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Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution | 
 enlarge | Author: Karl Giberson
Publisher: HarperOne
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  15 reviews
Sales Rank: 34919
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 256
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 5.9 x 1
ISBN: 0061228788
Dewey Decimal Number: 231.7652
EAN: 9780061228780
ASIN: 0061228788
Publication Date: June 1, 2008
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Condition: First Edition New in a New dustjacket . Binding is hardcover
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Product Description
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.
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 Evolution and Existentialism September 16, 2008
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
Professor Giberson gives an historical, scientific, and philosophical account of the evolution-vs-creationism-vs-ID cultural war in the United States. Giberson is evidently a Protestant, not a Catholic, because he thinks the whole human being, body and soul, evolved from primates:
"Scientists who have spent enough time with primates, especially in natural settings, are continually struck by their sophistication. In his remarkable books on primates, Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal describes primate behaviors, that were they associated with humans, would suggest a well-defined sense of right and wrong, cruelty and kindness, loyalty and manipulation." (p. 13)
No primate has ever claimed it had free will or admitted its sense knowledge made them inferior to humans with their conscious knowledge. No animal has ever intelligently designed a machine with more than one part because animals can't create the concepts of the different parts in their minds and make decisions about the parts and the purpose of the machine. Giberson is weak in the branch of religion called fundamental theology or apologetics:
"I understand how honest thinkers and seekers after truth like Daniel Dennett and Michael Ruse can end up rejecting God. Like that of most thinking Christians, my belief in God is tinged with doubts and, in my more reflective moments, I sometimes wonder if I am perhaps simply continuing along the trajectory of a childhood faith that should be abandoned." (p. 155)
"Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett describes evolution as a 'universal acid.' With undisguised glee he outlines how evolution, which he calls 'Darwin's dangerous idea,' eats through and dissolves the foundations of religion." (p. 9)
The "foundations of religion" are the historical Jesus and the metaphysical proof of God's existence. Jesus was a Jewish prophet and healer, who preached the coming of the kingdom of God, rose from the dead, and gave meaning to the life of human beings. The logical proof of God's existence is not based on the Big Bang or the complexity of organs in multicellular life. The logical proof is based on the finitude and existential unity of human beings. The metaphysical principles called essence and existence make our finitude intelligible and we can define, if not fully comprehend, God as a pure act of existence without a limiting essence. This existential/metaphysical analysis helps us understand Exodus 3.14, where God tells Moses his name is Yahweh. We know God is a person by analogy with the existence and personhood (self-knowledge, self-expression, and self-control) of ourselves.
The concept of the spiritual human soul is based on the membership of human beings in a category of being. That humans are different from one another and yet equal is made intelligible by the metaphysical principles called matter and form, also called body and soul. Knowing that human beings have spiritual souls is part of the science of evolution because the subject matter of evolution is limited to the bodies of human beings. This limitation is acknowledged by a famous authority on evolution in an article that quotes popes John Paul II and Pius XII:
"Catholics could believe whatever science determined about the evolution of the human body, so long as they accepted that, at some time of his choosing, God had infused the soul into such a creature. I also knew that I had no problem with this statement, for whatever my private beliefs about souls, science cannot touch such a subject and therefore cannot be threatened by any theological position on such a legitimately and intrinsically religious issue." (Stephen Jay Gould, "Nonoverlapping Magisteria," Natural History, March 1997, 13th paragraph)
Like a cheeky child, Gould mentions his "private beliefs about souls." But he knows in the court of conscience and reason there are arguments for the existence of free will, the human spiritual soul, and God. Another authority on evolution has a different approach:
"And how, out of this diversity of experiences, does a unitary reality emerge, the mind or self? The soul created by God, you might say, accounts for both transformations: ape to human and brain to mind. This religious answer may be satisfactory for believers, but it is not scientifically satisfactory." (Francisco J. Ayala, Darwin's Gift: to Science and Religion, p. 10)
Gould and Ayala are confusing religion and theology with metaphysics which is a method of inquiry that has as good a claim to truth as science. An example of a metaphysical or existential truth is that human beings have free will. It is not a scientific truth because it comes from our ability to transcend ourselves and make ourselves the subject of our own knowledge. Another reason free will is not a scientific concept is that it does not have an operational definition. We can comprehend the concept of free will only because we have it. Other existential truths: The universe is intelligible and human beings are embodied spirits.
The phenomena of free will and conscious knowledge cause anxiety in some people because of the unanswerable question: What is the relationship between myself and my body? In response to this feeling some say free will is an illusion and self-consciousness is an epiphenomenon. Ayala's tack is that he will not be satisfied by any explanation of human rationality that is not based on the scientific method. This is just posturing and is not supported at all by the science of evolution. This is why Gould, an outspoken secular humanist, says the existence of God and the human soul is compatible with evolution.
