Kids books...

We see books and reading (both alone and with parents) as a key part of our children's education.

Contemporary education seems to be much impoverished in this regard. Contemporary technocratic, statist, secularist societies lack imagination.

Kids need imagination to imagine a different world, one living under the Lordship of Christ; to see behind the curtain and think about being transformed and transforming.

Books open horizons; help us to assess and analyse the subtle spiritual propaganda of the enemy of souls, and think differently. Books help us to place ourselves within much larger contexts than the narrow ones we see when we only converse with figures our existing four walls.

Then the question is - which books? Friendly recommendations are always helpful. So I'm grateful to Justin Taylor for publishing this list used by his school, which will give us some material to take a look at and think about getting:
http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justintaylor/files/2012/05/Classical-School-reading-list-1.pdf

Eternal life

Recent I read NT Wright's "The Resurrection of the Son of God".

I am far from being an uncritical observer of Wright. Several of his positions are deeply worrying. I remain convinced that his position on justification is, if and when pressed to its inherent conclusions, ultimately destructive of the gospel itself.

Nevertheless, this book is both orthodox (barring the implications of various incidental comments along the way, which sadly repeatedly indicate a rejection of Biblical inerrancy - though Wright mostly disguises this under the cover of performing a "historical" investigation) and thrilling. If I am a churl, then it will only reflect on me and not on this book. The book is brilliant and inspirational; it takes on the critics of the orthodox doctrine head-on, and dismantles their every last hide-out. Either Christ departed bodily from his grave in a transformed resurrection life and the implications are that he is the world's one true Lord - or there is some other theory which in 2000 years has not been hit upon; because all the ones that have have fallen far short of explaining the facts we know.

Now to the point of this post.

One suggestion it contains is as follows: when we read the words "eternal life" in the New Testament, we should not read them as the Western church does today. That is, we should not think primarily of "life (or even, existence) that does not end". That is to read it quantitatively. Rather, we should read it qualitatively.

"Eternal life", within the Jewish world view, means "the life of the age to come; the heavenly life; the quality of life experienced by those who are the children of God and empowered by his Spirit". It goes on forever, of course - but that's a corollary of its nature, not the heart of it.

When Jesus promises us "eternal life", he is promising us something that comes down from heaven and reveals to us the heavenly glory, and transforms us according to its own nature. To many Western ears, "eternal life" means "what we now have but without ending", which may not necessarily be good news. Banal TV! Annoying family members! Corrupt politicians! Laziness and incompetence... forever! Erm... what were the other options again?

"Eternal life" means that we are part of God's purposes for his creation. We are part of the age to come and can now taste and will then feast on its glories. The Messianic age has been inaugurated, and we get to partake in its wonders. Jesus is the eternal life; he came down from heaven to earth. And he now offers that life to us to partake in to as we take part in the transformation of all things according to his heavenly purposes.

The Binding of the Blade

After finishing Narnia again, I began reading to my children the "Binding of the Blade" series.

Brilliant; absolutely brilliant. We're presently in the second half of book 2. I can't understand why we'd never heard of it (we found it in the ACTS bookshop in Nairobi). A great story, and a well executed echo of that awesome story of all stories that, in our house, has both reader and hearers eagerly waiting for the next chapter...

So dear reader, I do my duty by pointing you to: http://www.bindingoftheblade.com

World Magazine's "Books of the Year"

World Magazine, a large US evangelical magazine, chose two "books of 2011". One of them was the US edition of "Should Christians Embrace Evolution?", published by P & R (Presbyterian & Reformed Publishing Company). Praise the Lord!

My wife has obviously been living with a logician too long; she points out that I can't rationally derive too much from this... "this means at least they thought your chapter didn't wreck it" ... :-)

Here's the link: http://www.worldmag.com/articles/18207

Amazon US link: http://www.amazon.com/Should-Christians-Embrace-Evolution-Scientific/dp/1596382309
UK website link (which has a link on to Amazon UK): http://www.shouldchristiansembraceevolution.com

Total Forgiveness?

I've been readiing Dr. Ted Williams' "Christ or Therapy - For Depression and Life's Troubles"; a very helpful, easy to read book.

One of its insightful analyses is of the teaching of "Total Forgiveness"; the idea that the Christian should forgive everyone, unconditionally, and that this is the path to inner peace.

Williams shows how this idea in its contemporary form was unknown to previous generations of Christians, and is a significant corruption of the Christian doctrine of forgiveness, brought in through humanists via the secular counselling movement. Its major defects are:

• Authentic Christian forgiveness is based on real dealing with sin, and achieving reconciliation between the offender and the wronged party. "Total forgiveness" is based upon the wronged party granting a forgiveness within themselves - a forgiveness which is not usually communicated to the wrong-doer (and the wrong-doer may not agree that it was needed), and which is not based upon any actual dealing with the evil committed.
  
• Christian forgiveness aims for objective righteousness in God's world. "Total forgiveness" aims at the therapeutic healing of the wronged party, to give them inner peace, and is thus essentially a selfish enterprise.
• These things being so, the "wronged party" self-identifies; they deal only with their counsellor, who takes their word for it that they are wronged and then deals with their feelings; in an authentic Christian process, when necessary credible judges are brought in to give their opinion based upon Scripture.
• Christian forgiveness is ultimately based on the principle of atonement, and is not received unconditionally but rather when repentance has been credibly manifested. "Total forgiveness" is based upon nothing; righteousness is simply cancelled. Thus, "Total Forgiveness" promotes a sub-Christian view of God's character.

Some Christian "Total Forgiveness" advocates also add rank blasphemy to their teachings; e.g. R T Kendall's teaching that it is necessary for us to forgive God! As Williams says, the idea that a fallen creature can imagine that he needs to forgive God beggars belief.

The Bible forbids Christians to hold grudges, to be bitter or otherwise hold on to wrongs. It commands us to hand over our wrongs to God, and to entrust ourselves to him and his righteous judgments in due time, in all humility knowing that we ourselves are sinners. We are to stand ready to forgive when repentence is credibly shown, and at that time to deny it to nobody. But "Total Forgiveness" is not a Biblical concept, but a humanistic one which - as humanism does - is ultimately an anti-Christian attack on the doctrine of God and his righteousness.

American edition of "Should Christians Embrace Evolution?"

Presbyterian & Reformed publishing company are publishing an edition of "Should Christians Embrace Evolution?" (to which I contributed a chapter) for the American market next month - and it's available for pre-order from Amazon.com already: http://www.amazon.com/Should-Christians-Embrace-Evolution-Scientific/dp/1596382309

Free online creationist books

Creation Ministries International are giving free access to online versions of seven of their most popular books, here.

Free John Piper book on marriage

I dwell in a bit of a back-woods Internet-wise. By which I mean, I don't go out browsing much. So apologies if this is old hat. But, here's a freely downloadable John Piper book on marriage: http://www.desiringgod.org/ResourceLibrary/TopicIndex/45_Marriage/3338_This_Momentary_Marriage/

IVP's "Should Christians Embrace Evolution?" Reviewed

As author of one of the chapters in IVP's new book, "Should Christians Embrace Evolution?", I did receive an early draft of all the other chapters. But I did not make time to read many of them.

