The BioLogos Forum: Karl Giberson

Karl Giberson directs the new science & religion writing program at Gordon College in Boston. He has published more than 100 articles, reviews and essays for Web sites and journals including Salon.com, Books & Culture, and the Huffington Post. He has written seven books, including Saving Darwin, The Language of Science & Faith, and The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age.

Series by Giberson

Giberson Collins Interview (6 Parts)

In this six part series, Karl Giberson discusses evolution with BioLogos founder Francis Collins as it relates to the scientific community and the church. Their conversation addresses Collins’ scientific perspectives, his Christian faith, and the abundant evidence for evolution. Throughout, the two critique various unscientific approaches to evolution such as Young Earth Creationism and Intelligent Design. Overall, they both express the deep need for the Church in America to accept evolution as a valuable, true theory as well as to cultivate a richer understanding of the Bible among the people.

Would You Like Fries with that Theory? (5 Parts)

In this series, Karl Giberson addresses lay people’s irrational mistrust of “scientific orthodoxy” in response to this question: “Can we no longer confront the data on our own?” Giberson responds with a decisive “no” as he explains the long history of science as well as the extensive measures taken by the scientific community to develop and scrutinize a theory.

Exposing the Straw Men of New Atheism (6 Parts)

This six part series by Karl Giberson exposes several “straw-man” arguments that New Atheists, especially Jerry Coyne, use when attacking religion. He first describes logical fallacies and then explains the nature of a straw-man argument. Throughout the posts, Giberson addresses claims made by Coyne such as “science uses evidence and religion uses faith” and “religion represents a fossilized set of ideas that only reluctantly change in the face of overwhelming pressure from science.”

Quantum Leap (6 Parts)

Dean Nelson and Karl Giberson address the warfare mentality present at the intersection of science and Christian faith through the story of John Polkinghorne: one man who dared to cross the boundary from physics into priesthood. Through a series of extensive interviews with Polkinghorne himself, Nelson and Giberson are able to examine the deeper questions of “how do we know Truth?” and “how does a leading scientist think about the more mysterious aspects of faith -- prayer, miracles, life after death, resurrection?” The series enriches the discussion about science and religion through the voice of this generation’s most significant thinker on this topic.

The Wonder of the Universe (3 Parts)

BioLogos is pleased to share excerpts taken from Karl Giberson’s book The Wonder of the Universe: Hints of God in a Fine-Tuned World. The Wonder of the Universe presents a two-part argument: in the first section Giberson outlines the history of our understanding of the universe, emphasizing the reliability of our knowledge of both its properties and its history. In particular he outlines the remarkable evidence of design. In part two of the book, however, he discusses the complexities of drawing inferences from the design of the universe, cautioning against arguments that fine-tuning of the universe proves the existence of God.

Posts by Giberson

“Centered”: The Language of Science and Faith

November 18, 2011

In a recent interview with the Sirius XM radio show Centered, Karl Giberson, co-author of BioLogos' The Language of Science and Faith, sat down with host Don Belanus to discuss the book and the interplay between science and faith.
Comments (5)

What, Exactly, is the Secular World? A Response to Mark Mann

November 4, 2011

In the same way—but far more importantly—we cannot divide the world on a large scale into “secular” and “religious.” If I were to offer a slightly less flawed—but still too simple--knowledge map, I would suggest that we create a continuum stretching from “religious knowledge claims” at one end to “anti-religious claims” at the other with “secular claims” somewhere in the middle.
Comments (15)

An Invitation to Write about Science & Religion

October 1, 2011

Unfortunately our educational system is structured to provide training in science or religion but not both. The result is a stilted and uninformed cultural conversation with a high level of illiteracy on both sides of the table. The need for improved dialog is critically important but hard to come by.
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The Language of Faith and Science: Some Closing Discussion Questions

April 18, 2011

It is our sincere hope that those who read the book will find it to be so helpful that they may want to organize book clubs or Sunday School discussions around the points it raises. To help get those conversations started, here are a set of “talking points” that engage the material in a way that promote discussion.
Comments (5)

