Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution

After a positive anticipation coming from the book's subtitle and from Francis Collins' forward, I expected to read about a true synthesis of orthodox Christianity and orthodox evolution. Yet after finishing the introduction, it was clear that the writer himself was unable to take his readers down that road. The Christianity he describes by way of personal example is actually naturalistic deism rather than historical and orthodox Christianity. This is the only way he can claim that Christianity and evolution can mix: he dilutes Christianity until it fits with his evolutionary worldview.

I don't say this to be sectarian. I'm not insulting Giberson's faith because he's a Catholic, or a Presbyterian, or a pre-tribulationist, or a Pentacostal. All of those categories are firmly rooted within Christianity, as defined by all historical believers who declared Jesus as their Lord, Savior, and King. The Apostles' Creed and the Nicene Creed are good examples of statements of faith that can bridge the divides between Protestant and Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Armenian. The ties that bind are nearer than those that do not. This is what Luther called "The Church Invisible." However, Giberson's own words describe how he falls outside of the pale of historical Christianity. The Church Invisible still has walls, and Giberson is proud to say he is outside of them.

Only the Introduction was written to a Christian audience, but even it hopelessly fails in its ability to connect with the heart and beliefs of the family of the Redeemed. Below are some of my comments about the kind of "Christianity" that Giberson is evangelizing about:

p. 6 - Giberson recounts how he needed to slip down the slope of 19th century liberalization to get his religion in line. This liberalization was not Christian in nature, but rather secular humanistic.

p. 8 - Giberson calls the Genesis story an "old fashioned fairy tale" that is ridiculous when read literally. He comes to this conclusion because Eden includes a "magical garden" and "talking snakes." He doesn't describe why they sound ridiculous, just that they are. He does this because he is an anti-supernaturalist. Yet he never, not in the whole book, follows the implications of this judgment. Surely his line of reasoning would throw out all of Jesus' miracles and every act of God in physical nature. This would call into doubt both Old and New Testaments. Giberson never addresses the logical outcomes of his presuppositions.

p.10 - Giberson recounts Dennett's "universal acid" and says that it "runs out of steam" after dissolving away the meaning of Genesis. But as explained above, Giberson has no idea how much this acid dissolves all of orthodox Christianity - since he is a heterodox anti-supernaturalist himself.

p.10-11 - While speaking in a totally detached manner, Giberson correctly states that the central fact of Christianity is the divinity of Christ. However, I say "detached" because he then speaks of such an idea as absurdity. Yes, in the naturalistic "ways of this world" sense, the Incarnation was absurd, and every Christian knows that. But to leave the discussion at that is to malign the Christian perspective. Giberson then talks about how evolution does nothing to prove or disprove the Incarnation, which is a correct statement. But he leaves the reader with what amounts to the following argument, which I have summarized: "Christianity, with its series of doctrines like the Incarnation, is already illogical and impossible, so it must be believed on by blind faith alone. Adding evolution to the mix doesn't decrease Christianity's inherent problems." To believe in Christianity, Giberson thinks, one must check his brain at the door.

p. 11-15 - "Dissolving the Fall" and "Dissolving the Uniqueness of Mankind"
To properly reach out to his audience, Giberson should have written 75% of his book about the assertions he makes in these two sections. He correctly identifies that the meaning of the Fall and the uniqueness of mankind must necessarily be thrown out under evolution, but he is clueless as to how this destroys the entire framework of Christianity. Absolutely demolishes it. The "Christianity" that emerges from the ashes of these two fallen doctrines may be something religious, but it definitely isn't the orthodox Christianity that was preached by the apostles and believed in by the church universal. The main thrust of Giberson's argument is that mankind was not responsible for sin and death, and mankind is no different than animals. This is unacceptable, and it is very frustrating that Giberson did not follow through with the implications of these arguments. Based on his argument, I should be encouraged to start a Christian denomination entitled, "Chimpanzees for Christ", in which the Gospel of redemption from sin is preached to our chimpanzee brothers. Since all of our human traits are somehow inherited from other species, we could reasonably expect that chimpanzees have souls, if indeed humans have souls. But from Giberson's naturalistic slant, I think he would deny that even humans have metaphysical, spiritual souls. Giberson even goes so far as to say on p. 14 that the writers of the New Testament were limited in their spiritual understanding of primates because they had not yet entered into the 21st century! What a backward, non-revelatory perspective for a "Christian" to have. He treats the Bible just like any other book, which, of course, he approves of when he speaks positively of the 19th century liberalization of Christianity.