Now I've finally had the finished work in my hands for a few weeks. I may be biased, but I believe it is an extremely impressive and important book. I've already seen evidence that it has raised questions for people in circles where there had been little serious questionning of Darwinism before.

I want to encourage all my blog readers to read it and recommend it to others - whether you agree or disagree. I don't know of another work on the market like it. It's scholarly and thorough, with each chapter being written by an authoritative guide to their subject. This is the most substantial contemporary case put "on the table" by Darwin nay-sayers and essential to understanding the present state of debate. It is not a single author trying to cover many fields - each chapter is from an expert on their topic. To the end of persuading you to buy and read it, I'm going to briefly blog my way through the book to give a flavour of what's in there.

Today we'll just do the preliminaries. IVP have obviously shared this view of the importance of the book, and once you open the inside cover you'll find a raft of recommendations. An Anglican Bishop, a Bible college principal, professors of physics, philosophy, theology, law, humanities, mathematics and information science and a head of educational services for Scotland - it's a wide range. There's a common thread running through the responses - this book contains a serious and (for most of the recommenders) convincing Biblical and scientific challenge to "theistic evolution". The list of contributors and their bios follows. A similarly wide-ranging crew - four professors, a senior Cambridge research scientist, pastors and Bible college teachers, a denominational chariman of apologetics, a theological advisor to UCCF. Baptists, Church of Scotland, Presbyterian, Anglican, cessationists, charismatics - and an agnostic! PhDs in theology, environmental science, biology, aeronautics, medicine and chemistry. The charge made by many Darwinists is that only the ignorant doubt Darwinism. That charge itself is ignorant!

The foreword is from Professor Wayne Grudem, research professor of theology and Biblical studies in Phoenix, Arizona and author of a widely used Systematic Theology textbook. His own conclusion is: "I was previously aware that theistic evolution had serious difficulties, but I am now more firmly convinced thann ever that it is impossible to believe consistently in both the truthfulness of the Bible and Darwinian evolution. We have to choose one or the other." That's the case that the book will make.

The 3-page preface comes from co-ordinating editor Phil Hills, a pastor of 23 years. Its purpose is to set the background for the book. In recent years, the "New Atheists" have been making the charge that Christianity and science are fundamentally incompatible - and Darwinism has been their main battering ram. Many Christians have responded by trying to argue that Darwinism and the Bible can be made to agree, and have joined the "New Atheists" in the same strident demands that those who doubt Darwinism give up the fight and concede its truthfulness - even going so far as to treat those who don't as embarassments to the cause. The theology of these "theistic evolutionists", though, is novel and re-engineers key Biblical doctrines. Neither is the scientific case as strong as the rhetoric would make out. The purpose of this book is to set out the case that it is definitely not necessary, or even desirable, for a Christian to embrace Darwinian evolution, whether philosophically, Biblically or scientifically. Each chapter will make a strong case that on the issue at stake, a traditional Christian position holds more water than the new theology of the Christian Darwinists, and in particular its most recent prominent respresentative, Dr. Denis Alexander of Cambridge (via his book, "Creation or Evolution - do we have to choose?").

So much for the preliminaries. Next time on to the meat. Here's the chapter list:

1. Evolution and the Church - Alistair Donald
2. The language of Genesis - Alistair McKitterick
3. Adam and Eve - Michael Reeves
4. The fall and death - Greg Haslam
5. Creation, redemption and eschatology - David Anderson
6. The nature and character of God - Andrew Sibley
7. Faith and creation - R. T. Kendall
8. Towards a science worthy of creatures in imago Dei - Steve Fuller
9. Interpretation of scientific evidence:
A. Homology - Norman Nevin
B. The nature of the fossil record - Norman Nevin
C. Chromosomal fusion and common ancestry - Geoff Barnard
D. Information and thermodynamics - Andy McIntosh
10. Does the genome provide evidence for common ancestry? - Geoff Barnard
11. The origin of life: scientists play dice - John Walton
Conclusion: Should Christians embrace evolution? - Phil Hills and Norman Nevin

Throwing down the gauntlet to Dr. Denis Alexander

Regular readers will know that in the last year and a bit I've written a full-length response to Dr. Denis Alexander's insistence that evangelicals must make their peace with Darwinism. That response, tidied-up is itself now available as a book. I also contributed a chapter to the (IMO, devastating) IVP-published response, Should Christians Embrace Evolution?

Well, today I received something on the latter an editor at IVP. Dr. Alexander has finished reading it, and wants to contact the authors. He says that he does not have the inclination or the time to respond to the book as such, but just wants to alert us of a few factual points for correction. Hence he wanted to know our e-mail addresses.

Dr. Alexander has a pattern of avoiding meaningful interaction with people who disagree with him, so I didn't want to let this pass. Here's the reply I e-mailed to him and the other IVP authors, and I await his response. I've cut the quote referred to in the first paragraph as that was Dr. Alexander's own e-mail and I haven't asked him permission to publish it. (It's my own response; not all the authors are young-earth creationists as I am).

Hi Dr. Alexander,

I'm glad you've read the book and want to talk about it. For my part (this is referring to what's quoted below), I would much rather you would find both the time and the inclination to make a response on the substance of it and not just have a little side-discussion about a few points here and there. I read your book and noted that the interaction with genuine present-day creationists and their writings was basically zero - it was all "some Christians believe" but these "some Christians" normally only had a limited likeness to the positions of actual mainstream Darwin nay-sayers. (Henry Morris got a couple of footnotes: living representatives of creationism as it existed in 2008 got none). Yet at the end of the book there was a stinging criticism of creationists as time-wasters who don't spend enough time dealing with the real problems in the world. The impression was that in your book you had actually refuted year-2008 creationism and not a "some Christians say", "Here's what I've heard some folk say as I've been on my travels" folk-creationism caricature. You can't have your cake and eat it - either interact with us and then say you've done so, or don't interact and then don't claim afterwards that you did.

You've had time in 2009 to do a tremendously large amount of pro-Darwin activity, so I find it hard to stomach the idea that you don't have time to interact in a deep way with the main response to your position that's on the table. If we're going to have this discussion, let's have it properly or not at all. You've written that you're concerned science should be done properly - well, let's do theology (what my chapter was about) properly too. Let's not just quibble about minors around the edge. If your concern is that a private discussion wouldn't be as effective as all the public activity that's keeping you busy then that's fine - let's have it in public. I think my position stands up to maximum robust public scrutiny and am sure you feel the same about yours. So what have you got to lose by taking the time to do it properly? I have a
blog and your institute has a website - anything you write to me or in the other direction I'd suggest the other person gets full rights to publish (in full, unedited) on our own websites. Then perhaps that'll sidestep your concern, if that is what you're thinking. Over to you!

(Obviously I'm just speaking for myself here, not any of the other authors).

God bless,
David

Should Christians Embrace Evolution?

The new book has a very nice and comprehensive website. The publisher is obviously taking it very seriously, which I think is absolutely right. I had no idea there was a website until someone on a mailing list told me today. No need for me to say any more - it's all here:

http://www.shouldchristiansembraceevolution.com

New Book: Should Christians Embrace Evolution?

