“Saving Darwin” by Karl Giberson

Description

"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."
- From Publisher's Weekly. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Reviews

• Glen Branch, Skeptical Inquirer:
  Overall, anyone seeking a lively and engaging, if occasionally tendentious, introduction to the evolution wars from the standpoint of a Christian who accepts evolution will enjoy Saving Darwin.
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• Pastor Bob Cornwall, Ponderings on a Faith Journey:
  Saving Darwin is a must read. It lays out the issues in as balanced a way possible, for someone who has a stake in the conversation… In this book, he offers a middle road, one that rejects the either/or ideologies of creationist (Intelligent Design is included here) or materialists.
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• Amy E. Schwartz, The Washington Post:
  Saving Darwin offers readers two gifts: a cultural history of the anti-Darwin movement that details how its tenets, far from being the traditional doctrine of any church, were developed by a few cranks and fueled by larger, populist fears of secular culture; and an empathetic, comprehensible account of how the world looks if you believe in scientific creationism, as he once did.
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• John Leonard Berg, Library Journal:
  This sensitively written and convincingly argued book succeeds in respecting both religious beliefs and scientific facts in discussing theories surrounding the creation of the world.
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