p.47 - Giberson speaks approvingly of Strauss' "The Life of Jesus Critically Examined", thereby throwing out the historicity of the Resurrection and Jesus' miracles. Support for these kinds of heresies is what Giberson meant by going through the liberalization process from the 19th century.

p. 49 - Giberson calls God's wrath against humanity a "divine tantrum." He describes the God of the Israelites as vengeful and tyrannical (p.23). Besides being highly irreverent and distasteful to anyone but Bible-haters, this kind of description of God's actions shows how much Giberson is unacquainted with the God of the Bible. The Christian faith has always correctly taught the balance between God's wrath and grace. Like other mysterious truths about God, he is both 100% just (meaning he is wrathful), and 100% love (meaning he gives grace). To throw out God's wrath as improper or laughable is to define a god that is incompatible with Christianity.

p. 155-156 - Most importantly, Giberson's own admission of faithlessness is the nail in his coffin. One begins reading his book hoping to see the author portray a life-giving, Christ-loving, Christ-preaching, minister of God's truth who just happens to believe in evolution as well. In reality, the author is a man who gives credibility to atheists' arguments against God, insisting that he still believes in God because of "practical" reasons - which amount to approval of parents, approval of wife and children, approval of friends, and approval of colleagues. He "believes" in God because of peer pressure. In reality, his faith is dead. This should not come as any surprise since his faith is not based upon the foundation of God's Word, but rather his own finite intellect.

This book's title and subtitle are completely misleading. Giberson misses his target audience and loses the argument. The crux of his argument is that Christianity and Evolution can be harmonized and synthesized. Sadly, Giberson's example shows that this can only happen at Christianity's expense. The Christianity that results is as lifeless as a corpse.

I would highly suggest all of Francis Schaeffer's books to all who are seeking to understand why Giberson's naturalistic approach to this universe is left wholly wanting in metaphysics, epistemology, and morality.

Like author Karl W. Giberson, I grew up in a strict, fundamentalist home. In retrospect, I had always been a "young-earth creationist", surrounded by those of like belief, with little reason to question the "truth" of a literal translation of Genesis--the description of a six-day Creation and its account of our origins.

Except...

Information I gleaned from field trips to the Smithsonian museums didn't really mesh against what I was taught in private school, church, and in my Bob Jones-breed Christian home. Answers from my childhood "experts" seemed flippant, curt, and imminently unsatisfying.

Years later, I met and grew to love my parents-in-law (and before them, my brilliant, well-read, think-outside-the-box husband!). The whole family valued independent thinking and had the utmost respect for science's contributions to our understanding of our existence. They all encouraged me to explore and test different ways of thinking, much to my growth and amazement. Science, and three people who deeply loved me, quietly tugged at my heart.

But, the icing on the cake came when my pastor preached a sermon titled "Isn't Creation Just a Myth?", a clear assault on all that Darwin stood for. You see, my pastor, whom we still greatly respect and study under, called Darwin's theory of evolution "a religious system" that is "full of lies" on that fateful Sunday. Was my husband angry! For weeks afterwards, I listened to his diatribes. Eventually, he went to talk to our pastor one-one one, and eventually came to some kind of resolution in his own heart and mind on this volatile issue. I had only seen that kind of passion in hard-core fundamentalists before!

So when "Christianity Today" ran a review on Giberson's "Saving Darwin", I was chomping at the bit. I longed to resolve the obvious tension playing out in my intellectual and personal life. Besides, the search for Truth should never intimidate us, especially as Christ-followers!

"Saving Darwin" covers a lot of ground. Giberson begins with an honest assessment of Charles Darwin's paradigms and the ultimate break in his faith (which had absolutely nothing to do with his brand of science). He then moves comprehensively to an in-depth look at evolution's dark side, its abuses and extremes (think genocide) and slips easily into an anecdotal recount of the Scopes "Monkey Trial". In the blink of an eye, he leads us though a systematic dismantling of "The Genesis Flood", a fundamentalist's "science" book, co-authored by one my home-town's Biblical heroes, John C. Whitcomb. Giberson clearly demonstrates that the creation/evolution argument is a culture, rather than an academic war, for evolution bears out its scientific validity in a number of disciplines including biology, geology, genetics, and paleontology. On the other hand, young-earth creationists have virtually no support from mainstream scientists and in fact, find themselves a bit isolated (and conveniently academically myopic), with a small, but fiercely dedicated army of anti-evolutionists.

