Creation and Science Chronicle

How I Changed My Mind About Evolution : Evangelicals Reflect on Faith and Science by Kathryn Applegate & J. B. Stump.

Westmont, IL : IVP Academic, 2016. 204 pages. Price: $16.00 ISBN: 978-0830852901 0830852905

Series: BioLogos Books on Science and Christianity

Expected publication date: June 13, 2016

Summary: Perhaps no topic appears as potentially threatening to evangelicals as evolution. The very idea seems to exclude God from the creation the book of Genesis celebrates.

Yet many evangelicals have come to accept the conclusions of science while still holding to a vigorous belief in God and the Bible. How did they make this journey? How did they come to embrace both evolution and faith?

Here are stories from a community of people who love Jesus and honor the authority of the Bible, but who also agree with what science says about the cosmos, our planet and the life that so abundantly fills it.

Kathryn Applegate (PhD, The Scripps Research Institute) is program director at BioLogos, where she designs and coordinates programs aimed at translating scholarship on origins for the evangelical church. She earned bachelors degrees in biophysics and mathematics at Centenary College and a PhD in computational cell biology from The Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla). At Scripps she developed computer vision algorithms and mathematical models of the cell’s internal scaffold, the cytoskeleton. Kathryn enjoys an active involvement in both the science and faith community and in her church. She and her husband Brent have two young children and love exploring the state parks of Michigan together.

Jim Stump is Senior Editor at BioLogos. As such he oversees the development of new content and curates existing content for the website and print materials. He has a bachelors degree in Science Education (Bethel College, Indiana, 1991) and a masters degree (Northern Illinois University, 1995) and PhD (Boston University, 2000) in Philosophy. Jim was a philosophy professor and academic administrator for 17 years. Now he is the Senior Editor at BioLogos (biologos.org). He researches and writes in the areas of Christianity, Science, and their intersection. He also frequently speaks to various groups on these topics. Besides these scholarly pursuits, Jim spends time with his wife and three sons, plays guitar, runs marathons, and participates in a local CrossFit exercise club.

Table of contents:
Introduction / Kathryn Applegate and J. B. (Jim) Stump
1. From Culture Wars to Common Witness: A Pilgrimage on Faith and Science / James K. A. Smith
2. Who’s Afraid of Science? / Scot McKnight
3. The Inevitable Conclusion / Ken Fong
4. Learning to Praise God for His Work in Evolution / Deborah Haarsma
5. An Old Testament Professor Celebrates Creation / Tremper Longman III
6. Embracing the Lord of Life / Jeff Hardin
7. Peace / Stephen Ashley Blake
8. Learning the Language of God / Francis S. Collins
9. Faith, Truth and Mystery / Oliver D. Crisp
10. Inspired by an Amazing Universe / Jennifer Wiseman
11. Boiling Kettles and Remodeled Apes / John Ortberg
12. From Intelligent Design to Evolutionary Creation / Dennis R. Venema
13. A Scientist’s Journey to Reflective Christian Faith / Praveen Sethupathy
14. A Fumbling Journey / Dorothy Boorse
15. A Biblically Fulfilled Evolutionary Creationist / J. B. (Jim) Stump
16. A True Read on Reality / Daniel M. Harrell
17. A British Reflection on the Evolution Controversy in America / N. T. Wright
18. Personal Evolution: Reconciling Evolutionary Science and Christianity / Justin L. Barrett
19. The Evolution of an Evolutionary Creationist / Denis O. Lamoureux
20. Learning from the Stars / Laura Truax
21. So, Do You Believe in Evolution? / Rodney J. Scott
22. The Spirit of an Evolving Creation: Surmisings of a Pentecostal Theologian / Amos Yong
23. Two Books + Two Eyes = Four Necessities for Christian Witness / Richard Dahlstrom
24. Finding Rest in Christ, Not in Easy Answers / Kathryn Applegate
25. Safe Spaces / Richard J. Mouw
Notes
Contributors

Righting America at the Creation Museum by Susan L. Trollinger, William Vance Trollinger Jr.