In this "Darwin year", we've been exposed to a glut of pro-evolution propaganda from a wide variety of sources. It's not unexpected that the "New Atheist" crowd should rely heavily on Darwin for their goals. What is grievously sad is to see the energetic efforts from groups within evangelical Christianity to promote a pro-Darwin agenda. The motivation and message seems to be that standing up for the Christian church's historic belief in a divine creation ex nihilo (out of nothing) that was accomplished by a supernatural divine word in the comparatively recent past is no longer credible. We don't want to look silly when Professor Dawkins pokes fun at us! These Christian apologists tell us that Darwinism has no theological implications, and can be reconciled with the book of Genesis easily.

On that particular matter, though, the "New Atheists" are right. The attempt to shoe-horn macro-evolution into the Bible, and the idea that where we came from has no meaning, is intellectual suicide. The methods of Bible interpretation used turn the Bible into a nose of wax that can be shaped to say anything you please. That really does make us look silly.

Neither is the effort to make peace with Darwin scientifically necessary. We live in times when Darwin's knowledge of biology has been vastly superceded. The fossil record and modern genetics falsify Darwin's theory again and again. Darwinism retains its place in the academy only because of the unthinkable nature of the alternative to the modern secular mind. To jump on this horse now, when the simplest analysis can show you that it's got three broken legs and has already been shot, is not a good move. And certainly not a necessary one!

And now for the good news. Here's the intellectual ammunition, Biblical, theological and scientific, to show you why you can answer the question "Should Christians Embrace Evolution" with a decisive "No!". Here's the book for the layman which explains the issues in a way that is careful easy to follow, and that covers all the bases.

Published by Intervarsity Press and edited by Professor Norman C. Nevin - an international expert in genetics - the editors include theologians and scientists; including on the scientific side leading experts and PhDs in genetics, immunology, thermodynamics, chemistry and geology (including four professors and a senior research fellow). The theological side is no less weighty, with chapters from writers who hold positions in UCCF, denominational apologetics committees, Bible colleges and very well known pastors. And (drum roll) your friend in the Rift Valley. Oh yes!

The preface says,

In the face of the new atheists’ claim that evolution has rendered faith utterly redundant there is a flood tide arising that demands that Christians must embrace evolution or acknowledge that they are opposed to science. This book believes that this is a false premise. It is written to set out a clear theological framework on the relevant issues and to confront the questions that this gives rise to. It is written with a compelling conviction that science and faith are not in opposition. It is written by theologians who are committed to the authority of Scripture and to the exercise of careful exegesis. It is written by scientists who are fully persuaded of the importance of rigorous scientific investigation but who are dissatisfied with the arbitrary exclusion of possible conclusions and the failure to follow the evidence wherever it leads. This is not written for a select readership that already has expert knowledge of the subjects. It is written for ordinary men and women, who have the capacity to weigh the information, seek further clarification and draw their own conclusions.

It's on pre-order at Amazon now, with a pre-order discount... go get it!

Who Made God?

This book answering the "New Atheists" looks like one that stands out from the crowd. There's a website too: http://www.whomadegod.org

Evolution, natural evil and the theodicy question (Creation or evolution, chapter 13)

In this chapter, DA continues to address the question of how to integrate on the one hand the account of history and the development of life given by Darwinism, and on the other a Biblical theology. This especially concerns questions over the Fall, Adam and Eve, and the existence of suffering and pain (so-called "natural" evil as opposed to "moral" evil). This chapter particularly focuses on the latter set of issues. DA introduces it this way, though the chapter itself actually ranges over a much broader range of territory:

"The question before us is how a good God could choose to bring about all of biological diversity, including us, by such a long and wasteful process which involves so much death and suffering." (p277)

Much of that ranging seemed to this reviewer to not be especially relevant, but other material that DA found interesting, wanted to get in the book, and shoved in in various digressions in this chapter as the best place. Perhaps there are connections that evaded me. DA's basic answer to the question is one that exists in perfect harmony and continuity with the trajectory traced out in the previous few chapters. The Darwinian account of the earth's history is not up for critique or question; the Bible will not be used to examine whether there are any faults in what contemporary secular scientists say about the past. Rather, this will all be taken as certain truth, and what will be done is to search out for a theological justification by which the general themes of the Bible can be harmonised with it.

Such a harmony, as we've already seen in the discussions of the Fall, requires that pain and suffering cannot be seen as unnatural intruders into God's "very good" creation, coming because of Adam's sin. No - such an approach irreparably contradicts Darwinian dogma, because DA has already explained that humans and such unpleasant experiences had been around for many aeons before Adam was ever born to his father and mother. It's instructive to take a step back and observe how little effort - none - DA takes to actually derive his theodicy from the pages of Scripture. These questions are not answered by any kind of inductive study of Scripture, but by an exploration of the speculations of various non-evangelical theologians, of whom the most familiar to most readers will be John Hick, the pluralist universalist. This is not unexpected; beginning with an evolutionary framework as the starting point instead of Scripture, it's only really going to be such theologians who are going to have a compatible framework to help you.

The harmony itself, then, amounts to this: biology is a package deal, carbon-based life cannot be created without the accompanying down-sides, and who are we to label the natural evils that we see with such subjective labels as "wasteful" or "evil" when God has seen fit to use them as part of the process which brings about all the good and enjoyable things that we can witness and experience? In DA's solution to "the problem of evil", then, the problem is not so much as solved as defined out of existence, with various exceptional caveats in the particular case of suffering humans. Here are some representative quotes:

"Biology is a package deal. Once we have carbon, phosphorus, oxygen, nitrogen and the other key elements for life ... virtually any plus that we care to mention .... is going to have an inevitable minus." (p279)

"As noted in previous chapters, life, at least carbon-based life of the kind with which we are familiar [reviewer: i.e. including humanity], is impossible without death." (p279)

"... without genetic variation between us all, we would all be clonal, looking identical. But it is that same genetic variation which affects our susceptibility to certain diseases, and which causes genetics diseases or cancers - necessary costs of living in a carbon-based world." (p280)

"It is a world in which moral and spiritual growth is made possible - more like a Boot Camp than a Holiday Camp. No pain, no gain." (p288)

DA's answer, then, is that the "problem", if it is one, is essential. It's like 2+2=4, or requiring that squares have right angles. God himself couldn't do it another way. If you want life in anything like the present form, then this is the only way to have it. Throughout the chapter, the answer is consistent - it's not because of sin. Human wickedness plays no real part in the evil of this world - don't say, "fallen world", because the Fall is to do with unseen, inner, spiritual reality - relationship with God - not to do with the dust and dirt of everyday life.

DA's dualism becomes Gnostic when he relates this to the new heavens and the new earth - the age to come. That will, he allows, be one free of such pain and suffering, a different order entirely. As remarked before, what this means is that salvation is not to be conceived of in terms of an originally good created order which was ruined through sin then being redeemed and glorified through the work of Christ - rather, Christ liberates us from an order that was originally and essentially unpleasant, to something better. We're freed from the prison of the pains of this life, into a better and ultimately disconnected order. Not creation restored, but creation replaced. This leaves us wondering (DA never even approaches this question) why Christ had to bring this new creation about in such a flesh-and-blood way. He came as a carbon-based life-form, so to speak, and suffered in the flesh. He underwent physical death, in order to bring in the new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17-21). But why? Why was physical incarnation, physical suffering and physical death needed, when the physical suffering and natural evil has nothing real to do with sin, the Fall and the spiritual world, or even in the case of physical pain is actually something necessary and good?