If the human spiritual soul is the upper limit to evolution, the origin of life is the lower limit. The first quote is from Gould and the second quote is from the author:
"Evolution is not the study of life's ultimate origin as a path toward discerning its deepest meaning. Evolution, in fact, is not the study of origins at all. Even the more restricted (and scientifically permissible) question of life's origin on our earth lies outside its domain. (This interesting problem, I suspect, falls primarily within the purview of chemistry and the physics of self-organizing systems.)" (Stephen Jay Gould, "Justice Scalia's Misunderstanding," Natural History, October 1987, p. 139)
"There is presently no generally accepted theory of how the first life-form arose, but several options have been proposed. The raw materials, of course, were not alive, but were capable of assembling into a complex structure with the capacity to reproduce itself. And once reproduction was initiated, evolution began." (p. 191)
In the United States, the public face of the science of intelligent design (ID) is an advocacy movement to change the way evolution is taught. Throughout the book, Giberson tars ID with the pitch of creationism, which is based on the form of Protestant Christianity called fundamentalism. He says of one ID advocate, Michael Behe, that "he makes a deliberate effort to distance himself from traditional creationists" (p. 205). What is truly pertinent is that Behe distances himself to a certain extent from ID, which he considers to be an inference or a conclusion:
"...I spend the bulk of the chapters drawing on molecular evidence, genomic research, and--above all--crucial long-term studies of evolutionary changes in single-celled organisms to test Darwinism without regard to conclusions of design. ... As I will argue, mathematical probabilities and biochemical structures cannot support Darwinism's randomness, except at the margins of evolution. Still, as we seek to find the line marking the edge of randomness, there is no need to infer design." (Michael Behe, The Edge of Evolution: The Search for the Limits of Darwinism, p. 8)
The organisms are malaria and the HIV virus, which have evolved defenses against man-made drugs. Despite the huge numbers of organisms and cell divisions observed, there has been no build-up of molecular machinery. Behe likens these observations to the famous experiment in 1887 proving that light propagated in a vacuum, not a luminiferous ether. The ether had to behave like a solid for electric fields and behave like a gas for planets, but it was a good theory at the time.
The best chapter in the book gets its title ("How to Be Stupid, Wicked, and Insane") from a statement made by Richard Dawkins about people who question evolution:
"The creation-evolution controversy is only, in the most trivial sense, a scientific dispute. It is, instead, a culture war fought with culture-war weapons by culture warriors...The conflict resides at the much deeper and far more important level of worldview. It centers on one simple question: Can there be any roll at all for God in our own creation story?" (p.166)
Evolution, gay marriages, and abortion are controversial because they involve religion and theology. For creationists, evolution challenges the way they think the Bible should be interpreted. But for others, evolution challenges the reasons to believe in revelation, that is, the reasons to believe that God has communicated himself to mankind.
People who believe in religion are making a positive decision about revelation. At the same time, they are receiving the gift of faith from God. It is a mistake to think that before deciding whether God has intervened in history a person has to decide whether or not God exists and whether or not God created the universe. There is no need to make decisions about science and existentialism in order to have rational grounds for believing in God.
The ID movement is based on the assumption that scientists have made an atheistic decision about science which should be reversed. A scientist who admits God created the human soul and admits there is no scientific explanation for the origin of life is not guided in his science by atheistic presuppositions. The only persons who have to make decisions about science are scientists.
Nor does anyone have to make a decision about God's existence. Atheistic existentialists are not willing to assume or hope that the universe is intelligible. This sheds light on the metaphysical proof of God and means that the proof is only hypothetical. What we have to decide is whether the hypothetical God of existentialism cares about the needs of human beings. We should ask atheists why they don't believe the Biblical and Koranic account of our salvation history.
Author's musings August 19, 2008
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
The author tips his hand early when he calls Creation a secondary doctrine in Christianity. It would have helped had he consulted with a theologian. That said, I am glad I read it so I could better understand how some scientists may be struggling--although he asserts that he's come to some conclusions he is not convincing on that score.
A Good Book to Whet Your Critical Thinking August 14, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Here are just two of 25+ examples.
From the author on p. 160 - "Why aren't the ID theorists not calling down the wrath of God on the plumbing community for its blinkered adherence to pure naturalism?"
What a dumb question. Clearly Dr. Giberson didn't study philosophy or critical thinking too hard in college. The answer is two-part:
1) Such an approach to plumbing is not a worldview but only a method and as such the ID theorists would not perceive any threat.
2) The `naturalistic' approach to plumbing actually assumes an intelligent agent(s).
For example -->
a) water valves aren't designed to last forever,
b) people are both intentionally and unintentionally incompetent and so may have goofed the installation of the plumbing,
c) and many other specified causes of water leaks attributable to an intelligent agent...
So we see that Dr. Giberson has committed the logical fallacy of a False Analogy.
Arguing by analogy is often appropriate and useful. For even though most (if not all) analogies break down at some point they help us by at least pointing our attention in the right direction for thinking about the issue at hand. Dr. Giberson's comparison of ID theory to `plumbing theory' is no analogy at all since right from the start it fails to point to some truth or soundness of thought which can be compared unfavorably to ID theory. In fact, as demonstrated, the only direct way `plumbing theory' can be used as an analogy is in support of ID theory.
