Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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?
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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.

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.

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.

Saving Darwin is an excellent book! A must read! It is a very accessible analysis of the "origins" controversy in American culture. Giberson preserves the integrity of science while being religiously sensitive and encourages us to see the harmony, in principle, of science and Christianity.

Giberson convincingly argues for the explanatory mission of science as the detection of natural mechanisms as causes for natural phenomena, while steering carefully between two serious misunderstandings of science. On the one hand, popular cultural icons of science who represent evolutionary theory as entailing a naturalistic worldview--or even any particular philosophical position such as ethical relativism or social Darwinism--are misrepresenting science as such and thus harming our cultural discussion. On the other hand, religious fundamentalists who think that biblical sources should be imported into scientific work--as in "creation science"--are equally misguided about what science is. The more recent Intelligent Design movement also displays an egregious misunderstanding in insisting that science can inquire into transcendent or ultimate (supernatural) causes for natural phenomena. Giberson exposes the serious defects in these religiously-based "alternative" ways of doing science which continue to polarize the cultural discussion in their own ways.

Although Giberson's autobiographical journey, so well portrayed in the book that many can identify with him, carried him away from his early anti-evolution fundamentalism, it did not erode his Christian belief because he came to see evolution as an expression of God's creativity. Giberson shows that more sophisticated (less simplistic) categories for understanding the Bible and Christianity, coupled with a realistic, nonagendized view of science, make it entirely possible for a faithful believer to embrace evolution as a fascinating part of the total truth about God's ways with the world.

The reader of this book will be invited into the thought process that led the writer to see Christianity and evolution as compatible and even as mutually enlightening one another. The reader will also learn the history of the origins debate in this country, some of the real history of science and its positive relation to Christianity, and some helpful conceptual distinctions for making sense of this important issue.

Misleadingly shelved in the "Spirituality" section of my local bookstore, Karl W. Giberson's SAVING DARWIN is a focused work of history that concentrates on the endlessly fascinating conflict surrounding the meaning of the theory of evolution in our public lives. If you're a "secularist" try not to be put off by the subtitle, "How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution." Giberson is not preaching here. Not at all.

Relying (perhaps just a little too exclusively) on first-rate secondary sources - including Ronald Numbers, Edward Larson, Peter Bowler and Jon Roberts - Giberson has assembled a great overview, and his charming and somewhat snarky style makes for a very enjoyable read.

Giberson gets it right in my opinion when he writes on page 64, "Biological evolution, in its pure form at least, is purely descriptive. It tells us, as best it can, what happened, like a video of an event. It does not pass judgment on whether the history it describes was good or bad, just as a video passes no judgment on the event it captures." Too many scientific popularizers over the last 100 years (Julian Huxley, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, E. O. Wilson and Daniel Dennett to name just a few) have tried to see in evolution patterns of progress that could be harnessed and manipulated to "advance" the human species or defend the contention that religion can or should "evolve away." These beliefs invariably generate a cultural backlash as they always imply some sort of scale of progressive human value, whether it is from poorer to richer, from feebleminded to intelligent or from superstitious to scientific.

My only real criticism relates to Giberson's apparent lingering hope that the science of evolution, if viewed correctly, may still be a useful lens for examining not only God's wonders, but also God's plan. Gould may have been wrong when he suggested that if the tape of life were rewound and replayed we would never end up with the life forms we have today, or that increasing complexity of life forms over time is nothing but a statistical phantom (see FULL HOUSE). Life may indeed be unfolding like some kind of divine road movie. But Gould may also have been right.

Better I think to try and separate the theory of evolution from its misuse in defense of an ideology of progress, as Christian historian John C. Greene suggests. This would allow all of us, the religious and not, to see both the beauty of science and its limits.