Ultimately, this chapter has no real relationship to a Bible-based theology. It scrapes around from what this or that Princeton University scholar had to say that can be made to fit into an evolutionary worldview. At best it has some helpful thoughts that could be developed in a Scriptural way. At worst, it undercuts the Bible's own historical narrative and removes the foundation of the gospel, replacing evangelical religion with the ancient and disastrous Gnostic heresy.

Evolution and the Fall (Creation or evolution - do we have to choose? Chapter 12)

We can do this the long way or the short way, and for once I think we'll choose the latter. This chapter (which really is a continuation of the previous, "Evolution and the Biblical understanding of death"), has really only one claim. That claim is explained from a variety of points of view and applied to different situations, and discussed in relationship to different Biblical texts; but it is a single claim. The claim is that the Fall was an event that no physical effect upon humanity or the world. It was a spiritual event, not a physical one. It made no difference to the phenomena of pain, sickness, suffering or death, all of which existed before and continued afterwards, both for mice and men.

Thus, if you only have time to read one chapter in order to see how a theistic evolutionary position works out when applied to particular issues, this is a good one. This is the chapter to read if you want to see how far from orthodox evangelical theology you have to depart in order to accommodate Darwinism within one's overall scheme.

DA achieves these conclusions mostly by continuing to interpret Genesis overall as a "theological and figurative" (by which he means, not essentially historical) narrative, and by interpreting other relevant Biblical passages through the false dichotomy of "spiritual death" versus "physical death". This is carried on even when dealing with passages such as 1 Corinthians 15, where the physical resurrection from physical death is stage front and centre - even then, it never seems to really dawn on DA to see that this dualistic separation is fundamentally un- and anti-biblical. The exegesis is also characterised by a liberal dose of the "this passage is difficult, therefore we don't know for certain what it means, therefore it can't be held to mean the thing I don't want it to mean" interpretative method, known in more polemical parlance as "blowing smoke" or "hand-waving". Does Romans 8 state that the created order itself is in bondage to decay because of man's sin? Ah, but this "passage has kept commentators and PhD theology students happily busy for centuries!", so "we cannot be too dogmatic about the interpretation". And so on and so forth. Same picture as we've seen throughout the book - what Darwinism speculates must be treated as proven scientific truth, whose accuracy is established by the certainty of the scientific method... what the Bible says is difficult and must not be treated with dogmatism, and if we can find a way of reading it that doesn't contradict the theory of evolution, we should allow that as a possible interpretation.

What then is the Fall? It's a purely spiritual event. Friendship with God was offered to a select family of Neolithic farmers in the east (whilst, remember, many other humans were living in other parts of the world, including the Australian Aborigines who aren't descended from Adam). They rejected it, rebelling against God, losing the life he offered. This makes the Fall basically a loss of something that humanity never had. It bumbled along for many tens of thousands of years (according to DA, as explained in the previous chapter) without knowing God... that knowledge was eventually offered to one particular couple, who rejected it - which, unless my logic circuits have been fried, basically means that "the Fall" means that nothing happened - things went on as they were before.

DA's treatment of pain is a massive departure from evangelical orthodoxy. Biology is a package deal; you can't have all the good things in there without the bad things, and it's pain and death that grease the skids of the evolutionary machine and make all our pleasures possible. If you think pain is an evil intruder, you've been reading Milton's "Paradise Lost", instead of the Bible. It's not possible to be a sentient being without pain. The implication of this is that God is not the master of creation who determined its modes of operation, but is a prisoner to its limited possibilities - apparently not even he could have designed a system where humans could experience pleasure without experiencing pain; this is simply logically impossible, like squaring the circle or making two and two come to five. DA then gets himself into something of a pickle when he concedes that the future kingdom of God will be without pain or suffering - because then it seems that God could in fact do such a thing, and that sentient beings can exist without pain... but DA either never realises, or simply decides to pretend not to notice, this glaring contradiction. (Or perhaps the future creation is utterly ethereal and immaterial - angels floating around with harps like those Daily Mail cartoons after all). DA concludes that the healing ministry of Jesus was not to do with him restoring a fallen creation, but simply pointing the way to a new one. This means that redemption is not, contrary to orthodox Christianity, creation restored and perfected; it is creation replaced. This is not evangelical theology. It is, though, what you get when you insist on the truth of Darwinism, and from that point of view I am glad for DA making clear what the extent of the theological pay-load is if you ever feel tempted to do that.

Evolution and the Biblical understanding of death (Creation or evolution, chapter 11)

The next few chapters of the book are in my opinion particularly significant, and worth reading especially for any wavering creationist who wonders if he's making too much fuss over the origins issue. In these chapters, Dr. Alexander spells out the theological implications of his "evolutionary creationism" view. Accommodating one's interpretation of the Bible to Darwinism comes at a price, and in these chapters DA spells out just what that price is, with commendable candidness. From an orthodox evangelical point of view, the concessions that have to be made are much too great.

The organisation of the book could have done with a little more work in this bit, because in fact a significant part of the discussion is contained in the next chapter, "Evolution and the Fall". As "by one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin" (Romans 5:12), as God had promised (Genesis 2:17), you can't really discuss the Biblical doctrine of death without discussing the Fall. DA, though, does appear to think otherwise. As he presents these matters, this chapter is intended to be a "complete" (page 253) summary of the Bible's teaching on death, and the Fall is something that we can better understand after (not as part of) getting this "complete" understanding. This is not simply a matter of presentation. DA's doctrine of death and the Fall really does depend on this separation.

DA presents death in three parts - physical death, spiritual death, and the "second death". That in itself is OK - until you realise the hermetic sealing existing between the first and second of those (except in the case where God sends physical death as a particular judgment). That's how the Fall doesn't need to be discussed in this chapter at all - there is no reference whatsoever to Genesis 2-3 or to Romans 5 - because these two kinds of death are quite independent.

What, then, of physical death? First it's good to ask what Darwinian orthodoxy would require us to believe here, because if you've read this far in the book you'll know that that will be precisely what the Bible will end up being found to teach, or at least be "compatible" with. According to the long-ages dating DA adheres to, and the placing of the various evolutionary dates on that scale, anatomically modern, intelligent, cultured humans were around for plenty of time before Adam and Eve, who had human ancestors (though, DA adds, they would not have had any knowledge of God). Physical death is an essential part of the evolutionary engine, including in producing humanity. It cannot be an evil intruder, but has been the normal course of events for the 99.99(etc.)% of history before the Bible's timeline begins. What this means is, that you can't have the orthodox Darwinian scheme, and believe that death invaded the human race in a terrible way as a result of Adam eating the forbidden fruit.

