Karl Giberson does not like Answers in Genesis. Image courtesy of Wikipedia.
Joel Kontinen
Karl Giberson believes that God used evolution in creating the world and that evangelical Christians should embrace his view of origins.
A decade or so ago, Dr. Giberson edited the now defunct Templeton-sponsored newspaper Science and Theology News that in effect was a forum for promoting theistic evolution. He then said that he would not let young-earth creationists defend their views in his paper.
Giberson is known for some bizarre statements, such as that a historical-literal understanding of Genesis “robs it of everything that is interesting" and for claiming that Jesus would believe in evolution.
Dr. Giberson, who is a physicist, has been involved with the BioLogos Foundation in promoting theistic evolution.
Recently Giberson wrote a blog post, attempting to discredit young earth creationism. Referring to Mark Noll’s book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Eerdmans 1995), Giberson accuses evangelicals of relying on ideas that have been discredited centuries ago.
However, in reality it is Noll’s views that do not stand up to scrutiny. Contrary to what Noll claims, the Adventists did not discover young earth creationism in the 19th century. It has been the Church’s primary view since the apostolic era. The very idea of an evangelical scandal resulted from relying too much on the views of ex-Adventist Roland Numbers, who might have had an axe to grind against his former denomination.
Giberson is puzzled about “the strange preference that evangelicals have for the discredited young-earth creationism of Ken Ham over the legitimate and well-founded science of Francis Collins. The ideas promoted by Ham are so obsolete that some of them were actually abandoned by the scientific community in the 18th century!”
Ironically, scientific research shows that some of the claims of the BioLogos Foundation (e.g. “junk DNA”) that Giberson so ardently promotes are obsolete and the uniformitarianism that led to a belief in millions of years of Earth history has to some extent also been abandoned in geology.
Source:
Giberson, Karl. 2011. Why Do So Many Evangelicals Prefer to Get Their “Science” From Ken Ham Rather Than Francis Collins? Science + Religion Today (27 September).
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