Michael Gerson (see Wikipedia entry), offers us a confusing opinion piece about how to think of creation, evolution, and science. He’s portrayed as an evangelical Christian (attended Westminister Christian Academy in a St Louis suburb and Wheaton College) who was President Bush’s speechwriter for about 5 years. Most likely his confused views of science and theology were learned at neo-evangelical Wheaton College, long known within creationist circles as a bastion of old-earth compromise.
CP
Divine Evolution
by Michael Gerson
Washington Post (DC). page A35 (Op-Ed)
December 21, 2007
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth. Or not. And so the debate on origins continues.
This spring, west of Cincinnati, a $27 million Creation Museum opened its doors, complete with a display showing dinosaurs entering Noah’s Ark. Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is pressed repeatedly on his views of evolutionary biology, rather than health-care policy or Iran. According to the Pew Research Center, about 70 percent of evangelicals believe that living things have always existed in their current form.
I have little knowledge of, or interest in, the science behind this debate. Can gradual evolutionary changes account for the complex structures of cells and the eye? Why is the fossil record so weak when it comes to major mutations? I have no idea. There are unsolved mysteries in Darwinian evolution. There is also no credible scientific alternative.
But whatever the scientific objections, it is the theological objections to evolution that are weakest. Critics seem to argue that the laws of nature are somehow less miraculous than their divine suspension. But the elegant formulas of physics, and the complex mechanisms of evolution, strike me as an equal tribute to the Creator.