So it is, then, that we find DA writing such heterodox untruths as "Nowhere in the Old Testament is there the slightest uggestion [sic] that the physical death of either animals or humans, after a reasonable span of years, is anything other than the normal pattern ordained by God for this earth" and "the Old Testament ideal is a long and useful life obeying God's will, followed by death." DA follows a consistent pattern throughout the book. He does not interpret Old Testament texts using the light of New Testament revelation; he instead follows the modernist error of treating them in isolation (though in this case I think even with that treatment you shouldn't go as far wrong as this). Hebrews 2:14-15 states that "Jesus... [came] that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; and deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage." What does this mean? Jesus destroyed death through his physical death. Death cannot be cut up into neat "physical" and "spiritual" portions in DA's fashion, and then the portions utterly divorced from each other - the apostles' inspired explanations forbid it. Distinguished, yes - separated and divorced, no. DA writes (page 245, emphases mine) "Although there are hints of the possibility of resurrection in the later books of the Old Testament, there is no developed resurrection teaching within the old covenant". Jesus, though, thought differently, and severely rebuked the Sadducees, who only believed the first five books of the Bible, for "erring", "not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God", for not understanding that the teaching of the resurrection was clearly stated in the second book of the Bible, in Exodus chapter 3 (Matthew 22:29-32).

DA emphasises the normality of death in the Old Testament, but because this is entirely without any discussion of the Fall - i.e. the event which brought death in - it's a totally out of context discussion. Yes, of course death is normal - that's because the first father of the human race rebelled against God, and we inherited his sin and punishment (Romans 5:12ff)! DA, though, manages to give a "complete" discussion of the Biblical doctrine of death without mentioning the fall, and ends up concluding - just as orthodox Darwinism required him to do - that death is totally natural, and part of God's design for life on this earth. In this context, it then makes no sense (though DA never addresses this tension - is he aware of it?) when DA proceeds to the New Testament to talk about liberation from death, and that "Physical death has no place in the fulfilled kingdom of God", quoting the verses about tears being wiped away, etc. (p249). He speaks of physical death being "an enemy to be overcome", but we have no idea how this can be seeing as it was perfectly natural and necessary for our upward progress out of the sludge. DA's answer seems to be that it's just by contrast with the wonderful kingdom of Jesus - such a glorious thing that it makes death seem dark by comparison. DA ends up with the answer that the reason for physical death is that it is necessary for us to inherit the kingdom of God via the resurrection bodies, which could not have been done otherwise - though DA then grants that in fact this is not necessary because those who are alive when Jesus returns will inherit the kingdom without physical death. Confused? He certainly is. (As someone with a systematic bent, this leaves me wondering what DA supposes would have happened to Adam if he had passed the test of the tree, and been admitted into life - would God have killed him anyway so that he could then have been resurrected?) What we have here in DA's theology is not the apostles showing how the Christ event fulfilled the Old Testament Scriptures. Rather, they rewrite them - death, which was nice and natural before, suddenly becomes an enemy because of newly revealed future resurrection which the Old Testament believer would never have known about. Having the New Testament rewrite the Old in this way instead of fulfilling it makes us feel sympathetic for the Jews who rejected Jesus - it seems that they were correct about him not being the promised Messiah of Scripture after all, and for teaching different truths to the ones they found in their Bibles!

DA's faithfulness to whatever most contemporary scientists think is most likely concerning the past is very admirable. The price, though, is a corresponding loss of faithfulness in believing what God has actually testified about the past, and a resulting mangling of the Bible that has to take place in order to bring these things into line. I am indeed grateful to Dr. Alexander for spelling out some of the implications for Christians who seek to fold evolution into their systems of belief. DA isn't one for compromising when it comes to doing that, and he shows us exactly what price you're going to have to pay if you're going to be consistent instead of picking and choosing the bits you like. I hope that discerning readers will read this section of the book and respond with a resounding "No thanks".

Who were Adam and Eve? Genesis and science in conversation (Creation or evolution, chapter 10)

This chapter continues and concludes the discussion of the question of how to identify Adam and Eve, begun in the previous. As with the previous chapter, the bigger issues are revealed in this chapter by taking a step back. It's amazing to see what DA is certain about, given how uncertain he is about many things in the Bible he isn't certain about. Ancient teeth fragments can be relied upon to reveal human evolution in dogmatic detail. Stone tools appeared 2.6 million years ago. We know who lived near Lake Turkana (not so far from here - another few hundred k's up north - a couple doing food relief from this town travelled there yesterday) 1.44 million years ago, and don't make the mistake of saying it was 1.43 or 1.45.

The chapter, then, starts with several pages of dogmatism about the evolutionary history of man and his various cousins, the gorillas , gibbons, chimpanzees and Great Uncle Archie's family of throwbacks. There's some discussion of genetics, the development of human culture and language, before focussing on the "Neolithic" era (10,000 BC onwards), as the ultimately most relevant to the identification of Adam and Eve. This all winds up to the conclusion, which ought to sound out the big warning bells for anyone whose evangelical instincts haven't been thoroughly labotimised by the 230-odd pages beforehand:

"It is against this cultural and historical background [reviewer: i.e. the history of humanity according to present Darwinian theory] that one needs to consider the early chapters of Genesis."

Did you get that? Perhaps you were one of those naive Bible believers who thought that God gave us Genesis as a true account of humanity's origins, so that by this divine yardstick you could measure, approve or reject all competing accounts. Perhaps you foolishly imagined that the Word of God gave you a cultural and hsitorical background against which to test theories from other areas of study, such as Darwinism. Simpleton! DA will put you right. The sure and certain revelation of Darwinism gives you the truth, and against this background you must read the Word of God. If you can't spot the theological down-grade by this stage of the book, you're not going to.

There's then a small aside whilst DA considers the question of whether humans are still evolving. I applaud him for including it, as many times in the book he simply skirts around relevant issues. In DA's theology, creation is via gradual processes which are part of the world today as much as they are the past. This does raise as a natural question - so, are human beings still developing upwards, and shall we in future be something else? Did Jesus die for the coming homo futuris as well as the present homo sapiens? Well, DA poses the question but his answer is a pot of warm slop. Holding to Darwinian orthodoxy, he doesn't deny any of the premises, but falls back on giving three reasons why future human evolution (though theoretically possible), is unlikely in practice. What it boils down to is that in the modern world we don't get the isolated populations where natural selection can kill off the weak before they pass on their faulty genes. I think DA's answer needs to be better informed by the realities of present anthropology, because what he says isn't true. It's widely reported in the news in recent months (following a kind of contact made with an isolated tribe in the Amazon rainforest) that there are still believed to be around 100 tribes in the world that have no contact with the rest of humanity or with modern life. So DA needs to cook up a better answer than this one. (Did anyone see Steve Jones' answer to the same question in the Telegraph recently? Equally preposterous!).

This then leaves us with the synthesis of all the material in the preceeding 40+ pages on the Adam/Eve question. After all this, just who were they?

DA presents us with five possible "models", different ways in which Christians have answered the question. These range right from saying that Genesis is thoroughly mythological, just a story to teach timeless truths, to the young-earth creationist (YEC) position that Adam and Eve were created immediately out of the ground on the sixth day. You can guess which model DA is going to favour and which he holds in utter contempt by the number of words he gives in describing each: in turn models A, B, C, D and E get 1/3 of a page, 1/2 a page, 3 pages, 1/3 of a page, and 1 sentence. Yup, model E is the YEC position (D is old earth / episodic creationism), and as DA wants to keep his good standing in the academic community its necessary to make clear he sees it as beneath his contempt to discuss, so just 1 sentence it is. DA sees all these models as possible within a Biblical framework, which is a revelation in itself about DA's approach to Scripture, though consistent with all we've seen so far. Whether you take an out-and-out liberal position and assign the foundational historical narratives of Scripture to the wastebin of utter myth, or whether you think that when God says he made Adam directly from the earth he really means it, is a matter of comparative indifference, though DA has a preference. After this, models D and E simply get tossed into the wastebin, because they are incompatible with the theory of human evolution, and that, to DA, is all that needs to be said to tell you they must be false.