Few books have challenged my faith, my core beliefs, and my intellect more than this one. Many times, I found myself nodding with a clear understanding of Giberson's science, immediately accompanied by stabs of fundamentalist offense and guilt. In the end, however, I could find nothing in this work that contradicted Jesus' story of redemption for His fallen people. (That being said, I don't know that I could find much in this work that disagrees with any of the world's three major religions.) Giberson repeatedly warns both "sides" of the creation/evolution battle that the existing dichotomy between their theories is "wrong" and that the current polarized positions "are not the only two options". He compels his readers to re-work their understanding of God's creativity and our place in the universe to match what can be empirically studied. And he warns against twisting the Bible's ancient wisdom "to speak to a modern issue it never intended to address."

On a minor note, Giberson never fully engages his reader on an emotional level, other than his brushes with wry humor. This man is clearly a scholar, not a salesman. He does take one brief rabbit trail into his own personal belief system. He writes, "As a purely practical matter, I have compelling reasons to believe in God." He then describes his parents as "deeply committed Christians", his wife and children as "believing in God", most of his friends as "believers", and his job that he loves at "a Christian college". His relationship with our Creator never reaches much beyond his summation that "abandoning belief in God would be disruptive, sending my life completely off the rails." That's all? That is the basis for his faith? I wanted more.

In his conclusion, Giberson offers the book's powerful redemption, an admission that won me over: "Perhaps the unfolding of history includes a steady infusion of divine creativity under the scientific radar. Perhaps the meaning we encounter in so many different places and so many different ways is not simply an accident of our biology, but a hint that the universe is more than particles and their interactions." My belief in Jesus' plan for our universe's reconciliation and the wonder and mystery of His methods remain fully in tact, but will be, hereafter, combined with a respect for modern academia and science's advances.

"Saving Darwin" will make a great gift for my dear father-in-law; he will find it brilliant and engaging. I probably won't, however, buy it for my dear pastor. On second thought... it might be just the challenge he needs.

I'm not sure who the audience for this book is? Giberson is often smug and sarcastic when speaking of people he disagrees with (both atheists and creationists). He seems to think anyone with a more conservative theology than his is a fundamentalist. His own theology isn't clear, except that he seems to have a low view of scripture and even ridicules Norman Geisler as a fundamentalist who believes in demons.

Though culturally "creationist" refers to someone who believes in a literal 6-day creation, Giberson uses it to refer to anyone who doesn't accept a purely naturalistic explanation for the origin of life.

I was seriously approaching this book with an open mind. I just finished "Three Views on Creation" and in addition to Giberson's book, I also borrowed Collins' book from the library (yet to read). I don't hold to a strict literal interpretation of the Genesis creation account (I'm pretty sure it wasn't meant to be historic narrative) and I accept the scientific view on the age of the universe and earth.

I'm open to the possibility that life evolved. I'd even consider common ancestry... However, I have serious doubts about the purely naturalistic explanation for the origins of life which is central to Darwinian evolution. It just doesn't seem logically possible to me. I was hoping that Giberson would provide more information on this and the apparent theological issues that would arise from belief in Darwinian evolution, but this is largely ignored to instead criticize atheist Darwinist and "creationists."

One last thing to mention is that I got the impression that Giberson is somehow angry at his own fundamentalist past and has an axe to grind. I can't explain why else the tone of his book seems so negative.

I gave the book 2 stars because I did appreciate Giberson's overview of the history of the debate. It was certainly informative. I also appreciate the fact that he is trying to convey to people that they can accept both Christ as savior and Darwinism as truth.

Don't be fooled into believing in falsehoods! To those of you out there who are Christians (or who are at least contemplating or are trying to reconcile a belief in God with scientific teachings that hold to the various evolutionary models), DO NOT buy into the false impression, perpetrated by popular media, that there are basically ONLY THREE real choices in explanations of how the universe and life on earth came into being.

