Science and religion

Review: Beyond Evolution

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Cover image of "Beyond Evolution" by Sy Garte

Beyond Evolution, Sy Garte. Tyndale | Refresh (ISBN: 9798400501364) 2025.

Summary: Rather than evolution hindering belief, observes a reluctance in biology to follow evidence warranting belief in a Creator.

Sy Garte believes it is time to move on from controversies surrounding evolution. He doesn’t reject evolutionary theory. Rather he argues that there are more foundational matters to be considered as well as new developments that suggest that biology could be on the brink of a paradigm shift. On the biology side, a commitment to reductionism has hindered thinking about purpose, agency, and decision-making even at the cellular level and a teleology behind evolutionary development. To open the door to these ideas might offer warrants for a belief in a Creator God. Likewise, on the religion side, Garte has observed the needless controversy and division among Christians fighting about evolution.

Behind Garte’s contention for a paradigm shift are several factors. One is the absence of any mathematical models for evolution, and particularly an account for the non-random nature of many mutations. A second is that highly accurate self replication of cells is antecedent to any evolution, and is highly complex, and unique in separating living from all non-living things. Even more foundational is how a living and self-replicating cell originated from non-living material (abiogenesis). We haven’t explained why there is life in a universe unfriendly to its origins.

Perhaps most interesting and still quite new to me is Garte’s discussion of agency, cognition, and teleology at the cellular level. Cells act to sustain and protect themselves. This involves at some level cognition of both internal and external environments. And the agency of living things suggests purpose or teleology: to live and to reproduce. This is true of single-celled bacteria and human beings. The main difference is complexity. Above all is the complexity of human consciousness, which Garte believes continues to defy purely materialist explanations. He also raises the question of consciousness not being selectively advantageous, so how then account for it.

However, Garte is not arguing for a “God of the gaps” theory. He is open to discoveries that address currently open questions. Rather, he argues for following the evidence and that randomness may not be the best explanation of the evidence. He believes there is too much evidence of non-random, purposeful occurrences in biology to dismiss purpose and teleology and even design. He would contend that there is a willful effort to ignore this because it provides warrants (not proof) for belief a designer.

There were several things I loved about this book. It brought me up to date on the developments in biology since my college courses a long while ago. I appreciated the call to stop the needless squabbling about evolution and Garte’s reasons for moving on. However, most striking was his vision of a new paradigm for biology, following the evidence for agency, cognition, and teleology. Setting aside the question of belief in a Creator, it raises the question of a paradigm shift in biology. This is worth conversation and investigation among all biologists, Christian or not. Finally, on every page, Garte offers material for what one friend calls “doxological fascination.” As one who believes in a Creator, Garte gave me lots of material for worship.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Why Science and Faith Need Each Other

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why science and faith

Why Science and Faith Need Each Other, Elaine Howard Ecklund. Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2020.

Summary: A sociologist who has researched the relationship between science and faith proposes that there are eight shared values that make it possible to move beyond a relationship of fear or conflict between religious and scientific communities.

Most of the books I have read about science and faith have come from either theological perspectives or those of physical science. What marks out this book as different is that it is written by a sociologist as a distillation of her research about attitudes of scientists toward faith, and those of believing people toward scientists. Her thesis is that there are shared values in both communities that make it possible to move from fear and conflict into constructive and appreciative dialogue with each other.

The first part of this book deals with preliminary considerations. She observes how fear often dominates the conversation within churches, that science is out to disprove God. Either we don’t talk about science, or we create binary choices–either faith in God or godless science. She observes that this doesn’t consider the reality of many Christians working in science and many scientists in the church, and that we might do well to listen to them. She also tackles the big elephant on the table in this discussion–evolution. She describes how in her research that she allows people to choose among six options in describing their beliefs about creation and evolution, rather than a binary choice. When this is the case, many Christians acknowledge the possibility of some form of evolution, along with the important conviction of God’s creative involvement, and the importance of the image of God, belying the science-faith binary.

She then explores eight shared virtues of people of faith and scientists. She divides these in two parts. The first are those of process, crucial in scientific research processes but also in vibrant Christian communities. These are curiosity, doubt, humility, and creativity. The second concern how science and faith might come together in redemptive practices, including healing, awe, shalom, and gratitude.