That preference is model C, which recognises that the rest of Scripture does treat Adam and Eve as real historical individuals (not generic humanity, or "everyman"). Moreover, it recognises that this is going to be "perhaps" somewhere around 6-8,000 years ago - here we get the only fleeting mention that the Bible (e.g. Genesis 5) contains detailed genealogies, a point unexcusably absent when DA is discussing what literary genre the Genesis accounts are. This dating would make them (reading Genesis, as we have been told we must, against the backdrop of the certainities of contemporary Darwinian accounts) Neolithic farmers living somewhere in the east.

This identification does then pose a number of theological problems if you want to keep carrying your membership card for the club of Darwinian orthodoxy, such as:

• Mmmm, doesn't that mean that far from being the first two humans, there were actually many thousands of others around at the time?
• And those others... they will have already developed human language, culture, art and religious rituals, according to contemporary archaelogical and anthropological thinking.
  
• So how can Adam be the father of the human race, and Eve the mother of all the living (Genesis 3:20)? What does this mean for the doctrine of original sin?
  
• And this means that Adam had human ancestors (following the grunting gorillas) - so what of the genealogy of Luke, which puts Adam at the head? (Luke 3). How can Paul call Adam the "first man" (1 Corinthians 15:45)?
  

What we see as DA looks into some (but not all, particularly the interesting one about original sin - see Romans 5:12ff) of these questions is the same picture we've seen all the way along. His evolutionary orthodoxy holds absolutely firm - and the Bible becomes a nose of wax to be moulded as one pleases. He grants all these implications (lots of other humans, the human race is not all descended from Adam and Eve, Adam had human ancestors, etcetera), and then goes around to find some theological wheeze to still allow some kind of meaning to be put on the Bible's plain statements, and then he proclaims the resulting massacre of the sacred Word to be an elegant harmony of "science" (read: Darwinism) and "theology" (read: the Bible's history). Yuk.

The basic answer is that Adam was the first man to whom God started to reveal himself in a special way - the first man to come to a heightened awareness of God and his greatness, and to be invited into a saving relationship. What about the salvation, DA asks, of those who were before and scattered in other parts of the planet? We don't know, he answers, and should be humble. More pertinent would have been to ask, "saved from what - what does this concept mean in DA's alternative proto-history?" The picture DA gives us for Adam is basically that which holds for Abraham - a chosen family picked graciously out of a world of ignorance. What "graciously" could mean in a context where nobody else even has this mysterious awareness of God and hence none at all of his moral laws or commandments could mean, we are never told. The "salvation" DA has in mind seems to be very amenable to contemporary thinking - a kind of "God became my special friend", rather than the deliverance from holy wrath against wilful covenant-breakers which is actually the story of Scripture.

This leaves us wondering what the fall could mean. If life had gone on for gazillions of years, and intelligent humanity for tens of thousands, with no knowledge of God (how, from Romans 1:18ff, is that possible?), and God decides now to enlighten a couple of farmers a little, if they say "no thanks" what kind of fall is that - to just continue as you were before? How to understand death, the fall and evil within this bizarre framework are the subjects of the next three chapters. But perhaps I can urge my readers... it really is so much simpler just to believe the Bible as it really is than go into this insanity.

Who were Adam and Eve? - The background (Creation or evolution, chapter 9)

As I read Dr. Alexander's book, my main fear ironically isn't that it'll persuade Christians to embrace Darwinism. What this book will actually do to Christians who really take it to heart is much worse. The worse thing is that it might lead them into a much more far-reaching theological downgrade, through the methods of Bible interpretation that Dr. Alexander uses. As with many "bad books", the badness isn't ultimately in the questionable and obviously controversial conclusions (though it is). It's in the questionable methods of Bible interpretation used to reach them; methods which the author doesn't tell you are questionable or controversial, but simply presents as if they were quite normal and the kind of thing we should all do without hesitation.

The chapter starts, as a previous one did, with a somewhat limited disclaimer. DA protests that we must start with the biblical text if we are to ask about Adam and Eve, not to start with evolution and then try to retro-fit it. So far, so good, but it'll soon become apparent that there's going to be a gallactic mile of wiggle room such that the end result is happily (for DA) the same as if he'd done the latter. He proceeds to state that we should "listen to what the Bible has to say and then see whether there are any interesting resonances with the evolutionary account." No. That statement is a classic statement of the "two books" approach DA consistently follows: the Bible is the book of theological meaning, science (and eventually Darwinism) is the book of scientific truth, and each must be listened to and obeyed. This is not evangelical hermeneutics. The authentic Christian approach to the Bible is to give it an unrivalled place of supreme authority and absolute truth, so that it dictates the parameters which any other supposed sources of truth must adhere too. The Bible is certain and non-negotiable; other sources of truth are uncertain, must fit within the parameters of Scripture and be believed with appropriate tentativeness.

To DA, Genesis is not only primarily theological in intent, but basically exclusively so, and so he tells us that as he reads it he will approach it looking for theological and figurative aspects (verse 191). This is putting the cart before the horse. The fruits of the theological instruction arise from the historical reality of what is described. To change analogy, DA wants to have the fruits of the tree after he's plucked up the roots. That's not evangelical theology; it's classical liberalism. Liberal theologians decided to take the historical narratives of the Bible, strip them of their roots in the real world of time and space, and keep the results for their ethical teaching. The liberals concentrated most of their fire-power on the gospels and particularly the miracles of Jesus in this because for them the mythological status of Genesis was already beyond question. They were at least consistent in treating the gospels in the same way as Genesis. DA's hermeneutic needs to be seen for what it is - exactly the same de-historicising hermeneutic. Should it be acceptable for evangelicals to do to Genesis, the Bible's foundational book, what we absolutely reprobate and call heretical when we see others doing it to other historical narratives in the Bible?

The rotten fruits of DA's down-grading approach to Scripture become clear as the chapter proceeds. It's a chapter of two parts (and only begins to discuss the question of Adam and Eve - the next chapter continues). The first half looks at what the Bible says; the second half examines the evolutionary account. The first half is full of uncertainty and doubt. This passage is difficult. This portion admits of many interpretations. The commentaries suggest many possibilities here. It is not certain what this means. We cannot base any firm conclusions on this, and so on and so forth. Then we get to the second half of the chapter to learn what contemporary evolutionary biologists says about man's origins, and it's a totally different story. Here are results about which we can be as certain as about anything. This is an assured and definite truth. There is no real doubt about this to anyone in the field, etcetera, etcetera. It's as if I'd wandered into a gathering of the village atheists - the "religious" source of truth is by nature uncertain, doubtful, speculative... but here's science, which tells us results which are guaranteed in their infallibility because they are derived from the fail-safe scientific method, praise be to Richard Dawkins, Hallelu-Hitchens and Amen! But please, really... if DA is really an evangelical by consistent practice and not just in profession, then which of the two, contemporary science and Scripture, should we keep being told is infallible and certain, and which of the two should he keep emphasising is tentative and unsure?

