No, really. To listen to Giberson (author of Saving Darwin), this has been the worst year for “evolution” since the dinosaurs caught themselves an asteroid.
In a publication called Church and State (“challenging religious privilege in public life”), he tells us,
Evolution did not fare well in 2013. The year ended with the anti-evolution book Darwin’s Doubt as Amazon’s top seller in the “Paleontology” category. The state of Texas spent much of the year trying to keep the country’s most respected high school biology text out of its public schools. And leading anti-evolutionist and Creation Museum curator Ken Ham made his annual announcement that the “final nail” had been pounded into the coffin of poor Darwin’s beleaguered theory of evolution.
Americans entered 2013 more opposed to evolution than they have been for years, with an amazing 46 percent embracing the notion that “God created humans pretty much in their present form at one time in the last 10,000 years or so.” This number was up a full 6 percent from the prior poll taken in 2010. According to a December 2013 Pew poll, among white evangelical Protestants, a demographic that includes many Republican members of Congress and governors, almost 64 percent reject the idea that humans have evolved.
Toldjah. It’s the “13” effect again. 1913 was bad too. Alfred Russel Wallace died that year.
But seriously, readers, it’s a surprise Giberson is even using the word “evolution.” Here’s what he and Francis Collins had to say in their recent book, The Language of Science and Faith: “We avoid using the ‘E-word’”:
Theistic evolution is the belief that God created life using natural processes, working within the natural order, in harmony with its laws. So, why don’t we simply use the term evolution to describe our view? We don’t use the term, at least not at this point in our discussion, because it is associated with negative ideas, including atheism, and many readers would have a constant uncomfortable feeling while thinking about it. The word evolution carries emotional baggage that we are tossing overboard. (pp. 19–20)
Musta fished it back.
Well, it’ll be interesting to see what Giberson says about 2014.
Note: It’s kind of surprising that a well-known Christian theologian would be writing in a publication like Church and State. On the books page, get a load of the one suggesting short-lived Pope John Paul I was murdered. You know, just like Princess Di and Elvis. (Or wait, no, didn’t someone see all three of them down at the donut shop together recently? Figures.)
See also: Observant Jew Prager takes on Christian Darwinist Giberson
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Hat tip: Daniel Quinones