Her chapter on doubt is an example of the surprising concurrence of these values. Scientific research is rooted in doubt–either questioning an existing theory about a phenomena as an inadequate explanation of the data, or some question that hasn’t been explored that the scientist does not understand. In the church, doubt is often discouraged, yet everyone wrestles with questions while believing. Perhaps Christians may even learn from scientists, who believe in their process, even while “doubting.” Acknowledging together that we have honest questions builds bridges of understanding and can allow for real growth. Scientists can show how faith doesn’t require certainty.

Another example was the chapter on awe, something bringing atheist scientists and Christians together as they explore the wonders of the world at every level from the smallest components of life to the vastness of the cosmos. Of course for the Christian, this awe points us to a more profound awe, that of God.

Ecklund concludes the book talking about the virtue of gratitude. She speaks of gratitude in the practice of science, gratitude for science and the scientists in our midst, and gratitude for our faith. She concludes by illustrating this with a personal statement–what she would now say to her grandfather who asked her why she pursued a graduate degree in sociology when it might not result in greater pay. She writes:

I am devoting my life to sociology, and to the sociological study of religion, because of gratitude. I am grateful for my Christian faith and the role it plays in my life. I am grateful for my church community. I am also grateful for the advances that science and social science have made in helping us better understand and navigate our world. I am grateful for the scientific tools and concepts that allow us to better get along and work together. Indeed my gratitude for both faith and science has compelled me to study faith communities and scientific communities and to endeavor to give back to both of those communities. And because of this gratitude I can say that my work is part of my worship.

I’m grateful for this approach! I didn’t discuss humility, but my experience is that humility often seems in short supply in science-faith discussions. Yet both Christians and scientists have ample grounds for humility. We each are profoundly blessed in our lives beyond what we deserve–whether enjoying generous grants to build expensive apparatuses for our investigations, or exploring the infinite wonders of a generous God.

There is one other virtue Ecklund doesn’t mention that also seems a part of process. It is that of rigor or discipline. Scientists ruthlessly critique each other’s research in the pursuit of truth and often expend years on a research problem, running numerous experiments or simulations, crunching massive amounts of data. Sometimes this is also true in the church, whether in the care of framing our theology of the atonement, or the rigor shown in developing a program that serves one’s community. But we might also have much to learn from scientists in the rigor of our thinking and the testing of our ideas.

This is not so much criticism as evidence of how much fun it can be to consider what we share in common, and how we might learn from each other about living more virtuously. This provides a far better ground for good conversations that offer the hope of making us both better Christians and better scientists.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: A Worldview Approach to Science and Scripture

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A worldview approach to science and scripture

A Worldview Approach to Science and Scripture, Carol Hill. Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2019.

Summary: This book proposes that a worldview approach offers the best prospect of reconciling scripture and science, taking both seriously.

I’ve reviewed a number of books on scripture and science on this blog. This stands apart in many respects, one of which is the size of the book, the quality of the paper, and the lavish artwork, photography, charts, and graphs with which it is illustrated in full color on fine paper. It may equally serve as a coffee table book, or a supplemental text in an apologetics, biology or geology course in a Christian college setting. The author, a geologist teaching at the University of New Mexico has both the scientific background and familiarity with biblical scholarship to assemble this text.

Hill’s approach is one that has a high commitment both to the biblical text and the findings of science. She describes this as a “worldview approach,” following John Walton and other biblical scholars. She contends that we must read Genesis through the eyes of the pre-scientific worldview that informed the text of Genesis. By doing so, we rightly handle the text, rather than importing modern scientific concerns into that text.

A good example is the cosmology of the Ancient Near East and how it informs both our reading of Genesis 1 and the flood accounts of Genesis 6-9, allowing what is described as a “global” flood to be just that–a flood that covered everything in the known world of the observers, but yet was local. Likewise the six day sequence of creation consisting of three days of forming, and three days of filling with its numerous repetitions reflects a literary structure, not uncommon in the Ancient Near East, and memorable for readers and hearers.

