creationism, and evolution have always been hot topics for debate in America. Creationism and intelligent design are usually seen as the province of religious people, while evolution belongs to the scientists. More often than not, both camps see the other as "the enemy." But what about committed Christians who find something lacking in the ideas of both creationism and intelligent design? Can you still be a Christian and support the idea of evolution? Scientist Karl Giberson believes you can. Raised a fundamentalist and influenced as a boy by Henry Morris's creationist classic The Genesis Flood, Giberson firmly believed in creationism through his college years. But while working on his Ph.D. in physics, he began to doubt that science could have gotten everything as thoroughly wrong as the creationists suggested, and he gradually abandoned his creationist beliefs—but not his belief in Christianity. Through careful research, Giberson concluded that Christianity and evolution do not have to be incompatible. In Saving Darwin, Giberson paints a clear picture of the creation/evolution controversy and explores its intricate history, from Darwin to the current culture wars, carefully showing why—and how—it is possible to believe in God and evolution at the same time.
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Customer Reviews
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Review Summary: Starts from wrong assumptions |
Date: 2008-12-10 |
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Details: This book offers the good news, and the bad news.
The bad news is, Christians are still under the delusion that being Christian is a good thing.
About 50 AD, a cult called The Way started recruiting victims. They wrote a Sales Pitch which was read aloud at meetings. In this Sales Pitch, an outspoken Jew from Nazareth came down to Jerusalem for the Passover celebration, attacked some moneychangers and was arrested. In Nazareth, making protests against the Romans was a popular pasttime. In Jerusalem, at the Temple during Passover, it wasn't tolerated.
Today, being a Christian means you can't look at a simple set of facts and draw the Correct Conclusion. (1) Having a demonic spirit identify Jesus as the Holy One of God is NOT a good entry on your resume. (2) Anyone who joined Peter's group had to sell their property and give Peter the money. (3) The world never ended with a general resurrection of the dead.
If you're smart, you realize that Christianity has been proven wrong.
So, can you be a Christian and accept modern Evolutionary Theory at the same time? Of course. Being a Christian means you don't think too hard about facts, nothing more. So there's no conflict.
There's some nonsense about what the author thinks being a Christian means, but he's missing the essential Truth. Being a Christian is not a good thing. The only way you can be a Christian today is to read a book and ignore 60% of the words, and only "see" the remaining 40%. That's why we have all the problems with Intelligent Design and their ilk. The only thing Christianity is good for is recruiting new Christians. The Gospel of Mark was never a historical text, only a tool for recruitment, and the people who fall for the con are only interested in finding new victims. That's what this book is, too. A long-winded "this is why you should respect Christianity" plea in a world that no longer respects their nonsense.
A man's behaviour may be quite harmless and even beneficial, when he is morally behaving like a scoundrel. And he may do great harm when he is morally acting on the highest principles.
--Shaw, George Bernard
Oh, yeah, the good news. Jesus was an exorcist who confronted demonic spirits. Evolution rules out the possibility of demonic spirits. Therefore, you can't be a Christian AND accept Evolution at the same time. They're too different things... and Christianity is wrong. Demons, as used in the gospel of Mark, are just another way to insult people who reject Christ. |
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Review Summary: misleading title |
Date: 2008-11-23 |
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Details: When people put their money down and give hours of their lives to a book, they expect that the book's content will have something to do with the book's title. This book's subtitle is "How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution." In 41 years of reading, I've never seen a greater disconnect between a book's title and what the book actually delivers.
I hoped to read theological reflections on evolution. Perhaps a chapter on the meaning of the crucifixion in light of evolution. Perhaps a chapter on how to re-think the concept of the Fall in light of evolution. Maybe a chapter on why, theologically, evolution isn't a big deal. The last few pages in this text could serve as a prologue to such a book.
If the book were titled "A Christian's Reflections on the Creation-Evolution Controversy," I'd give it a high score. It is a good introduction to the broad conversation on that topic.