Baltimore, MD : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016. 316 pages. Illustrated. Price: $26.95 ISBN: 978-1421419510 1421419513

Series: Medicine, Science, and Religion in Historical Context

Expected publication date: April 29, 2016

Summary: On May 28, 2007, the Creation Museum opened in Petersburg, Kentucky. Aimed at scientifically demonstrating that the universe was created less than ten thousand years ago by a Judeo-Christian god, the museum is hugely popular, attracting millions of visitors over the past eight years. Surrounded by themed topiary gardens and a petting zoo with camel rides, the site conjures up images of a religious Disneyland. Inside, visitors are met by dinosaurs at every turn and by a replica of the Garden of Eden that features the Tree of Life, the serpent, and Adam and Eve.

In Righting America at the Creation Museum, Susan L. Trollinger and William Vance Trollinger, Jr., take readers on a fascinating tour of the museum. The Trollingers vividly describe and analyze its vast array of exhibits, placards, dioramas, and videos, from the Culture in Crisis Room, where videos depict sinful characters watching pornography or considering abortion, to the Natural Selection Room, where placards argue that natural selection doesn’t lead to evolution. The book also traces the rise of creationism and the history of fundamentalism in America.

This compelling book reveals that the Creation Museum is a remarkably complex phenomenon, at once a “natural history” museum at odds with contemporary science, an extended brief for the Bible as the literally true and errorless word of God, and a powerful and unflinching argument on behalf of the Christian right.

Susan L. Trollinger is an associate professor of English at the University of Dayton. She is the author of Selling the Amish: The Tourism of Nostalgia. William Vance Trollinger, Jr., is a professor of history at the University of Dayton. He is the author of God’s Empire: William Bell Riley and Midwestern Fundamentalism.

Table of contents (tenative):
Introduction
Chapter 1 – Museum
Chapter 2 – Science
Chapter 3 – Bible
Chapter 4 – Politics
Chapter 5 – Judgement
Epilogue

What Happened in the Garden? : the Reality and Ramifications of the Creation and Fall of Man edited by Abner Chou.

Grand Rapids, MI : Kregel Publications, 2016. 302 pages. Price: $19.99 ISBN: 978-0825442094 0825442095

Expected publication date: April 27, 2016

Summary: Evangelicals are no strangers to creation and evolution debate . Now the argument has spread beyond the contents of the creation account in Genesis 1 and into Genesis 2-3, with speculation about the historicity of Adam and Eve and the Fall. But does it matter which position one holds? Is anything really at stake?

The faculty of The Master’s College have come together to show that this more than merely an ivory-tower debate, that its implications actually strike at the very core of our collective experience: the legal system, literature, gender roles, education, psychology, and science.

Through this multidisciplinary look at the debate, the contributors prove that to change our understanding of the Fall is to change the way we understand reality, to revise the Christian worldview, and to reshape the faith itself. Far from irrelevant, the theology and historicity of Genesis are in fact critical to our everyday lives.

Table of contents:
Contributors
Preface and Acknowledgments
Introduction / Abner Chou
Part 1 Reality of Genesis 2-3
Chapter 1 – “Did God Really Say?”—Hermeneutics and History in Genesis 3 / Abner Chou
Chapter 2 – Adam and the Animals / Todd Charles Wood and Joseph W. Francis
Chapter 3 – Genetics of Adam / Todd Charles Wood and Joseph W. Francis
Chapter 4 – Genesis 3—A Map of Misreadings / Grant Horner
Part 2 / Theological Ramifications of the Creation and Fall
Chapter 5 – Genesis 3 and Original Sin / Paul R. Thorsell
Chapter 6 – The Seed and Schaeffer / William Varner
Part 3 Worldview Ramifications of the Creation and Fall
Chapter 7 – After the Fall—Three Effects on Human Enterprise / R. W. Mackey II
Chapter 8 – Thermodynamics and the Fall—How the Curse Changed Our World / Taylor B. Jones
Chapter 9 – In Re Adam and Eve / Reflections on the Creation and Fall of Man-A Legal Perspective
Chapter 10 – The Significance of Sin for the Psychologies / Ernie Baker
Chapter 11 – “He Made Them Male and Female”—The Image of God, Essentialism, and the Evangelical Gender Debate / Jo Suzuki
Chapter 12 – The Historical Adam in Education—Why Keeping Him Real in Our Curriculum Matters / Alexander Granados
Chapter 13 – A Sin of Historic Proportions / John MacArthur
Conclusion