Saving Darwin

March 24, 2008
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.