In the first edition hardcover version of this book, above the subtitle - "How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution" - one finds a picture of a fish under a picture of a monkey. Perhaps one may deduce that the fish is an explicit reference not merely to the most ancient of animals in an evolutionary sense but to the traditional icthus symbol of Christianity. The monkey of course being the more primal ancestor to the human than the fish. Thus, the book's claim to reconcile the two.

I am conflicted about this book. To be sure, Giberson seems comfortable floating in and out of the worlds of history, science, and religion. Moreover, he is also very fluid in his writing style. He is a gifted writer - almost poetic at times - and is usually enjoyable to read. In addition, his book provides a helpful source of all sorts of information about creationism in America and the ins and outs of evolutionary theory. The two most valuable parts of the book in my opinion are Ch. 3 "Darwin's Dark Companions" and Ch. 7 "How To Be Stupid, Wicked, and Insane." In both sections Giberson, though an advocate of evolution, is honest about the ways in which evolution - as the organizing principle of biology - has, in fact, been hijacked at times by those across a wide spectrum of sinister ideological objectives, from Hitler's holocaust to Dawkins frontal assault on all things supernatural. Giberson also acknowledges the dangers of scientism whereby the only acceptable lens through which to find meaning in the world is via the scientific method. He writes: "I worry that scientific progress has bewitched us into thinking that there is nothing more to the world that what we can understand. Science is like the fisherman's net that can't catch small fish because the holes in the net are too large. We must be careful not to conclude that the fish we can catch disprove the existence of those we cannot" (210).

All that said, I finished this book somewhat unsettled. I'll mention four areas of concern where I think the book could have been more valuable: 1) I wish the author of this volume, a physicist, had been trained at advanced levels in biology and theology. This is especially the case as often the criticisms made against leaders within Creationism and/or Intelligent Design (ID) movements have to due with their lack of appropriate credentials for the tasks they undertake (e.g. law professor critiquing evolution, former high school science teacher opening a creation science museums, and an engineer talking about the fossil record with authority, etc.). 2) I found the organization of this book at times lacking and redundant. This book just seemed to lack a cohesive overall structure and repeated much of the same material (much as I have just done to make a point!!). All this to say, "Saving Darwin" could have benefited from a bit more "intelligent design" from its editors. 3) As is unfortunately the case in many critiques of Creationism and/or ID, Giberson resorts at times to exaggerated statements (e.g. "someone who believes this or that is ridiculous" with occasional ad hominem attacks sprinkled with a pompous tone. 4) At the end of the day, my greatest concern about this book has to do with the fact that while I found this volume helpful and informative in many ways I find it significantly lacking with respect to its alleged aim of helping someone to really think through being a Christian and believing in evolution. Perhaps - and I speculate - due to the author's own lack of training in theology and biology he never goes into meaningful depth on either front to assist the inquisitive believer how - really - one might understand the ways in which to affirm historic Christian belief in "God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth" with free, open, and honest scientific inquiry. The absence of such substance to this otherwise valuable volume is quite unfortunate.

Perhaps the paperback edition of "Saving Darwin" sufficiently mutated in needed ways to address the areas above. On that question I must remain agnostic. Otherwise, Giberson needs to continue to work out his salvation of Darwin...and perhaps next time with a bit more healthy fear and trembling.

One rarely comes across a book like this. The genre of evolutionary theology is small but growing. But even here, you don't find books like this. Giberson is part Pennock, explaining the history of Literal Creationism, part Miller, giving the overwhelming evidence for the theory, and a large part St. Augustine, giving his own personal story in moving terms, of how he was once in the darkness of literalism and was lead to the Light of God's presence in evolution. It is this third aspect that makes the book overwhelmingly worth reading.