From the author on p. 162-3 - "[t]he human body is riddled with design problems". For example, "Our knees are strangely designed and destined for injury. Below them are ankles that can move in several directions; above them are hips attached via "ball joints" that also permit a wide range of motion, as anyone who has ever played with a hula-hoop knows. But knees themselves bend in only one direction. No engineer would put three joints in a row and constrain the middle one in the way our knee is constrained. The design is so bad that countless athletes have to wear a special brace to help prevent a knee from bending about the wrong axis". . .
As it happens I've just finished reading the August 4th - 11th, 2008 issue of U.S. News and World Report that talks about engineering enhancements to the human body. On page 42 is a picture and article discussing an exoskeleton designed and developed by Raytheon Sarcos engineers. The design lead (Stephen Jacobsen - Distinguished Professor) is the Director, Center for Engineering Design at the University of Utah, Department of Mechanical Engineering and who got his PhD at MIT.
Not only does the device have the aforementioned forbidden arrangement of joints but the article describes the general difficulty the engineers have encountered; "In the process, neuroengineers are learning how hard it is to duplicate nature, let alone do it one better".
So we see here that Dr. Giberson has committed the logical fallacies of Dicto Simpliciter ("strangely designed", "destined for injury") and Hasty Generalization ("countless athletes"). And if I were Dr. Stephen Jacobsen I might accuse Dr. Giberson of the logical fallacy of Ad Hominem ("no engineer would put").
Yep, a great text for teaching how not to argue! Not so great otherwise.
Ergo, "3-stars".
 Inconsistent at best August 10, 2008
1 out of 9 found this review helpful
As one other reviewer states, this book does not deliver on its promise. It is, at most, a book on evolutionary apologetics, stating the same reasons to accept evolution over creation as hundreds of other books do. This 248 pages book ends with a chapter that basically comes down to what most other people would describe as 'theistic evolution', as Giberson describes evolution as "an expression of God's creativity."
What really makes this an inconsistent rant is that Giberson describes himself as a Christian, but at the same time describes the core of Christianity in two different ways, starting with Jesus as the Son of God, both human and divine at the same time, but then later on describing this core as nothing more than a belief in a loving, caring God. Never once does he make it clear whether or not he believes in the miracles of the Bible. My guess is that he does not, simply because if he can't believe that God created the universe, then there is no reason to believe in any other miracles in the Bible. This is the most confusing aspect of the book, by far, for me because he puts his beliefs in evolution first, before his faith. This is evidenced by his 'universal acid' take on evolution, meaning that his faith in the Fall, human uniqueness, the concept of sin, etc. is destroyed by his first and foremost belief in science - evolution. So, if he can't trust the Bible's take on these matters, how can he believe in the virgin birth, etc.? How can he call himself a Christian?
Later in the book, he goes into a short escapade about how he wishes ID were true so he wouldn't face the problems he does while teaching at a Christian college. OH, Boo-whoo! What does he expect? His faith is clearly affected a-priori by his evolutionary beliefs.
He calls Dawkins 'agnostic', and "our leading public intellectual". As a Christian, this is highly offensive. How can he mislead his readers in such a drastic fashion? Does he know that Dawkins in 100% atheistic, and someone who uses evolution to promote atheism? It seems he does, from a rather soft criticism of his views in other parts of the book. I wonder why he seems to forget this criticism in this portion (Ch.2).
Finally, he says ID fails for two reasons. One, it doesn't work scientifically. He says that even if ID was an accepted theory, it wouldn't add anything to working science practices and only contribute to perhaps some 'origins' science. Well, do we need evolutionary theory to do the work we do in biology today? Of course not (despite what so many people say!). Second, he says there's a theological problem associated with this because there are so many bad designs. Ok, but from a theological perspective, the worst designs work perfectly in a perfect world (before the Fall), right? I don't understand why evolutionists keep bringing this point up. It is 100% mute and easily dismissed from a theological perspective.
Anyway, this book adds nothing to the debate and only makes it worse, simply because Giberson is so inconsistent, and while I hope I am wrong here, appears to not share traditional Christian beliefs - which is the result of his adherence to evolutionary theory. So, he fails to deliver on his promise.
 Finally, A Standard for Reasonable Voices July 26, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Finally, a book that presents an intellegent, balanced and historical analysis of the evolution controversy. Understanding the scientific issues involved (which Dr. Giberson addresses very well, I might add) is only one part of coming to grips with that controversy. There are deep historical and ideological issues involved. Ken Miller's "Finding' Darwin's God" contained some similar criticisms of the ideological nature of the scientific materialists, but they weren't presented as aggressively or as effectively. Edward Larson's book on evolution brought up many of the same "dark companions of Darwin", but he didn't effectively make the tie between them and our current cultural wars.
As used in popular media, Darwinism is both a well-established scientific theory and a questionable materialistic ideology. I want to embrace the first and reject the second and Saving Darwin provides significant assistance toward that end.
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