Can't Darwin and God get along?

Of course they can, argues physicist and theologian Karl Giberson, if only many believers were more sophisticated and atheists less dogmatic.

By Vincent Rossmeier

Read more: Religion, Books, Evolution, Science, God, Faith, Atoms and Eden

July 1, 2008 | With biologist Richard Dawkins leading the way, many scientists today are locked in an unending match of whack-a-mole with Christian creationists, who insist that God created heaven, earth and humanity in its present form, and with disciples of intelligent design who want to expel evolution from its scientific prominence in public schools. If you've been following the battle, you might be inclined to believe that Americans are faced with a choice between believing in God and scientific fact.

In his new book, "Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution," Karl Giberson calls this a false choice. A professor of physics at Eastern Nazarene College, and director of the Forum on Faith and Science at Gordon College, Giberson believes in evolutionary theory as adamantly as he does in God. For Giberson, evolution and Christianity are not in competition but complement one another. Holding equal disdain for creationists who read the Bible literally and scientists who disregard God altogether, Giberson seeks a middle way, and attempts to resuscitate Darwin's reputation as both a religious man and a scientist. In conversation, Giberson possesses a boundless inquisitiveness typical of many scientists, but also displays the wry wit of a seasoned polemicist. He seems to know how to counteract your best arguments before you have even made them.

Why does Darwin need to be saved?

He has been vilified in American evangelical culture and even more broadly than that. Yet his important contribution to science reaches into theology and religion, and so it's important to rehabilitate him so that you can't simply call something Darwinist and have people say, "Oooo, that smells bad."

Why do misconceptions about Darwin persist?

Because in the latter part of the 20th century, evolution became identified with negative social agendas, and some very effective polemicists like Henry Morris and Ken Ham convinced people that evolution was responsible for the breakdown of the family and drug abuse and all manners of evil. Christians who tend to see satanic or sinister influences behind those things were only too ready to demonize Darwin and say he had an agenda to destroy their faith. In their eyes, Darwinism destroyed belief in God the creator.

Darwinism became associated with repugnant beliefs like Nazism and eugenics. But as you point out, evolution doesn't make judgments, it merely describes.

Right. There's an important distinction between a theory that tells us the way the world is and a theory that tells us the way it ought to be. In practice, however, we think we should behave by the way we think the world is. That's why there's such an intense debate about homosexuality. Conservatives don't want homosexuality to be perceived as something natural because that would force them to reevaluate the way we treat it from a moral perspective. While it's true that you can't justify eugenics on the basis of Darwin's observations, as soon as genetics was recognized to be as important as it is, people began to realize that genetics could be used to improve the species. This was kind of a natural extension but it's certainly not implied in Darwin's work.

Aren't some people threatened by evolution because they can't reconcile biblical literalism, or "young-earth" creationism, with the fact that the earth is not 10,000 years old but billions?

Yes, but young-earth theory is an interpretation of Genesis that requires that you bring a certain set of suspect assumptions to the text. The early chapters of Genesis do not read like history. They have a different sort of character to them. People who read Hebrew and understand the ancient Near Eastern worldview, and the cosmology that informed it, have given us ample reasons why you would not read Genesis that way, even if you weren't worried about reconciling it with a billion-year-old planet.

Yet Americans do. One poll you cite shows that 51 percent of Americans believe that God created humans in their present form. You write that the strength of creationism in the U.S. "has more to do with American culture than biology or Christian theology." What is it about our culture that has led to creationism's popularity?

In short, intellectual laziness. We're not prepared to do the hard work to make our culture more sophisticated. We don't drill into our children in Sunday school or church the fact that ancient people thought differently about the world than we do. Even a modest amount of sophistication in biblical interpretation will show that the biblical authors, in both the Old Testament and New Testament, are not writing history.

In the Bible, you read the same events chronicled by different writers, and they put things in different orders or leave things out. If someone is really chronicling events, then events would be lined up in the right order. We know the Civil War comes after the American Revolution. But a biblical author, who thought for some reason that the American Revolution seemed more relevant, might reverse the order. It wouldn't be because he was incompetent historically, it would be because he was presenting these events from an agenda that's not that of a historian.

Many Christians insist the Bible is the literal word of God.

Yes, that's widespread and again it's because of a certain lack of sophistication from a literary point of view. Many people translate "the word of God" into the "words of God." They don't recognize that when you talk theologically about the Bible being the word of God, you mean that it contains an important message, that God is revealing himself through the history of Israel and Jesus Christ. New Testament theology gives us the "Word made flesh in Jesus." But that phrase makes no sense if you're talking about words and sentences. But it does make sense if you're talking about some kind of revelation about the nature of God.

The Bible is correctly understood in Christianity as the Word of God. But it's a distortion to say the Bible contains the words of God as if God had dictated these things. We need to grant that there are differences in the way that biblical authors talked about the world. We can't just pull all of this into the 20th century as if it was just recently written down by God for our benefit.

Evolution is taught in American high schools and yet many still don't believe in it. How can that be counteracted?

Well, if you could figure that one out, someone would be interviewing you, not you interviewing me. You're absolutely right. That's a challenging problem and it's a problem that the Europeans are just shaking their heads over.

Why is that?

Because Europe doesn't have a robust fundamentalist subculture like America has had since the early parts of the 20th century. American religion has been characterized by an entrepreneurial spirit. In Europe, many of the great religious traditions wasted away because they were supported by government. They didn't need to be popular and have lots of people coming to worship on Sunday to continue. So they atrophied and people lost interest.

In America, without that kind of governmental support, religious leaders had to be entrepreneurial. So a charismatic evangelist can come up with a brand-new approach to faith and touch some chord contemporary with people's needs. It's why we see people like Rick Warren, a very popular guy who is revolutionizing the way a lot of evangelicals think about their faith. He's obviously tapped into an anti-evolutionary fundamentalism and biblical literalism that people find important and like.

Biblical literalism is very simple. You read the Bible in English and you say to yourself that these are the things God wrote down through a secretary a long time ago, and all I need to do is read this in English and that's all the work I have to do to understand it. Who wouldn't want that to be the case? If you try to tell these people that they need some egghead scholar from Harvard, who can read Hebrew, to come in and help them with it, that seems offensive and alienating, and people aren't attracted to that. So I think the ability of American religion to invent itself and to appeal to common denominators, sometimes the lowest denominator, has allowed these evangelical movements to flourish with their own agendas.

Discussing intelligent design, you write, "although I wish it were true, it must be rejected." Why?

I don't think the intelligent design movement does anything useful. Its poster children for God's intervention are things like the clotting of blood or the propeller on the back of a bacterium. These aren't interesting features of the world, and the fact that they seem complicated and hard to explain through evolution doesn't suggest for one second that we ought to invoke the supernatural finger of God. I do think there are lots of things we don't understand about the world and maybe the intelligent design movement is doing us a service by shining a bright light on those. But when all is said and done, I don't think Christian theology wants to have a God who is one of several different factors in shaping natural history.

Do you think the intelligent-design movement demeans God?

Yes, it turns God into a kind of conjurer, one who comes in every now and then to do a trick in nature. How is this a helpful model for God?

Next page: I'd say to Dawkins, don't tell me that God couldn't interact with the world the same way we do