Why is humanity's descent from the apes so certain? DA is consistent in relying on a single argument that he's outlined earlier in the book, though here he goes into more detail (and the man's certainly very gifted in explaining unfamiliar scientific concepts, provided you at least have some background). It's the argument that the human genome is full of what are basically relics from the past - gene sequences that are no longer active, or have been corrupted in some way. His argument is then theological - this really looks like common descent, and therefore it must be, because otherwise God would be playing games with us by deceiving us. As before, though, DA doesn't compare his scenario to the alternative creationist paradigm, but simply asserts that the particular account he's given fits really well and that there's no alternative (we'll have to take his word for it), therefore it must be true. Real life creationists, though, as opposed to the "some Christians say..." straw-men who roam through the pages of this book, have no problem in accommodating the concept of many inactive genes in the human genome. We believe in the fall - a fall which had a real and very serious effect on humanity at very many levels. Man became subject to all kinds of illnesses, sicknesses and even death. As there is no real separation between the theology and the real-world biology, what that would mean among other things for the genes that we would expect to find we lost abilities in our genomes, which is just what DA skilfully explains. DA relies heavily on what he says are identical losses of functionality in humans and some of their supposed evolutionary cousins. Again, though, there are other possibilities. These gene sequences may not be as useless as presently thought - future science may discover a function we do not presently know, making DA's argument a Darwin-of-the-gaps one. Or, the common Designer, having designed man and physically similar beings using common design, may have at the fall made common changes in the genomes. DA's argument that common gene sequences must mean common ancestry (as opposed to common design, a thesis he never mentions), is an empty assertion.

DA's down-grading approach to Scripture is nowhere illustrated more clearly than in the case of his explanations of what the Genesis account says about Eve. Eve was made out of Adam's side whilst Adam was in a deep sleep (Genesis 2:21). DA explains all of this, goes on to explain the significance of this for the doctrine of marriage... and then goes on further to assert that therefore since the important implication is the doctrine of marriage, we thus should not insist that Eve was actually made out of Adam's side after all. With the skill of the clever rhetorician he is, he seeks to make this sound as ridiculous as possible: "Now if we take this ... as referring to some early Near Eastern operation during which God both provides the anaesthetic and does the surgical manipulation of a male rib to generate a woman, then we will have missed the point of the text by reading it through modernist spectacles. No, if we go down that route then we are in real danger of abusing the text, which is about the foundations of marriage." DA, though, does not trouble himself to investigate the New Testament texts where the writers do, with all seriousness, interpret the details of Adam and Eve as real historical phenomena and not just nice literary teaching aids (e.g. 1 Timothy 2:13 - Eve being formed after Adam, or 2 Corinthians 11:3 - Eve really was deceived by a talking snake!). The irony is that it is DA's own non-apostolic interpretation which is classic modernism. He reads Genesis 2, scoffs at the idea of a talking snake or a woman being formed out of a sleeping man's rib, and concludes like a good rationalist that it cannot really mean that, and therefore we are just intended to extract the theological payload from the passage and leave the vessel that was used to teach that payload in the realms of mythology where it belongs. Similar is his treatment of the name given to Eve, the "mother of all the living" (Genesis 3:20). This disagrees with Darwinian orthodoxy, and hence cannot be literally true, so DA re-interprets it to say that it might mean that she was the mother of the family of faith - later in the book DA will admit that Aborigines cannot, if Darwinism is true, be descended from Eve, which leaves some interesting implications...

Hence it's no surprise to find that DA entirely skips over any discussion of Genesis 5, with its very down-to-earth genealogy, with a long list of dates and names, of Adam down to Noah. It's hard to extract too much theological significance from "And Enos lived ninety years, and begat Cainan", unless in fact Enos living 90 years and begetting Cainan, i.e. the literal history, is itself the theological significance. That is how it is, because the Bible writer is tracing out the line which eventually leads to Abraham, David and Jesus the Messiah - the line focussed on in 1 Chronices 1, Matthew 1 and Luke 3. The real-world actual-historical nature of the text is not an optional extra that we can throw away, because the Saviour we have is a real-world flesh-and-blood one. Genesis finds a fundamental part of its significance in being his history. The Bible does not leave the question "who were Adam and Eve?" hanging in the air. It gives us a very full and precise account, complete with detailed genealogies which eventually go right from Adam to Christ. God promised at the fall that there would be a seed of the woman who would conquer the serpent (Genesis 3:15). Jesus is that unique man, and so the Bible is very careful to demonstrate very precisely how he fulfilled that promise, giving us his line and the dates going right back to the beginning, so that we might know him for who he is. The ultimate fact in Darwinian manglings of Genesis is that it's not just a side-story in the Bible that they're playing games with - it's the foundation of the whole lot.

Creation or Evolution - "Evolutionary Creationism" (Chapter 8)

We're now in the middle of the book, and having done all the spade work DA now summarises his main idea, which he calls "evolutionary creationism", but which is normally called "theistic evolution", i.e., the Darwinian process is God's chosen method for the creation of the world. After this chapter DA will go on to look at some particular areas of interest or difficulty in more detail, in particular how this thesis deals with various theological questions that arise.

DA first of all sets himself the task of clearing the ground by explaining that evolution need not carry any atheistic overtones, and to parade a list of names of those who from Darwin's day downwards (including the man himself) either did not believe evolution had to imply atheism, or who ardently advocated both evolution and Christianity. Concerning the latter, not all the names were familiar to me, but DA was very sloppy in handling two who were. Henry Drummond, despite his involvement in Moody's campaigns, was not as DA describes him an evangelical, but an outright down-grader. DA also uncritically quotes Benjamin Warfield's words describing himself as a "Darwinian of the purest water", with no hint that he is aware that Warfield spoke those words at the beginning of his theological career as a 17-year old freshman (though granted, somewhat above the usual grade of such - he had memorised the Westminster Shorter Catechism by the age of 6!), and that in later years he developed a number of criticisms of Darwin and was not unambiguous in his support of evolutionary theory - certainly he could never have written a book like DA's!

The former point though is more important - it's granted that Darwinism has been a massively successful theory in terms of gaining adherents including legions ready to proclaim their belief that it can be harmonised with Christianity, evangelicalism, etcetera. DA's basic approach to the question of Darwinism's implications is a naive dualism. Scientific theories have no inherent ideological implications; all those are later encrustations welded on by philosophers. Scientists and philosophers work in different spheres, and scientists just go where the evidence leads, leaving it to others to do what they will with their findings. It's amazing to believe that anyone can believe that kind of nonsense in these post-modern days, and I find it hard to believe DA can really believe what he's penning when he writes along those lines. Later on, DA gives some good explanations of how various ideologues used Darwinism to support their various theories (in such fields as economics, Marxism and medicine (eugenics)), but he never gets close to penetrating the heart of why they did so. The closest is when he remarks that some of what happened in the world of eugenics had to do with "the aspirations of nineteenth ccentury educated Victorian gentlemen to create the world in their own image" (p 179). A more incisive insight would have been to observe that all these competitive and individualist theories hung together, including evolution, and that Darwin's theory, far from being a neutral insight into scientific reality, was in many respects simply this kind of 19th century educated Victorian gentleman seeking to form a theory of biology that fitted his views on the world.