The Modern Creation Story

February 28, 2011

As our readers work through successive chapters of The Language of Science and Faith, Francis Collins and I hope they will become increasingly more comfortable with science and prepared to engage openly with contemporary scientific ideas about origins. We conclude the book with a reflection on what the modern creation story looks like, through biblically informed eyes.
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The Relationship Between Science and Religion

February 19, 2011

Science and religion have had a long and interesting relationship and many scholars have proposed various strategies for relating them to each other. When I was the editor of Science & Theology News I regularly received elaborate proposals from unknown scholars, often accompanied by diagrams, for the proper way to relate science and religion.
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Celebrate Science, Don’t Fear It

February 12, 2011

In The Language of Science and Faith: Straight Answers to Genuine Questions, Francis Collins and I make a familiar but underemphasized theological point: the world cries out for explanation at both a scientific and an emotional level, and the latter must not be reduced to the former.
Comments (112)

Two Languages, Two Books: One Creator

February 4, 2011

One of the most daunting but exciting parts of publishing a book happens after the publisher has decided that your manuscript isn’t an embarrassing disaster and will actually get published. I am referring, of course, to the solicitation of endorsements for the back cover of the book, known as “blurbs” in the business.
Comments (4)

Through a Glass Darkly:  The God of the Old Testament

November 1, 2010

The Old Testament—and the God it reveals—has had a long and colorful relationship with Christians. New Testament authors appealed to the Old Testament as they made their case that Jesus was the Messiah; some early Christians debated about the extent to which the Old Testament and its laws were even relevant to their faith; the caretakers of the canon made controversial decisions about which Old Testament books to include.
Comments (176)

Polkinghorne’s Masterful Reminder

October 15, 2010

Saturday, October 16, marks Sir John Polkinghorne’s 80th birthday. In honor of the occasion, we post this reflection on his book Theology in the Context of Science. Sir Polkinghorne’s life and work have been a shining example of the harmony of science and faith, and we at BioLogos extend to him the warmest of wishes on this special day.
Comments (34)

“I’d Like to Have an Argument, Please”

October 12, 2010

I continue to be surprised—and I mean that honestly—at the incoherent way that Coyne engages these topics. He reminds me of that great Monty Python skit about the customer who pays to have an argument, and then is frustrated because his sparring partner just sits there, responding with variations on “No, it isn’t.”
Comments (122)

Hawking’s Speculation: Everything Happens

September 13, 2010

Stephen Hawking is talking about God again. His new book, due in America in September 7, has the champions of atheism all excited. Jerry Coyne is ecstatic that the new book will put to rest the claim that the heroic cosmologist is "religious, even in a deistic sense."
Comments (62)

Darwin and Dr. Mohler: The Truth Comes Out

August 26, 2010

Our mission here at BioLogos is to seek God’s truth as best we can, a humbling enterprise. I imagine that you would say the same thing about your seminary. Not unlike heliocentrism in Galileo’s day, we believe that the scientific evidence so strongly supports evolution that we must take it seriously and, if this brings us to new understandings of the Bible, then we will wrestle with those, fully aware of the challenges.
Comments (186)

How Should BioLogos Respond to Dr. Albert Mohler’s Critique: Karl’s Response

July 6, 2010

Dear Dr. Mohler: I watched your presentation on the importance of Young Earth Creationism with great interest and some questions occurred to me. My most general question would have to be whether this really matters as much as you say. It seems to me that you are making a theological mountain out of an exegetical molehill, but I suspect we should just agree to disagree about that.
Comments (190)

A Tale of Two Skeptics

June 7, 2010

The ideas of arch-skeptic Richard Dawkins are quite familiar to BioLogos readers. I was reminded of them recently because of their remarkable contrast with the beliefs of another notorious skeptic who passed away last month—Martin Gardner.
Comments (22)

Jerry Coyne’s Insufferable Argument

May 24, 2010

(Updated) In a recent blog post Jerry Coyne critiqued what he called a “surprising” paper by biologist John Avise in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). [...] Avise made a familiar argument that Ayala and others have made on this site, namely that evolution should be preferred over ID and creationism for theological as well as scientific reasons.
Comments (176)

Science - Now and Then

April 26, 2010

A common argument against evolution as science is that science can study only present-day processes. Claims about what happened in the past are just conjecture, since we were not there and thus cannot confirm that processes of the past were the same as those in the present. By restricting the focus of science in this way, the methodology of the historical sciences is supposedly undermined.
Comments (155)