At the same time, the author takes the existence of a real Adam and Eve in a real Garden of Eden seriously and explores the possible geographic location of that Garden, which she proposes might be about 100 miles northwest of Basra in present day Iraq. Later in the book, in coming back to the real existence of Adam and Eve, she discusses the possibility of pre-Adamite homo sapiens, with whom the offspring of Adam and Eve mated after expulsion from the garden, evidence of which we find in Genesis. She explores the numbers in the chronologies, noting the numerological interpretation of these numbers and the gaps in genealogies that make these both significant theological accounts, and totally irrelevant to the date of Adam and Eve or the age of the earth. The author argues for the flood as a historical, but extensive local event, probably around 2900 BC in Mesopotamia, looking at other records, and using studies of weather patterns to show how such a flood may have been possible. She discusses how the ark could have flowed up-gradient to Ararat from, counter to the prevailing flow of water into the Persian Gulf. Using her geological training, and familiarity with the American southwest, she demonstrates how it is just not possible to explain the Grand Canyon by “flood geology” that would contend that it was carved out, with all its layers of rock, in a year.

The upshot is a book that acknowledges the historic and literary elements of Genesis 1-11, and yet does not rule out the scientific accounts of the origins of the earth 4.58 billion years ago, the formation of the earth’s surfaces through geologic process over long time spans, and the rise of life along an evolutionary creationist model that does not try to force fit science into the Genesis 1 narrative. Her argument is that the worldview of the biblical writers as it shapes the writing of these scriptures does not require of us the gymnastics of trying to fit our scientific knowledge into either young earth or day-age approaches, but upholds what scripture affirms, read through Ancient Near Eastern eyes, as well as what science has revealed, finding no inherent conflict between them.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Evolution, Scripture, and Science

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9781532690143

Evolution, Scripture, and Science, B. B. Warfield (Edited by Mark A. Noll & David N. Livingstone). Eugene, Wipf & Stock, 2019 (originally published in 2000).

Summary: A collection of the writings of B.B. Warfield consisting of lectures, articles, and reviews showing his engagement with evolutionary writers and his conviction that scripture and science need not be in conflict.

B. B. Warfield (1851-1921) was know as a staunch advocate of the inspiration, infallibility, and authority of the Bible, and as a “Princeton theologian,” trained by Charles Hodge. What is lesser known was that he closely followed the scientific literature of his day concerning the developing theory of evolution and did not see that evolution and scripture inherently in conflict.

Mark Noll and David N. Livingstone have collected the writings of Warfield on the subject of evolutionary science. This includes lectures, articles, and excerpts from Warfield’s own writings as well as numerous reviews of articles and books by various writers on the subject. There are several things that impress me about Warfield:

  1. He both affirms the truthfulness of the Genesis accounts but is open to interpretations that do not insist on literal days, or use genealogical records to date when Adam was created.
  2. He insists on ex nihilo creation of the stuff of the cosmos, allows for providentially guided development, but insists on the creation of the human soul.
  3. His views develop over the course of his life. At one point, while allowing for evolutionary development under God’s providence, he advocated mediate creation. Later, after studying Calvin, he abandoned the idea of mediate creation and allowed for development and speciation.
  4. At the same time, he was willing to both affirm and critique various aspects of the writers of his day. His big issues were not evolution per se, but rather evolutionism that denied God’s providential involvement and the idea of randomness that denied teleology, the evidence of purpose in the development of life.
  5. He is, if anything more challenging in his remarks on theological writers when they deviate from orthodoxy than with science writers.
  6. He is unwilling to accept the fact/value dichotomy. He insists that theology and biology are both sciences, both are concerned with facts. Theology cannot be relegated to the subjective world of faith and emotion.

The editors provide an excellent essay on Warfield as a “conservative evolutionist.” Also each of the works are preceded by a brief summary.

It is sad that Andrew Dickson White’s History of the Warfare of Science with Theology shaped the public conception about Christianity’s response to evolutionary theory and science more generally, one sadly that even many Christians have adopted. Warfield called White’s work “special pleading,” projecting present controversies into a past when Christians were on the forefront of science and saw their investigations as giving glory to God, studying his revelation in the books of scripture and nature. It is sad that Warfield’s ideas did not gain greater currency in the culture and in the church.