Basically, media falsely perpetrates that there are ONLY the following choices:

1) That existence of the universe and how life came into being can only be explained through naturalism's various evolutionary models (or a combination of them).

2) That the only alternative explanations to the evolutionary models (for the existence of our universe and life on earth) are inherit in the Young Earth Creationists (YECs) views (typically called a "Fundamentalist" view in media) that the earth is only 10,000 of so years old and that the earth and universe were created in a literal six days - per a LITERAL reading of Genesis in the Bible.

3) That God made the universe and created life, but that His modes of operation were through various evolutionary mechanisms and pathways (the author of this book's view, which is NOT supported by Scripture).

THERE IS A FOURTH WAY NOT TYPICALLY REPORTED, AND THAT IS SUPPORTED BY LARGE NUMBERS OF EVANGELICAL CHRISTIANS!

4) MANY Christians and evangelical leaders (Old Earth Creationists - OECs) DO in fact believe that God created the universe and earth and that they are both VERY ancient - (a 4.5 billion-year-old earth and a 13.73 billion-year-old universe), yet they do not support Darwinian evolution or its offshoots. WHY does the media never report this? Because it is so easy to make those who believe in a 10,000-year-old earth and universe (YECs) look scientifically ignorant as well as ridiculous (and understandably so), and also that by linking this YEC belief to the Bible, they attempt to portray the Bible as being ridiculous as well.

MANY notable evangelical Christian leaders hold to an Old-Earth Creationist (OEC) position of an ancient (many billions-of-years-old) universe ([...]). The precise wording of many Bible Scriptures make the OEC position something that many conservative theologians agree upon. [...].

Old Earth Creationists believe that God created the universe and life through very long periods of creation events that included various periods of new species, extinctions, and subsequent species. This is supported by the scientific and fossil record and is in agreement with an enlightened view of reading Scripture. For a great review of this, go to the Reasons to Believe website ([...]) or read "Creation as Science" by Hugh Ross. Also, to get MANY printable articles as well as audio files supporting the Bible, Christianity, and Old Earth Creationism, go to the Reasons to Believe website ([...]). Reasons to Believe (RTB) believes in much mainstream science and in an ancient universe. RTB believes the Bible is God's word, is accurate, historic and that it points to Christ as the Son of God.

This book is (in part) a nicely written history of the effort by a relatively tiny group of fundamentalist christians who have argued, quite sucessfully if polls are to be believed, that biologists have evolution all wrong and geologists have the age of the earth all wrong. Anti-evolution and young earth views fit well with a literal reading of the bible, and this has resulted in the last 50 to 100 years in these views being adopted by a wide swath of the fundamentalist clergy and community, most of whom are untrained technically.

Giberson is a self described christian scientist whose writing is accurate, technically persuasive, and sometimes even poetic. Clearly one of his aims in this book is to convince his friends in the fundamentalist world that their anti-evolution and young earth creationists views are just plain wrong. In just two pages (p189-190) he shows why evolution (almost) has to be true, listing eight (of many) independent lines of evidence that support it. He could have strengthen his argument if he had included a little math. For example, if each of eight 'independent' arguments for evolution is only 90% likely to be true and 10% likely to be false, then the likelihood of no evolution, which requires all eight arguments to fail, is one in 100 million! (This is figured as 0.1 multiplied by itself eight times.)

I agreed with about 99% of the points Giberson makes in this book even though I am a non-religious engineer. The 1% that bothered me was his making nice-nice with the pied pipers who have have spread the anti-evolution and young earth message which have lead a wide swath of the fundamentalist community into the wilderness. As he traces the history of the creationist movement, Giberson focuses on one book which he argues had the greatest influence on the fundamentalist community: 'Genesis Flood' by Morris and Whitcom published in 1961. The technical of the two authors is the recently deceased PhD engineer/scientist Henry Morris. Giberson had grown up a fundamentalist and had read Genesis Flood in high school and been convinced by it, so Morris, who Giberson calls "a giant of American fundamentalism", was something of a boyhood hero to the young Giberson.

Here are some of the phrases Giberson uses to describe the 513 page Genesis Flood and its impact:

* impressively technical, masterful, entire presentation was very believable

* enough footnotes, graphs, and pictures to convince any intellectually oriented fundamentalist (that the earth was created about 10,000 years ago and there is no reason to take evolution seriously)

* bombshell, watershed event, what it accomplished was nothing short of astonishing

* perhaps the most influential text on any topic in the second half of the 20th century (This claim for the book is really something, and it caused me to go to Amazon and buy a used copy of the Genesis Flood.)

