Video|How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution

Spectrum Staff | June 9, 2009

Karl Giberson, Ph.D., is an internationally known scholar of science-and-religion and one of America’s leading participants in the creation/evolution controversy. Giberson has been on the faculty of Eastern Nazarene College since 1984, where he teaches interdisciplinary honors seminars and the history of science. He is also the director of the Forum on Faith and Science at Gordon College.

In this discussion with Bob Wright, Giberson, author of Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution tackles a lot of the issues that six-day literalists raise, in part how Darwinism actually helps us understand sin and suffering, how the incarnation of Jesus helps us model evolution, and how Deism is not the answer.

Topics:

On reconciling Christianity with evolution

In search of a scientifically respectable form of divine intervention

Can natural selection explain our moral sense?

What is it that our moral sense senses, anyway?

Can we explain Mother Teresa’s generosity without God?

How consoling could a hands-off God be?

I particularly like how Giberson pushes back against the Bob’s reductive arguments that evolution determines morality. In fact, they end up both positing that religion and moral codes have evolved over time (think cave shamans to Cathedrals) perhaps as part of the evolutionary survival mechanism. Perhaps evolution gives us faith in order to transcend its own materialism.

For more on Christianity and Evolution, check out the BioLogos Foundation.

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