At very least, this collection suggests that thoughtful Christians with a high view of scripture need not be at war with science. The state of evolutionary theory is far advanced from the time of Warfield and the discussions concern discarded aspects of the theory. Nevertheless, the model of respectful engagement, a theologian abreast with scientific research, a foundation of conviction with an openness to grow all commend Warfield as a model for those who would engage discussions between scripture and science. Wipf & Stock is to be commended for re-printing this work and keeping it in circulation.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Friend of Science, Friend of Faith

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friend of science friend of faith

Friend of Science, Friend of Faith, Gregg Davidson. Grand Rapids: Kregel Academic, 2019.

Summary:  Shows how we can trust both the witness of scripture and the findings of science as we consider God’s works.

Gregg Davidson begins this account with a story I’ve sadly observed in too many college settings. A students has been raised with a particular interpretation of the Bible’s account of beginnings and all sorts of “answers” to the challenge of evolution. Then she discovers that the real evidence for evolution far more extensive, and that the supposed “objections” to evolution were groundless in light of the actual evidence. A well meaning youth minister brings by a book defending a literal, “plain sense” reading of Genesis, but the student finds it riddled with inconsistencies, misconceptions and false assertions. Forced to choose between science and the interpretation of scripture presented her as true and authoritative, she walked away from her faith, her Bible ending up in a landfill.

Davidson is saddened by this because he is convinced that most of the science versus faith conflicts are needless battles. He proposes three important questions where science and the Bible seem in conflict:

  1. Does the infallibility of Scripture rest on a literal interpretation of the verses in question?
  2. Does the science conflict with the intended message of scripture?
  3. Is the science credible? (p.23).

What Davidson does is illustrate, first with the historic case of heliocentrism, and then in much more depth in the accounts of origins how Genesis may give a true, but not literalistic account of origins that would have “rung true” for it original hearers and readers who would have been baffled by the concordist efforts to reconcile a literal reading with observed evidence. He then shows that in fact science does not clash with the intended meaning of scripture that affirms a universe that emerged ex nihilo, life that arose from the earth, and humans from the dust of the ground, and the evidence of a massive flood in the known world of the Bible.

Having contended for the trustworthiness of biblical accounts, and that read in terms of their intended message, they needn’t conflict with science, Davidson, a geologist by training, turns to the question of the credibility of the science of beginnings, summarizing in wonderful detail both cosmological origins, and the geology and origins of life on earth. He shows the problems the evidence poses for flood geology. He also addresses the objection raised by many of the lack of transitional forms, demonstrating that while this was true at one point, we now have great evidence for these forms in the fossil record showing transitions from dinosaurs to birds, reptiles to mammals, mammals to marine whales, and the origins of human life.

One of the most challenging portions of this book for those who advocate “creation science” is how Davidson exposes the rhetorical moves used to advance this cause: false dichotomies, the twisting of terms, the misapplication of scientific principles like the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the misleading ways of telling half a story, the use of distractions, the cherry-picking of quotations, and outright wrong and often outdated information. Some do this from sincere conviction, and I appreciate Davidson’s graciousness with those who do not agree, and his commitment to Christian charity and fellowship with those who differ. But he also challenges others who uphold a particular mode of creation at the expense of truth. The cause of truth and righteousness is never advanced by falsehoods. Their efforts are also misdirected. They become creation evangelists, rather than what Davidson would hope for, people with particular beliefs of what is true who can acknowledge those who read Genesis differently and then say, “so what do you think about Jesus?”

He discusses the intelligent design movement, and the difficulty of arguing for the activity of God in the places evidencing design not yet explicable by science. He confirmed what I’ve long felt that the things we do understand argue as much for the Creator as what we do not, and that to put our emphasis on the inexplicables is to worship a shrinking God, rather than a God, the grandeur of whose work only grows as we understand more of it.

Gregg Davidson represents a growing number of Christians in science who are convinced both of the inspiration and authority of the Bible and the credibility of the results of scientific research. As his title suggests, he is an advocate for a better conversation, a better relationship between science and faith, a friendly rather than adversarial relationship. In this book he makes a strong case from both scripture and science that this is possible, and that adversarial approaches, whether by Christians, or by atheists like Richard Dawkins, are needless, wrong headed, and harmful.

