Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution
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Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution Giberson, Karl My name is Bruce Congdon. I’m the dean of the college of Arts and Sciences and it’s my pleasure, my honor to introduce tonight’s speaker. I just met Dr. Karl Giberson and it’s been really fun getting to know him. And for those of you who were students, I’d like to give you a word of encouragement here. In some ways, Dr. Giberson is a product of general education. You know those courses that you have to take that you would rather not, amazingly Dr. Giberson really in some ways pose his development as a scholar in the area he will be speaking on tonight to his interest in teaching general education courses. And so, he’s been wide ranging in this area of faith and science. Even though he started out with a bachelor’s degree in math and physics, a PHD in physics from Rice University, once he started teaching at Eastern Nazarene University in the Boston area, he found himself more and more drawn towards these general education science classes. And it was during those explorations that he now is an author of four books. The most recent of which is called “Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution.” A very interesting work, that I haven’t had a chance to look at it but I’ve been really hoping for decades that somebody would write a book like this. There’s another book called Species of Origins that we actually use in our University Scholars class that I have read, and I’ve been so blessed by that book because it tries to find some middle ground between these polar opposites you don’t often find in these areas of topic that really tries to make some sense of a good middle ground. So I am very happy that Dr. Giberson is here. I’m sure you’re going to enjoy it. Please welcome him. Well I’m very glad to have this invitation to come here. It’s nice to see this crowd. I love general education, but one of the things I love about general education is the way that it has allowed me to engage a lot of different students in a lot of ways. One of the things I didn’t really like about my physics courses is that I typically had three male geeks at a time in my classes and general education brought a broader range of people with more ideas, more interesting things to challenge me to think about, and all of my writing, all of my book have come out of teaching general education, wrestling with students and talking to them about the things which they are wrestling with. And I had a chance today at lunch at the Lucy Exhibit and then in class this morning, to meet a few of you. It was great meeting you. I really enjoyed it enormously and I think that the student body of SPU seems like a great group, so I’m humbled and gratified to be here with you tonight. If anybody is interested at the end of the evening, I understand that the bookstore sold out of copies of my book. I have three copies remaining that are mine that I brought. But if you would like to have a copy of “Saving Darwin” that is signed by me, if that’s of Seattle Pacific University Transcriptions interest to you. If you’ll give a check or cash to Professor Wall-Scheffler here afterwards, I will mail it to you. So just give her a piece of paper and I’ll be happy to take a check and just trust you that you actually have money in your account. And I will send it to you, and if you’d like it endorsed in any particular way… you know, ‘to my best friend, Minnie’ or whatever, I’d be happy to do that for you. Okay so, let me talk about this book a little bit. Now this book was a lot of fun for me to write. It was a writing exercise as well as an intellectual challenge. And I was asked to write a book that had a personal component to it, and over the previous few years prior to writing this book, I had begun to write a little more in the first person. I’d been getting some feedback that people kind of like this aspect of my writing, so I was encouraged to kind of weave together my own story of being raised a fundamentalist… a militant, young earth creationist, a biblical literalist, the whole 9 yards, who gradually became someone who accepted evolution, accepted the general scientific conclusions about origins that we have and then wrestles with how to reconcile that with Christian beliefs. So I’m still quite happy to call myself a Christian, but I accept the conclusions of contemporary science about our origins and I work to try to fit these things together in a way which I think allows me to have some harmony with both. So I want to talk a little bit about that tonight. Give you some of the places where I think it’s straightforward to do that, some places where I think it’s hard, and then we can have a little bit of Q&A afterwards and you can give me some of your thoughts on this. So let me give you a little bit of biography here to tell you how you get a Canadian fundamentalist to Seattle. I was born and raised about as far away from Seattle as you can get and still be on the North American continent. That’s in the far tip of Eastern Canada in rural New Brunswick. It was a very rural, old-fashioned kind of area. It was a small town about 1,000 people on the banks of the St. John River. All the little towns on the banks of this river, which I just took for granted, I now understand that it’s one of North America’s most beautiful rivers. The country side rolls back on both sides of the river and there are potato farms everywhere, and every fall the public schools would all closedown and the children would go out and pick potatoes and get 25 cents for each barrel of potatoes that we could fill. It was a deeply religious area, very much a bible belt. Every community was more or less a Christian community of some sort. Communities which were too small to support even one public school would have four or five Evangelical churches, each one convinced that only they had got it exactly right. And my father was a pastor of some of these churches growing up that looked very much like this and were bible based, fundamentalist churches. Now, this was Canadian fundamentalism which is a little different than American fundamentalism. Canadian fundamentalism doesn’t have the hard edge to it. It doesn’t have the same sort of political dimension. You can’t tell who a Canadian fundamentalist will vote for in the same way you can tell who an American fundamentalist would vote for. So I don’t look back on this period as something that was a period of bigotry or hostility or great negativity. It was simply a period when the bible was taken incredibly seriously and we were encouraged to read it and memorize it, to learn as much as we could about it, and to take it as literally as Seattle Pacific University Transcriptions possible because it was God’s inspired work and was thus completely and utterly inerrant and we must allow it to control everything that we believe. The period of the 60s and 70s when I grew up… I was born in 1957 so I was a young person through the decade of the 60s…. Canada didn’t really have a 60s, though in the sense that America did. We weren’t fighting any wars, we didn’t have any politicians that were shot, our young men weren’t fleeing to some other country, and so on. A very quiet kind of period, and it was a nice period of coming of age for Christianity. It was a time when Evangelicals were emerging in ways which were, for me, very positive then. This later took on a hard edge with a religious rite, maybe. But for me, I got to by the very first record album ever made that was Christian rock. This is it. Love song. It came out of Calvary Chapel down in Southern California. This was the very first Christian rock album ever made. Rock music was very controversial. I had a book which my parents have me called “Rock and Roll: The Devil’s Diversion.” And this book talked about how these sort of evil sinister beats which came from the dark continent of Africa would do something to your soul if you listened to them too much. But eventually, we gave in and we accepted that this music was fine. And it was just very liberating to kind of not have to listen to these silly quartets out of Nashville all the time, which was the alternative. One of the controversies that we dealt with related to movies. The Cross and the Switchblade was a very popular book and it was made into a movie that was starring Pat Boone.