Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution [Bargain Price] [Hardcover]

Karl Giberson (Author)

Book Description

Release date: June 10, 2008

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Drawing on his fundamentalist upbringing and experience teaching physics at an evangelical college, Giberson has a native understanding of how conservative Christians feel and think about evolution. As a Christian evolutionist, he finds himself occupying a frequently misunderstood middle ground in the midst of a culture war, fought with culture-war weapons by culture warriors. Behind the culture war, Giberson sketches an engaging historical narrative including Darwin's background in intelligent design, what really happened at the Scopes monkey trial and how catastrophist geology derived from Seventh Day Adventism found an audience among the evangelical mainstream in the post-Sputnik era. By tackling the debate in cultural as well as scientific terms, Giberson does greater justice to the motivations of Christians who reject evolution. Yet he does not conceal his frustration—on theological as well as scientific grounds—with the rubbish of scientific creationism, which has climbed onto the radar screens of American intellectual culture only as a bad joke. Giberson's sarcasm, however honestly come by, may cause the book to alienate an evangelical audience it might otherwise engage. (June)
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Review

"A much-needed book . . . a powerful contribution." -- Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D.

"A poignant account of [Giberson’s] Christian pilgrimage from Creationist to Evolutionist. He offers a sympathetic historical analysis laced with trenchant criticism of both misguided intelligent design advocates and hard core atheists." -- Kenneth R. Miller, Professor of Biology, Brown University, and author of Finding Darwin's God

"An intensely personal account of [Giberson’s] intellectual journey from creationism to the acceptance of evolution . . . By situating his own story in the context of larger social and scientific developments, Giberson’s book can serve as a guide for other Christians on a similar trek." -- Edward J. Larson, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and the American Controversy over Creation and Evolution.

"Giberson has a native understanding of how conservative Christians feel and think about evolution . . . he sketches an engaging historical narrative. -- Publishers Weekly

"Giberson makes the case, persuasively and with considerable wit, that there’s no irreconcilable conflict between robust Christian faith and evolutionary biology, rightly understood. This is a wonderfully readable book: humane, modest, and wise." -- John Wilson, Editor, Books & Culture

"Karl Giberson here presents a poignant account of his Christian pilgrimage from Creationist to Evolutionist. He offers a sympathetic historical analysis laced with trenchant criticism of both misguided intelligent design advocates and hard core atheists." -- Owen Gingerich, author of God's Universe, Professor Emeritus of Astronomy & History of Science, Harvard University

"Karl Giberson skillfully unravels the tangled skein of argument about creation and evolution, showing that there need be no incompatibility between Christianity and Darwinism. His writing is lively, in a style that is both informal and informed. This is a book that many will find helpful." -- John Polkinghorne, author of Belief in God in an Age of Science

Giberson posesses a boundless inquisitiveness typical of many scientiests, but also displays the wry wit of a seasoned polemicist. He seems to know how to counteract your best arguments before you have even made them. -- Salon.com

This sensitively written and convincingly argued book succeeds in respecting both religious beliefs and scientific facts in discussing thoeries surrounding the creation of the world. . . A truly courageous work. -- Library Journal

Writing in nontechnical, engaging prose, [Giberson] tells the 150-year story of Christianity’s engagement with evolution, along the way staking out a position midway between Richard Dawkins, the apostle of atheism, and Ken Ham, the huckster of creationism." -- Ronald L. Numbers, Hilldale Professor of the History of Science and Medicine, Department of Medical History and Bioethics, University of Wisconsin

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: HarperOne; 1 edition (June 10, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 0061228788
• ASIN: B001SERO56
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,174,137 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Karl Giberson (1957, New Brunswick, Canada) is an internationally known scholar, speaker, and writer. He holds a PhD in Physics from Rice University. Dr. Giberson has lectured on science-and-religion at the Vatican, Oxford University, London's Thomas Moore Institute, and at many prestigious American venues including MIT, Brigham Young University and Xavier University.

Dr. Giberson has published more than 200 reviews and essays, both technical and popular, in outlets that include NY Times, CNN.com, the Guardian, USA Today, LA Times and Salon.com. He has written or co-authored 9 books, and contributed to many edited volumes. In addition to his published works, Karl is a regular contributor to the public dialogue on Science and Faith. He has appeared as a guest on NPR's Morning Edition and Talk of the Nation as well as other radio programs. He also blogs at The Huffington Post where his articles have generated thousands of comments and are frequently featured.

From 1984 to 2011, Dr. Giberson was a professor at Eastern Nazarene College (ENC) where he received numerous recognitions and awards. From 2007 to 2010 he headed the Forum on Faith at Science at Gordon College. For 3 years, ending in 2009 he was the program director for the prestigious Venice Summer School on Science & Religion. Currently, Dr. Giberson teaches writing, and science-and-religion in the Cornerstone Program at Stonehill College. Karl also lectures at universities, churches and other venues across the country and is working on his 10th book, due for publication in 2014.

Karl enjoys writing in his gazebo, listening to Bob Dylan, watching re-runs of Star Trek the Next Generation, and drinking Diet Coke.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 29 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Doesn't deliver what the subtitle promises July 19, 2008

By Paul R. Bruggink

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

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.

65 of 84 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Misleading title and subtitle October 16, 2008

By Extollager

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

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. Read more ›

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Resolving the Tension Between Religion and Science August 5, 2009

By Julie L. Pogue

Format:Paperback

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. Read more ›

17 of 21 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Christian scientist tries to straighten out his fundamentalist friends April 17, 2009

By Donald E. Fulton

Format:Hardcover

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. Read more ›