The title isn't the author's fault. The publisher has disgraced itself with such a misleading title. |
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Review Summary: Assertions instead of arguments |
Date: 2008-11-06 |
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Details: The author writes (p.79): "...one thing is crystal clear: the Holocaust would have happened with or without Charles Darwin". Crystal clear? How sure of himself is this author. Absent substantiation. Moreover, he on that page quotes Hitler as waxing "eloquent about the triumph of the strong, calling it 'an iron law of necessity', justified as the 'right of victory of the best'" and "'Whoever will not fight in this world of eternal struggle', Hitler wrote in language eerily reminiscent of Darwin's explanation of natural selection, 'does not deserve to live'". Yet the author has amazing knowledge of truth under the historical hypothesis of nonexistent Darwin, despite Nazism's persistent self-justification by claiming racial superiority, an ideology born in a vacuum, I suppose.
The author also approvingly quotes (e.g. p.10) philosopher Dennett's phrase "Darwin's dangerous idea", meant jokingly to imply no danger to the idea. But as the preceding indicates, the idea is not merely dangerous, but disastrous. Danger concerns the potential, whereas disaster concerns the actual. Contrary to the author and that philosopher, many see Darwinism as responsible for, foreseen or not, the unequalled mass-killings of the 20th century. The author complains (p.83): "Tragically...the most preposterous charges are leveled against [Darwin]", quoting an "anti-evolutionary": "If evolution is true, then we are simply a product of time and chance, and there is no morality and no intrinsic worth to human life". Preposterous?
The author also (p.155) regards Dennett as one of "seekers after truth", although the latter's virulent atheism seems to qualify him at best as an adherent, not a truth-seeker. He is, however, excused and praised by the author, who while professing belief in God shares with him a worship of Darwin, which is as extensive with the author as with anyone I know about. He calls Darwin "the nineteenth century's greatest scientist" (p.33) or "one of the greatest scientists who ever lived" (p.40), accepting Darwinism lock, stock, and barrel. He accordingly holds in contempt even restricted criticism of it, e.g. by Intelligent Design, as "offering simplistic alternatives" (p.82). Intelligent Design is known to contend that the structure of organisms in order to function is so complex that it presupposes an intelligent designer. Darwinism of course contrariwise contends "that something so feeble and obviously purposeless as blind natural selection [accomplishes] that remarkable task" (p.54).
To defend against intelligent design, Darwinians have recently been accumulating hordes of denials of intelligence in designs of organisms. For instance, the author writes (p.199) about "the way our hands and feet are so similar to the forelimbs of other mammals"; "we might expect to discover entirely unrelated configurations of bones. After all, what we do with our appendages bears little resemblance to what bats do with theirs. What we find, however, is the same configuration modified for different purposes". Since this is not what "we might expect", he has the "simplistic" answer: it is bad design. How presumptuous. Inventors like Leonardo have for centuries failed to design human wings duplicating the flight of birds, or bats. Another complaint (p.163): "our eye has a blind spot". But this is in no way apparent in our vision; what then is the detriment?
Speaking of a blind spot, an incomparably more significant one looms, which fully discredits Darwin's "purposeless", "blind natural selection". This blind spot handicaps both Darwinians and their design opponents, and is one I have, so far unsuccessfully, tried to bring to attention in these reviews and elsewhere. It is that the inquirers needlessly argue for or against purpose in organisms regarding their structure. If attention is, rather, shifted to their behavior, the behavior's purposefulness is immediately obvious, as one directed toward their preservation. From this is easily inferred equal purpose in their formation, adaptation, etc., contra Darwin.
My marking a second star for the author is motivated by his relative fairness in criticizing (p.172) both sides of a dispute over a U.S. Senate bill concerning the teaching of evolution: "the goal of the protagonists is to win, not to discover the truth..."
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Review Summary: It Just Doesn't Add Up... |
Date: 2008-10-29 |
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Details: This book claims to show that Christians can believe in evolution. But it is a big FAIL. The thing that the author doesn't recognize is that the conflict is between two entirely incompatible worldviews. He attempts to take parts of this one and parts of that one and put them together to make a new worldview but it fails on so many levels.
The creationist worldview and the evolutionist worldviews are two internally coherent systems of thinking. They both make claims about the nature of reality and they both have metaphysical implications (despite evolutionist claims to the contrary). He would like to have the best of both worlds by taking the claims about reality from evolution and tack on the metaphysical implications of Christianity. You just can't do it without compromising both of them.