The Beauty of Being a Scientist and a Christian

April 24, 2010

I am a Christian. I believe that God is the ultimate reality and that the world, including me, was created by God. But this is not just an idle affirmation, a faith statement to be recited in church on Sunday. I find my experience of the world enriched in several ways by my belief in God.
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Through a Glass Darkly

April 12, 2010

It seems to me that all Christian positions on origins share a commitment to a mysterious and transcendent divine action and we might as well acknowledge that we are all in that boat together. The conversation needs to be about what is revealed in the details of the creation, not who can explain exactly how God works (for nobody can!).
Comments (43)

The Proof is in the Pudding, Not the Recipe

March 29, 2010

Recently a biology teacher inquired of Casey Luskin at the Discovery Institute how science works in the Intelligent Design paradigm. How, the teacher asked, does one “test intelligent design using the scientific method?” The response was that ID uses the scientific method: “a four-step process involving observations, hypothesis, experiments, and conclusion.”
Comments (29)

Does Intelligent Design Really Explain a Complex and Puzzling World?

March 15, 2010

The problem of puzzlement is similar. If we say that an intelligent agent has produced certain strings of DNA, are we more or less puzzled by the problem of DNA when we are all done? Frankly, I am more puzzled after hearing this claim. This “explanation” generates a set of questions even more troubling than our original query about how information-rich strings of DNA came to be.
Comments (112)

What Does it Mean to Believe in God the Creator?

March 6, 2010

In this video conversation, Karl Giberson advocates for an understanding of the Creator that places more emphasis on his sustainment of creation and less on its origins. Giberson notes that one of the things that the New Atheists have succeeded in doing is setting the frame of the debate by suggesting that unless we can point to what God is “doing”, that is, what he is actively creating—then he can’t exist.
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Mythology in the Making

March 1, 2010

If we believe that science and religion are profoundly incompatible and that history has seen a thousand similar confrontations, then incidents like these will provide confirmation of what we already believe to be true. Unfortunately, the mythology about Darwin and the implications of evolution creates the same sort of confusion, and muddled commentators continue to perpetuate misunderstandings from the past.
Comments (37)

A House of Sand and Fog

October 12, 2009

The message of the creation museum is clear--too clear in fact. None of the ambiguities that make science, biblical studies, history or theology so interesting are present. There simply aren't any real questions in this slick packaging of all-that-matters. The earth is a few thousand years old, the flood of Noah was worldwide, Jesus' mission was simple, and fundamentalist Protestantism is the way to heaven.
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Evolution Matters

February 15, 2010

People often ask me why it matters so much what they think of evolution. At Christian colleges evolution is controversial and there are always concerned constituents fretting about what students are learning. Many parents don’t even want their kids to learn about it—evolution is like pornography, not to be trifled with under any circumstances and certainly not something to be “integrated” with the Christian faith.
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A Muddled Theist to the End: The Missing Darwin of “Creation”

February 1, 2010

So kudos to the producers [of Creation] who gave us the first big screen look at the most controversial scientist in history. And kudos for making Darwin into a sympathetic and fully human character, in contrast to the sinister portraits provided by so many of his anti-evolutionary critics.
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Believing in God and Evolution

January 18, 2010

I was raised to believe that evolution was a conspiracy to undermine faith in God and had no evidence to support it. Like many young people today, I thought of Darwin in the same negative way that I thought of Hitler—simply evil.
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Emerging Voices

January 4, 2010

There were several interesting developments in 2009. For starters, the New Atheists set much of the agenda, aligning themselves against both creationism and religion in general. In between these two extremes, however, two moderate voices emerged.
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Crossing the Bridge

December 21, 2009

"Creationism can be hard to dislodge", writes Karl Giberson in his book Saving Darwin. How can one make people cross the bridge and finally see the compatibility between evolution and their religious beliefs?
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Chopping Logic

October 26, 2009

Two curiously related things happened to me last month. The first was a request from the college bookstore for my book orders for the Logic course I will be offering this spring. The second was an "Open Letter to Karl Giberson" posted on an anti-evolution site accusing me of not understanding elementary Logic!
Comments (1)