DA notes that Darwin was a deist (in the part of the chapter where he's arguing that Darwinism doesn't have to imply atheism), and in another part of the chapter gives a short denial that his view of creation is basically deistic, but that's the closest he gets to actually examining the question of what form of theism evolution implies - that question has already been side-stepped into irrelevance by the conveniently thesis that scientific theories are ideology-free zones. But even Professor Dawkins is ready to concede the compatibility of Darwinism with theism - provided that the brand of theism involved is deism. Darwin's deism is not a coincedence, and his biological theory was not a neutral ejaculation of an unbiased mind. Darwinism is essentially the theory that the laws of nature (however those are conceived of in terms of their relationship to God) make the rise of more complex life forms from simpler ones inevitable - a view well summarised in a Darwin quote DA approvingly supplies:

"There is a grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."

As long as certain rules are followed, complex life is inevitable by small and successive stages. That view of "creation" may be compatible with theism, but this point is not under dispute and so DA is offering us red herrings again. The real question at the heart of the disagreement between creationists and theistic evolutionists is, is Darwinism compatible with Biblical theism? i.e. is is compatible with essentially Christian theism? DA defends the legitimacy of believing in both God and Darwin - fine. But what about the Biblical God and Darwin? This is a question that DA is ill-equipped to get to grips with because of his starting point - which is to insist a priori that the Bible just tells us naked theology, science tells us about the physical world, and our job is just to find a nice harmony for the two. DA's answer to the charge that theistic evolution is basically deism is to insist that his theory insists on God's immanence in all the processes in creation, whereas deism is a theory of an absent God who merely set the rules and started the machine going but then takes a leave of absence. But this difference is entirely theoretical - it has no "cash value" as regards anything that ever happens in the physical world. Perhaps these physical events happen by the inevitable working out of natural laws; perhaps they happen because God is immanent in creation and working things according to a perfect order and harmony - but that's an entirely theological question totally unrelated to science or history. The point is that "evolutionary creationism" is functionally the same as deism, whatever it is philosophically - and functional deism is not Christian theism.

DA writes that it is ironic that young earth creationists agree with Dawkins that evolution is inherently atheistic. This is not ironic; it is simply true. He then goes on to blame them of "playing right into Dawkins' hands" by "confusing theology with science" and "setting up a false antithesis". This reflects DA's dualism - Genesis is theology, Darwinism is science, and in principle there's no reason why the two should ever have a problem. The problem is, though, that Genesis makes historical claims and so does Darwinism - it's no "confusion" to compare the two and observe that they differ; the confusion comes in an approach which conveniently side-steps the question at each turn.

Side-stepping is what DA does when he comes to address the issue of "naturalism" and whether it's at heart an anti-Christian theology. As seen many times now in the book, the question is neatly dealt with by a clever re-definition of the issue that is then inevitably easy to deal with. DA re-defines "naturalism" to mean "scientific language which does not mention God", and then proceeds to explain the reasons why Christian scientists don't stuff their papers with God-language (because God is everywhere and always present in creation, not just at some parts - we don't want to invoke a false "God of the gaps"). Neat, but useless. The problem with naturalism was never that it didn't include enough God-talk. The problem is the removal of the necessity of a mind - the philosophical decision to rule the questions of intentionality and design out of court, not on the basis of scientific evidence or necessity, but for ideological reasons. Darwinism, view from this angle, is simply the accomodation of biology to the philosophy of naturalism. It's not the absence of "God-speak" that causes Biblical theists issues with it - it's the absence of any necessity for a mind or purpose in the process. That's why Charles Hodge, a predecessor of B B Warfield at Princeton Seminary who DA didn't mention in his survey of responses to Darwinism, concluded his book "What is Darwinism?" with the conclusion "What is Darwinism? It is atheism."

"Creation or Evolution" - Chapter 7 - "What about Genesis?"

This chapter will make the discerning reader want to take a step back. There are even larger issues raised by this chapter and its role within the book than the subject of the book itself. The larger issues point to an ongoing "downgrade" in the world of evangelical theology which are part of the reason why much of the evangelical world is willing to come to an easy compromise with Darwinian thought.

We have now reached chapter 7, and Dr. Alexander has set out what he claims are proven and certain facts about the history of the world, its age, and the manner in which life developed. After settling all those issues, we now come to chapter 7, to ask - what does the word of God have to say about these things? Perhaps sensing that someone reading the book might have an uncomfortable feeling about the orthodoxy of his methodology, DA begins with a page of disclaimers to protest his submission to the Word of God as his final authority. He doth protest too much. Authentically evangelical methodology means that the Scriptures come first, and set the parameters of the debate. We do not ask fallen men for their best conclusions from their own investigations first, and then see whether we can harmonise it with Scripture afterwards - which is just what DA does, despite the protest that he wouldn't dream of such a thing.

DA's general approach to the early chapters of Genesis is to set up a false dichotomy (which is never formally stated, but is continually implied) between the historical reality of the Genesis account, and the theological truths which that history teaches. A first necessity is to ask what kind of literature Genesis is. Most of the ink is, as in a previous chapter, spent on refuting the suggestion that nobody makes - that Genesis is to be treated like a modern scientific treatise. But, in amongst this, we do get one - yes, a whole one and not just a half - sentence to discuss the idea of whether Genesis records not modern science but accurate historical narrative (whether with or without poetic elements in the presentation). Here it is

It is describing creative events that occurred before anuyone was around to describe them, so it cannot be history in any normal use of that term.

And that's it. What DA means by "normal use" of the term "history", we are not told. Whether God himself, inspiring Moses, might be an even better historian than the normal human ones who weren't around and therefore whether we don't need to worry about their absence, doesn't seem to be worth discussing. Nope - if it happened before any men were here, then even if God himself records it it just can't count as "history" in a meaningful way and there's nothing left even worth dicussing. This kind of "clever" word-game, by which DA entirely side-steps the central and relevant issues in order to swiftly proceed on to some display of intelligence on some other side-issue is what makes this book a deeply frustrating one for anyone looking for an informed critique of young earth creationism.

Another such gem of schoolboy logic is the old chestnut that as the sun and moon weren't created until the fourth day, therefore the days can't be of the 24-hour kind because there was nothing there to mark them. This absurd argument wrongly assumes that the passing of time and the marking of the passing of time are the same thing. But does not even an infant know that time has passed long before mum or dad tells them what it is or how to count it?

There are several other such glaring logical howlers in the chapter, and more besides with historical misrepresentations, and hand-waving-smoke-blowing-strawman-destroying of possible objections, but I won't bore you with them. Such things can easily be detected by a critical reader who goes off to any of the big creationist websites to search for discussion of the common arguments. The big issue raised by the chapter is that of principles of interpretation and the place of the Word of God in forrming our theology and world-view. It's not enough to say that you abide by the Bible's authority. DA seeks to harmonise Genesis with evolution, but the Bible is not just one book alongside others; it must rule them all, and that in evident practice and not just in theory and disclaimer. DA makes a continual false dichotomy, urging us to not focus on Genesis' historical details and then to miss their theological import for us. Fine, but DA makes the opposite error; he divorces the two, aiming to give us the theological fruits but without the real-world, time-and-space events that actually give rise to them. This is trying to eat your cake without having ever had it to begin with.