As an example, in the Introduction he argues at length that it is ridiculous to be a creationist because it doesn't jive with what scientists tell us and then (on pg 10) he argues that the central claim of Christianity is the incarnation (God becoming a man), which he points out is a ridiculous idea and it requires faith to accept it. Then he claims that the "acid of evolution" (which ate away all his origins theology) hasn't eaten away those beliefs about Christ which are "the heart and soul of Christianity". Interestingly, he doesn't state what these beliefs are, but instead points out the second and third beliefs (after creation) that "the acid" does eat away: the "fall of mankind", and the "uniqueness of mankind". This is where is starts getting ridiculous...and I haven't even gotten past the Introduction!
I'm a "fundamentalist idiot" and I can assure you that this book has nothing to do with Christianity. This guy is a "Christian" the same way that I am a "scientist" (I'm a graphic designer). You can tack on the name Christ to anything you want but that doesn't mean that you will end up with an internally coherent system of belief. The author's belief system just doesn't add up. |
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Review Summary: Misleading title and subtitle |
Date: 2008-10-16 |
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Details: Having grown up in the American evangelical denomination called the Church of the Nazarene (which presumably is the author's affiliation, since he teaches at Eastern Nazarene College), I was impressed, on my very first visit to a congregation of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, by how focused the latter was on Christ. Thirty years later, having been a Lutheran for many years, I am reminded of this experience as I reflect on the subtitle of Giberson's book, "How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution." I understand being a Christian, now, as a radically Christ-centered thing. This means that the importance of Christ is not just basically a matter of what He accomplished two millennia ago on the Cross while today the Christian's relationship to God is primarily a matter of the Holy Spirit, which, if I may simplify a bit, is what I imbibed from my Nazarene experience. Rather, as a Lutheran Christian I understand that it's all, everything, about Christ. Preaching is about Christ, Holy Baptism and the Lord's Supper are real means by which He acts in my life, etc.
The relevance of this to the book at hand is that it gives me some idea about why there is virtually nothing in what Giberson writes that, for me, relates to being a _Christian_, as distinct from a believer in "God": that is, Nazarenes are not as focused on the centrality of Christ as Lutherans are. (I do not mean to disparage Giberson's faith in Christ.) But as I read the book and, now having finished it, reflect upon it, I wish that the subtitle had eschewed "Christian" and just said "How to Believe in Evolution and Also in God" or something like that, which would have given a more accurate idea of the book's achievement.
I became aware of the book from seeing something in Books and Culture, which is associated with the evangelical magazine Christianity Today. Persons considering Saving Darwin who are hoping for a book that will help them with the topic of evolution, as written by an evangelical, should be aware that Giberson basically writes simply as a theist -- hardly as an evangelical Christian, or, I would say, as a _Christian_ at all.
Moreover, much of the book is a readable historical review of conflicts between creation science-type folks and scientists who affirm evolution. It's interesting, if familiar, stuff, but it doesn't help all that much with the topic suggested by the subtitle. Even the title is kind of misleading. "Saving Darwin," in the context of what the book actually does, seems to mean "Trying to Get Darwin Some Respect from Christians." That's not a bad idea, and in that effort the author succeeds. But that's not what evangelicals probably will think they are buying if they order this book.
A Christian prepared to accept evolution has need, from a book with the subtitle of this one, for some indications, at least, of how he can still believe
--that man was created in the image of God (ignored by Giberson unless, despite a careful reading, I missed it)
--that as sin and death came by one man, so salvation comes by one Man, Christ, the Second Adam
--that if the Old Testament contains myths (I believe Giberson uses the term "fairy tales"), there is a way to avoid relativizing these biblical myths as the same sort of thing as in other religions, with the inevitable inference that other religions or even any religion may be equivalent to Christianity
And also Giberson ought to come forward with them, if there are any biblical passages (including sayings of Jesus) supportive of evolution. If not, what was God's intention in giving us the Bible? Is the Bible still Holy Scripture?
Finally, although the tone improves as the book continues, I object to the author's description of God's "divine tantrums" in the Old Testament (p. 49), and his remark that the biblical God, when He had finished creating, "[took] a day off to do God knows what" (p. 53). Even if Genesis is a myth in some sense, the wise guy tone is inappropriate.
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