Later in the book Giberson refers to popular creationist arguments as "rubbish" and has a whole page listing the tricky and deceptive arguments "used to great effect in virtually every creationist text". But curiously Giberson never singles out Morris, who he has identified as the chief pied piper, for criticism. Maybe this is because he was a friend, or maybe because Giberson thinks there has been too much name calling in the evolution/creationism fight. Issac Asimov said, "Creationists are stupid, lying people" (p138) and Richard Dawkins has called them, "Stupid, Wicked and Insane" which Giberson uses for a chapter title.

I was also a little disappointed that Giberson never addresses the bigger picture of how christian theology is a poor fit to the continuum of life and random nature revealed by evolution. For example, Giberson mentions the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, but he doesn't even comment on it. Clearly this was a one time random event. It might have missed the earth or have been a little smaller in which case dinosaurs might still be around and almost for sure we'd not be here now. If it had been a little bigger, it might have sterilized the surface of the earth, forcing life on earth to re-evolve from underground or underwater microbes, in which case almost for sure we'd not be here now. Does christian theology make any attempt to deal with random turning points like this in life's history? Not that I've seen. Can a theologian please tell me: if the meteorite had been a little smaller, would Jesus still have arrived around zero BCE and instead of being squeezed out of Mary, have popped out of a dinosaur egg?
----------------------
On Morris & Genesis Flood

I dipped into Genesis Flood to see how Morris operated. Typical is Morris' discussion of radioactive dating of the earth. For 20 pages or so Morris quotes and footnotes every published reference he can find that says earlier dates were wrong, and he discusses every known measurement error of the procedure. Arthur Holmes, who Morris mentions(p334), had already determined the age of the earth by 1913 via a primitive radioactive decay procedure to be 1.6 billion years, off by only a factor of three from the currently accepted age. These relatively small errors discussed in the geology literature have 'zero' relevance to the Morris & Whitcom position that the earth is only 10,000 years old. There is a factor of 'one million' between 4.6 billion and 4.6 thousand! Finally many pages into the technical discussion of radioactive techniques, probably reached only by the persistent reader, Morris owns up to the fact that even if the measurement errors were off by a factor of ten they would still yield an age for the earth of more than 100 million years, far in excess of his 10,000 years. He doesn't do the math, but 100 million is x10,000 longer than his 10,000 years.

So what's Morris' rebuttal to radioactive dating? It's that god created the radioactive parent/daughter ratios in the rocks so the earth would "appear" old! And why is it that all the various geochronometer methods involving different elements and isotopes yield ages close together? I quote his response, "In the absence of a specific revelation, it seems impossible to decide this question with finality." (p346) Translation --- I couldn't figure out an explanation for this one.

Morris, who minored in geology (says Giberson), knew exactly what he was doing in this book. He was not 'uninformed' as Giberson says at one point. All the hundreds of footnoted pages discussing various age measurement errors are smoke screens, inserted for misdirection, for confusion, to lend supposed scientific credibility to Morris' and Whitcom's biblically inspired answers. The pattern repeats again and again.

Astronomical dating --- Stars 'appear' to be billions of light years away, because god created photons 'in flight' says Morris. The HR diagram (Hertzsprung-Russell or luminosity vs color diagram) has been around since 1914. It is a powerful tool for estimating the age of stars in clusters. From basic stellar physics and observation it is known that large, bright stars burn through their supply of hydrogen much, much faster (x1,000) than small dim stars, so large stars can have lifetimes of 20 million years vs 20 billion years for small stars. By plotting stars in a cluster on an HR diagram and seeing where the brighter, faster burning stars go missing (technically move off the main sequence), a rough estimate of the age of the cluster is obtained. When this is done for some large star clusters in the halo of our galaxy, an estimated age of 13 billion years is obtained, about three times the age of the earth.

So how does Morris deal with this? He doesn't deal with it, there's no mention of HR diagrams or star clusters. He just waves his arms saying cosmology is speculative (HR diagrams have nothing to do with cosmology) and astronomical dating is less firmly grounded than radioactive dating (granted), so it's not worth considering. Now there's a non-sequitor.