There are people on both sides of the “battle” who have built personal followings and empires that are sustained by the perpetuation of this battle. I frankly hope that Davidson’s book contributes to the opening of the eyes of many to recognize that “the emperor(s) have no clothes,” that they should no longer be heeded, and that former enemies might become friends–friends both of science and faith.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Love and Quasars

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Love and Quasars

Love and Quasars: An Astrophysicist Reconciles Faith and Science, Paul Wallace. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2019.

Summary: An astrophysicist recounts both his journey away from faith as he saw it in conflict with science, and his return to a faith enlarged by his pursuit of science.

There are many books that contend that science and faith might be reconciled. What makes this book stand apart is not merely the reasoned argument, but more deeply the wonder and love for both God and the cosmos that brings science and faith together for the author.

It wasn’t always so for Paul Wallace. Like many children, Paul started out with an implicit faith in God and saw God’s glory in the world (the subject of a family joke). Beginning in second grade, he began to see contradictions between what he read in the Bible and what he was learning about the world from science. The religious adults he discussed this with seemed uneasy, the scientists were in love with their work. As he went along, he gradually came to believe that opposing faith to science was kind of like “chessboxing” the mixing of two very different things that each address different aspects of our existence. Faith shouldn’t exclude scientific explanations of origins, and science shouldn’t pretend to answer the questions of what kind of people we ought to be and ultimate questions of meaning.

He argues for the cooperation of friends, indeed lovers, as the model for the relationship of faith and science, both approaching the universe with wonder and love without imposing what each sees on the other, but mutually appreciating and learning from each other, sometimes coming to a seamless union, as in marriage. He speaks about how science may enlarge faith, even while some choose to believe there is nothing more while others grow in faith. He proposes this rewrite to a materialist vision of the universe:

You have a heavenly father. You’re an amazing product of his ongoing creation project. We’ve discovered a lot about that project, which has been going on for billions of years. We are human beings, the descendants of apes, who were drawn from earlier, smaller primates. Our lineage also includes reptiles and amphibians and fish and worms and even single-celled organisms. Like a flower that grows from the dirt yet is not itself dirt, we have been gradually assembled out of chaotic and disorganized elements. You were formed from the dust of the ground, given the breath of life, and carry the image of a loving and creative Father who is crazy about you.

He proposes that this view of science and faith opens us to a larger and stranger God, one who made a vastly more immense universe than anyone before Copernicus imagined, and even stranger than the universe delineated by Newton. He thinks this leads to a larger understanding of the Bible revealing God’s loving relationship to the world he has made rather than strained interpretations that tend to harmonize a literal reading of Genesis with the findings of science. Science reveals a universe “red in tooth and claw” and faith reveals a Christ who enters into violence and suffering and transforms it. He suggests that our problem with miracles may be that we look at such events from a human point of view whereas from God’s perspective, there are no miracles but only possible things.

One of the most helpful chapters is one in which he re-examines the popular view of the church versus Galileo, suggesting that the real history is more complicated and that much of the purported warfare between science and Christianity has been cooked up and is an oversimplification of history. He describes his own journey back to faith as he recognized the limits of science to address life’s big questions of why we are here and our sense of wonder at the beauty we behold in the world. Most of all, faith, and not science revealed that we are creatures of love, a love that embraces people, God and the cosmos that scientists study.

What I appreciate is that Wallace does not try to argue a concordist explanation between the Bible and science. He doesn’t try to argue God from irreducible complexity or fine tuning. He traces his own recognition of the inadequacy of materialist science to answer the deepest longings and intuitions of his life. He recognizes the connection between the wonder and love of the believer and the scientific researcher. He does all this in a manner that is at times disarmingly offhand and at others is caught up in the wonder of the world he studies, inviting us, “do you see it too?” Just as the woman who eventually became his wife didn’t make him an evangelistic “project” but simply entered into a relationship of wonder and love that was instrumental in his return to faith, so he treats the reader. One feels we are not projects but fellow seekers, trying to make sense of our own wonder and love and a longing for making some sense of the world, even as we listen to his personal journey of discovery.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher via Edelweiss. The opinions I have expressed are my own.