The confusion of a non-literal Christian physicist in dealing with myth

Meet Karl Giberson, physics professor, believer in evolution, and committed Christian, including being committed to talk about how evolution has no incompatibilities with religious belief. You work to reconcile religion and evolution, as a scientist, but can’t think straight in your own mind.

One of the points of the Garden of Eden story is that Adam and Eve got this idyllic situation and all they need to do is make a set of simple choices that are right and avoid one kind of no-brainer that is wrong. And what do they do? They choose the wrong thing.

Either the early chapters of Genesis are myth, in which case that story is not literal and you have to stop giving it a literalist interpretation, or it is literal, and you’ve just hoisted yourself by your own petard.

Elsewhere, you say you agree with Dawkins et al that modern science has shown it works just fine without the need for God as an explanatory hypothesis, as Laplace knew 200 years ago.

So, you drop back and punt, with the old transcendentalist stance. You argue that most people don’t come to religious faith at the end of a long argument. Well, secular humanists certainly don’t come to faith with the petering out of an untenable argument.

Needless to say, neither I nor Richard Dawkins will be reading “Saving Darwin: How to Be a Christian and Believe in Evolution.”