A Prelude to some Book Reviews

This past winter, I made it my goal to read a number of books from a number of perspectives on the creation/evolution debate.

You see, for many years I have been uninterested in the debate, for its relevance seemed minimal. My longstanding distaste for the topic began with an internal criticism of my own faith community: I encountered “the Fundy spirit” which pitted evolution and atheism against the bible and Christianity. However, it seemed plain to me that evolution did not provide any support for atheism, for evolution is merely about how existing matter behaves, not whether God created that matter or not. Evolution does not answer the question of the existence of God at all: it is almost entirely irrelevant to the question. It was always my delight to smugly listen to atheists who went on and on about how evolution answered all of their questions and justified their unbelief, then to simply ask where all that evolving matter came from? I didn’t need any education in the details of the science, because it was irrelevant to evaluating the philosophical question.

Even if evolution is true, (I reasoned to myself) its truthfulness would leave all of the central doctrines of Christianity intact: evolutionists still have to deal with the God question, and I always felt it was a strength of my apologetic not to have to hand out “reject evolution!” buttons as a pre-requisite for entrance to the kingdom of God. To do otherwise was just plain silly.

Then my education took a new turn: since I have begun pursuing graduate theological studies, an itching ignorance has been afflicting my mind. As I specialize in one field of knowledge, I am growing increasingly embarrassed at how little I know about things outside of my specialty. I am becoming specialized -good! I am becoming unbalanced -bad!

An apologetics course I took required me to familiarize myself with some “Intelligent Design” literature, and I have used that as a diving board to plunge into other related books. I would like to blog a few book reviews out, at least to help myself sort through the information I’m reading. I also hope my blog followers will also find my reviews of interest, but I have to apologize: though I’m working on my brevity, these will be longer than my regular posts.