I grew up much as Giberson did, and traveled through much the same path. I grew up as a Literal Creationist, because this is what the Bible says- and one must believe and obey the Bible in it's entirety, literally, lest one reject God. There was only one suitable interpretation, and if there seemed to be inconsistencies, there were ways to harmonize the Word to make it work. One Gospel might say Judas fell and his guts spilled on the ground, and another that he hung himself, so it is quite obviously that he hung himself, the rope broke, and his guts spilled on the ground. Likewise, I followed the NIV which worked to deal with the animals being created before humanity in Genesis 1, and after, in Genesis 2, by accepting the tweaking of the Hebrew in Genesis 2 to make it appear that the animals were brought to Adam and had been created earlier. I believed this for so long, and did not know why. Giberson here tells the backstory, of why so many American Christians read the Bible in this manner, despite most of the initial authors of Fundamentalism being Evolutionists. It is amazing to read here how the current Literal Creationist beliefs can be traced in a direct line to Morris' Genesis Flood, in turn based on Price's New Geology, and that based on the founder of Seventh Day Adventism Ellen White's detailed visions received after the Millerite Great Disappointment (where Jesus didn't come back on October 22nd, 1844) of a literal 7-day creation event, contrary to the beliefs of most devout Christians up to that point. Thus as we read, we are astonished to find that basic beliefs that many Christians hold, that I held, are in fact firmly grounded in if not heretical ideas, at least those that are severely aberrent by Christian standards.

My journey continues to track with Giberson. I, too, entered college convinced of my beliefs. I would write in the margins of my tests, "If evolution were true..." I knew the arguments against evolution cold, both theological and biological. I'd read my Morris and Gish and Ross. But again, following Giberson, somewhere between my sophmore and junior year I started to realize something amazing. Just as repeatedly the Bible would predict archeological findings (not always, but often), so repeatedly evolution would predict fossil findings, and other scientific events. How could I with integrity accept one and reject the other, if the methodology was the same? At the same time, I started to read the Bible in a new way, and find that there were portions there that, while fully true, were also myth, and in that in many ways more true than if they had been history. I started to do justice to the text.

This is the other valuable reason to read this book. Giberson is sharing his search for justice with us. He is pursuing integrity, wherever it might be. He wants to do justice to the scientific evidence, and to the authors' original intent in the books of the Bible. Any Literal Creationist who reads this book will find his own life echoed in the pages, and be reading the writings of a brother, who has traveled much the same road as the Literal Creationist. And, it just might be, that in reading this, the truth shall set you free as well.

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.

The author clearly supports evolution, especially the idea of common descent, and his comments clearly show that he detests the creation account in the Bible and those creationists who seek to show that the Biblical account is true. The book seems to provide a good history of the creation-evolution conflict but the author includes derogatory comments throughout making the reader wonder if he has exaggerated his descriptions to accommodate his noticeable bias. The book argues for evolution but never gets around to explaining how one can be a Christian and believe in Evolution. The author only seems to say that he is a Christian and he believes in evolution so any Christian can do the same.

The author labors too much on Ellen White and George McCready Price as the founders of the creationist movement. Certainly, there writings may have provided encouragement to Whitcomb and Morris to collaborate in writing the "Genesis Flood," but ultimately, Whitcomb and Morris derived their inspiration from the Biblical account and their desire to explain how that account leads to that which people observe and investigate today. He spends time discussing Carl Baugh and Kent Hovind but says nothing about Dr. Russell Humphreys, strange because both the author and Dr. Humphreys have backgrounds in physics and Humphreys is a leading defender of the Biblical account and addresses the light travel problem that led to Hugh Ross rejecting the Biblical account. The author is quick to explain why evolutionists are right but never really finds time to explain why creationists must be wrong.

The author says in Chapter 6, "Geologists note that there were portions of the planet, such as the polar regions, that clearly had never experienced a flood," without telling the reader that creationists do not see the polar ice caps forming until after the flood. It is little things like that throughout the book that lead the reader to believe that all is not as pure and pristine in the world of evolution as the author wants the reader to believe.

The book is a nice read but ultimately adds nothing new to the creation-evolution debate and does not tell one "How to be a Christian and Believe in Evolution."