Should Christians embrace evolution? It is an increasingly urgent question and one that seems increasingly difficult to answer. Like you, I have grown accustomed to hearing Christians declare that, in the end, it doesn’t really matter a whole lot what you believe about creation, whether you embrace a literal six-day creation or a version that allows for some kind of evolution. If only it was that simple. The fact is that there are many other doctrines that lean heavily upon the doctrine of creation. As this one topples and falls, many other crumble along side it.

Just a couple of weeks ago WORLD magazine declared Should Christians Embrace Evolution? their book of the year for 2011. I received the book just days after and eagerly opened it up to see what the fuss was all about. What I found is a book that offers a series of biblical and scientific responses to the question of evolution. Edited by Norman Nevin, the chapters are written by a list of distinguished scientists and theologians. 

What the book demonstrates above all, and what it demonstrates especially in the first half, is that there is far more to the issue of creation than merely whether the world was created in six days or six billion years. This doctrine of creation provides a foundation for many others. As we let go of a literal six-day creation, we find many other critical doctrines are in danger of falling with it. For example:

• Was Adam truly a historical person who truly fathered the entire human race?
• Did death exist before man’s fall into sin? What kind of death came with the Fall?
• Did God create a world in which death was, in fact, a necessary (and good!) part of the created order?
• Can one join Darwinianism and the Bible without inadvertently (but necessarily) slipping into Gnostic errors which downplay the physical in favor of the spiritual?

This is merely a sampling. The fact is that creation does not stand alone within the Bible; there is much that hinges upon it.

Stephen Hawkings’ The Grand Design has shot straight to the top of the New York Times list of bestsellers. The book is his atheistic answer to questions like these ones: Why is there a universe—why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist? Why are the laws of nature what they are? Did the universe need a designer and creator? Edgar Andrews was kind enough to allow me to post his review of the book. Andrews is author of Who Made God?: Searching for a Theory of Everything, Emeritus Professor of Materials at the University of London and an international expert on the science of large molecules. Which is to say that he is well-suited to write a review of a book like this one. Here is what he says about The Grand Design:

Cosmologist Stephen Hawking sold over nine million copies of his book A Brief History of Time. Now, 22 years later, he has co-authored The Grand Design which immediately hit the No.1 spot in the New York Times best-seller list. But the sequel is so inferior to the prequel in intellectual quality that a reviewer in The Times Saturday Review (London, 11 September 2010) writes: 'It reads like a stretched magazine article … there is too much padding and too much recycling of long-stale material… I doubt whether The Grand Design would have been published if Hawking's name were not on the cover'.

So why is the new book a runaway best-seller? Because it claims that science makes God redundant. Let's take a closer look at the claims advanced in The Grand Design.

Yesterday I finished up Nancy Pearcey’s new book Saving Leonardo. Nancy doesn’t write a lot of books, but when she does, they are worth reading. She’s a unique thinker and one who puts into words what for so many of us are just ideas flitting around the edges of our minds. This new book is just like that.

When I finished it up I began to write a review but found that I was having trouble distilling my thoughts. I did something I try not to do, at least until I’ve finished writing my own review—I went looking for what others are saying about it. As I did so, I came across a really good review written by David Steele (who blogs at veritas et lux). David was kind enough to give me permission to simply re-post his review. It nicely captures my own thoughts on Saving Leonardo!

*****

Why should the Devil get all the good scientists? It sometimes seems that way, doesn’t it? We hear of scientists like Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins and others who are acclaimed as being at the top of their field and almost inevitably it seems that they are atheists or otherwise committed to explaining the world in terms of Darwinian evolution. Occasionally we find a great dissenting mind, but then we discover that that person is committed to beliefs that seem opposed to the plain account of Scripture. So we have Francis Collins who writes The Language of God but who in the book says that, though God exists, life and creation can be explained in terms of natural laws and processes that do not depend on the Divine hand of God. It is both tiresome and frustrating.

It has been a couple of years since Richard Dawkins’ last major work, The God Delusion (my review). That book was a long-time fixture on the bestseller lists and served to establish Dawkins as the foremost spokesman for the New Atheists. Dawkins has long had two related emphases in his writing and speaking: the non-existence of God and the evidence in nature that evolution is responsible for all that exists. Where The God Delusion emphasized the former, his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, emphasizes the latter. It is primarily a counter-attack to advocates of Intelligent Design, and represents Dawkins’ attempt to provide natural evidence for evolution.

There are many people I "know" primarily through their books. I read constantly and find that books allow me to understand the people who write them, especially when the author has written several books. As I read through the corpus of his writings I learn to understand how he thinks and learn to understand what he believes. Even if I have never met an author face-to-face, I often feel like I have met him in his books. Because Tim Keller has written so little, I do not know him in the way I feel I know many of his peers--pastors and theologians who have written extensively. So it was with great interest that I read The Reason for God, only his second book (besides edited volumes to which he has contributed a chapter) and certainly his most significant. Published by Penguin and with a positive review by Publishers Weekly, it has all the makings of a bestseller.

Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion is a mega-seller, having been a long-time fixture on the New York Times list of bestsellers. Easily the world’s most prominent atheist at this time, Dawkins is becoming still more popular and gaining a wider and wider voice. Just recently he has introduced his “OUT” campaign which seeks to convince atheists to come out with their beliefs and to stop hiding in shame. He is leading the charge for society to regard atheism as a valid and respectable worldview.

The atheistic literary pantheon is currently comprised of three men: Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. All three men have written bestselling books and all three have published their most recent efforts in the past year. While I have no reason to believe that they have planned their books to coincide thematically or chronologically, their books do resemble each other in several ways. All three men believe that religion is a blight on society and all of them choose to deal most specifically with the evils of Christianity and its adherents. All three believe that religion harms far more than it hurts and all of them are angry and unwilling to be silent about all of this. Of these three, Dawkins is the most influential and we can rightly say that he is currently the most prominent atheist in the world.

There is a great deal of controversy surrounding global warming. Some insist that it is a terrifying and imminent concern that portends worldwide disaster. Others scoff at the notion, accusing those who spread such dire predictions of using global warming as part of a larger, sinister agenda. Al Gore considers global warming to be an inconvenient truth and a pending planetary emergency. In his political career he was an advocate of measures to deal with this and other environmental crises, and in his post-political career he has accelerated these warnings. An Inconvenient Truth, an immediate New York Times bestseller, and the film that was released at around the same time, are his attempt to take this message to the masses.

John MacArthur wrote Battle For The Beginning primarily to address the world’s origins from a Biblical viewpoint. The book is aimed at a Christian audience and is not so much a defense of creationism as it is a defense of a literal six-day creation. This is not a book that primarily focuses on convincing unbelieving evolutionists of creationism, but rather it focuses on convincing Christians who believe that in some form of evolution (such as old-earth creationism or the Gap Theory) that the only valid reading of Genesis one and two is a literal reading. MacArthur bases much of the book on the view that Evolution is itself a religion that is completely opposed to Christianity. Creationism and Evolution, therefore, can never be mixed. We must believe in either one or the other.