Tiny Tails Wagging Gigantic Dogs

November 9, 2009

I want to suggest that anti-evolutionists don't actually use evidence as evidence. Rather they use evidence as rhetoric--a debating tool designed to score points in arguments. Evidence is not, by these defocused lights, a pointer toward truth. Rather evidence is a distraction, undermining truth.
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With God All Things Are Possible

November 23, 2009

"Christianity," wrote someone who likes to comment under the cover of an alias on the Science and the Sacred blogs, "is extremely anti-science. Every single Christian belief, especially the disgusting childish belief in the Resurrection, is scientifically impossible."
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Belief, Guidance, and Evolution

December 8, 2009

In part one of his interview with Marcio Campos for the Brazilian newspaper Gazeta do Povo's Tubo De Ensaio (i.e. "Test tube") section, Karl Giberson discusses whether we can "believe" in evolution and what it means to say God guides evolution.
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Who Cares About Darwin?

September 14, 2009

There is an odd rearguard action to undermine evolution taking place that I don't quite understand. Rather than critique evolution for its inability to explain the bacterial flagellum, or the origin of life, or how the leopard got its spots, or any of the other countless things that presently challenge evolution, this movement seeks to undermine evolution by making Charles Darwin into a sinister, lying purveyor of evil social policies, like eugenics and genocide.
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Decent Swordfish

August 31, 2009

I love the show Frasier and watch it most nights before I go to bed. Last night's episode had Frasier whining about how nothing was up to his standards at the resort where he was trying to score points with his latest love interest.
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No Room at the Inn?

August 17, 2009

Watching the discussion surrounding Francis Collins's National Institutes of Health (NIH) appointment has been enlightening in so many ways. I was especially interested in the argument made by various critics, including Sam Harris in the New York Times, that someone with faith in God cannot be a good scientist because those two agendas are incompatible.
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The Necessity of Faith

August 3, 2009

Some Christians apparently believe that faith is a bad word. At least it seems this way when they ridicule science because it is based on probabilities and celebrate the "absolute" truth of their religious convictions, happy that none of those beliefs are simply based on faith.
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Blessed is the Peacemaker

July 13, 2009

The news these days -- especially in the BioLogos part of the world -- is all about Francis Collins being tapped as possible head of the National Institutes of Health. If confirmed by the Senate, he will disengage from BioLogos and head a somewhat larger and more complicated entity.
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Word Games

July 6, 2009

Have you ever noticed how easy it is to tell where people stand just based on the words they use? The op-ed writers in The New York Times, for example, seem unable to write about George W. Bush without saying something rude. Journalists on Fox News have the same problem when covering stories about Barack Obama.
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Saving Faith

June 15, 2009

The popular organization Answers in Genesis, led by Ken Ham, warns that BioLogos and like-minded organizations are "destructive to biblical authority and are leading so many people astray." I believe, rather, that anti-evolution arguments like these from Ham and other young-earth creationists force many thoughtful Christians to lose their faith. Organizations like BioLogos, however, protect faith.
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God or Matter?

May 25, 2009

The University of Chicago biologist Jerry Coyne recently objected to the suggestion that humans might actually be a part of God's creative plan. Like most of the so-called "new atheists," he denounces the idea that evolution -- all by its lonesome, blind, purposeless, unguided self -- would ever find its way to such an improbably unique species as human beings by any route other than a series of random accidents.
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Essays by Giberson

Adventist Origins of Young Earth Creationism

July 2009

Many evangelicals believe that young-earth creationism is the only authentic and Biblical way for Christians to understand origins, and that until the advent of Darwin's theory of evolution, young-earth creationism was the only view held by Christians. However, in this excerpt from his book, Saving Darwin, Karl Giberson explains that young-earth creationism is a relatively new phenomenon that stemmed from the 20th century fundamentalist movement.

Scientific Fundamentalism and its Cultural Impact

November 2009

Giberson's essay makes the case that scientific fundamentalists are not merely arguing for the omnipotent supremacyof science but also presenting science as a quasi-religious replacement. The agenda of the "New Atheists" is not merely to refute mainstream religion but to replace it. Unfortunately, the scientific community is poorly represented by these aggressive public figures.

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