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Species of Origins: America's Search for a Creation Story

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For those interested in a helpful introduction into the conflict between science and religion the book by Giberson and Yerxa is a good place to begin. The authors describe in helpful detail (yet without too much technical jargon) the entire spectrum of America's search for an explanation for the origin of life. This spectrum runs from scientific creationism (a literal 6 day event) to scientific evolution and its conclusion that creation has spanned 5 billions years. In between these two extreme positions are several alternatives, each considered a via media or middle way. In this last category one will find intelligent design.

The book examines in particular the components of evolution, the thinking behind scientific creationism (3 chapters out of a possible 10) and the strategy of intelligent design. While providing a good overview of these competing voices, the book also isolates the main reason for the contention, namely a cultural war which pits naturalistic materialism (including evolution) against a theistic worldview, which holds to some kind of being (divine or superhuman) who has influenced creation in some way. After reading this book, one will come away with the feeling that the conflict may be more about philosophical differences than simply who does the best science.

The book is well written and well documented and includes the major players on all sides. The authors deal directly with an underlying tension: the extreme positions sacrifice clarity for truth and the middle positions hedge toward truth but at the cost of clarity.

This book will not replace reading the major players but it will surely provide an important overview by which one can begin to make sense of a public debate that will, in all likelihood, be around for a long time to come.

This is one of the only books in the emotionally charged field of creation-evolution that is fair to everyone. Most books in this field, like those of Richard Dawkins or Phillip Johnson, are nothing more than one-sided arguments for a particular viewpoint. The authors of this book have taken the time to read literally everybody and they summarize a vast sprectrum of ideas with clarity and balance. And they are good writers so the book is a pleasure to read.

The authors actually discuss 6 day creation respectfully and show why so many people like it. Instead of just heaping ridicule on creation, they help the reader understand why most Americans are attracted to it.

The best part though is when they have some fun with the extremist evolutionists. They call them "The Council of Despair" and quote their most nihilistic comments.

This is a good "first book" to read as it helps you see the whole controversy and then you can read further with their suggestions (they have a huge bibliography.) Or you can get the other books that Amazon always lists with it.

This is an incredible introduction into the "evolution-creation" debate, literally covering almost every position. Widely hailed as the most comprehensive intro book on the subject, this is how I would have gone about writing a book about the subject to be fair.

This is a must-read in its field. The authors thoroughly present each viewpoint as seen by its adherents, making it possible for the reader to imagine what it might be like to know of no alternatives. This includes the simplistic extremes of scientific creationism, in which the earth is created in 6 days with an initial "appearance of history" in an Eden complete with belly buttons and tree rings, and naturalistic materialism, in which miracles, meaning events not merely novel but inexplicable in principle, never occur. And then there is "the muddle in the middle," the attempted compromises that "are, in their simplest form, contradictory."

But, nonpolemical intent notwithstanding, in the end the authors, professors of physics and history respectively at conservative Eastern Nazarene College, betray their bias. This occurs first when they "whimsically" adopt "the perspective of traditional religious believers" by applying to popularizers of science the pejorative label "Council of Despair," which "provides us with little reason to believe that the world might have a purpose and no reason to cling to the old-fashioned idea of hope." Readers will have to imagine for themselves the sensible and cheerful people who have no need of that hypotheses and who, absent tangible evidence of a universal "Who" as author of a universal "Why," see such an idea as old-fashioned anthropomorphism. So, while ID proponent William Dembski is quoted as calling naturalism a "disease," "the intellectual pathology of our age," it is for the reader to decide which viewpoint is pathological.

The second betrayal of bias is in regard to intelligent design, identified as an old argument which "in the late 1980s and early 1990s ...was revitalized by a cadre of talented advocates" and "a brilliant Berkeley law professor" (Philip Johnson). Some see them as neither talented nor brilliant, since the "intelligence" they so casually postulate could not credibly have been physical (having neither means of micro-manipulation of DNA nor a site for its own intelligence), leaving only the option of the so-called supernatural. Which surely appeals to those who believe in "purpose" given to, rather than arising within, the individual, but which others see as mere wish fulfillment. On which psychological grounds rests, in the end, this entire controversy.