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23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Doesn't deliver what the subtitle promises, July 19, 2008
Karl Giberson's book is a very enjoyable history of the "Darwin wars," particularly in America. Near the end of the book, he makes a short but convincing case for the theory of biological evolution, summarizing the evidence from the fossil record, biogeography, comparative anatomy, developmental similarities and genetics. However, he does not address the theological implications of biological evolution. He is, after all, a scientist, not a theologian.
He provides some interesting observations on Darwin's personal religious views, the Scopes trial, the Arkansas trial, the Dover trial, the background of Whitcomb & Morris's book "The Genesis Flood," and the culture war between Richard Dawkins & co. and Phillip Johnson & co.
He makes a number of very blunt negative observations about Young Earth Creationism [YEC], e.g., " 'The Genesis Flood' was intellectually disastrous on two fronts," and "There is no reason for anyone, Christian or otherwise, to take these [YEC] claims seriously."
I highly recommend this book to Christians who want a relatively brief and very readable introduction to how we got to the point where half of America's Christians do not accept the theory of biological evolution and to Young Earth Creationists who are having doubts about their position on this issue.
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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Christian scientist tries to straighten out his fundamentalist friends, April 17, 2009
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.
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58 of 75 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Misleading title and subtitle, October 16, 2008
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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