SAVING THE ORIGINAL SINNER

A scientist and former evangelical argues that holding onto a belief in a literal, historical Adam has forced many Christians to reject science and become intellectually isolated from the modern world.

Beginning in the seventeenth century, discoveries in anthropology, geology, paleontology, biblical studies, and linguistics cast doubt on the familiar account of the biblical Adam and his fall into sin, the central component in the West’s understanding of its origins. Christians responded by creatively reconstructing the creation story, letting Adam “evolve” to accommodate his changing context. But further advances both in science and biblical studies eventually made it all but impossible to reconcile a first couple with a modern, scientific understanding of the past or with an informed reading of ancient biblical texts. Many Christians rejected the offensive scholarship, veering onto a path that would place them increasingly at odds with contemporary scholarship in many fields.

In Saving the Original Sinner, Giberson tells the story of the evolution of the idea of Adam and explores how, over the centuries, we have created Adam in our own image to explain and justify our behavior. Giberson shows how the narrative of the Fall has influenced Western ideas about sexuality, gender, and race, and he argues that ongoing attempts to preserve the biblical story of creation in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary is contributing to the intellectual isolation of many Christians, particularly evangelicals—even as they continue to wield significant political power in the United States.

Karl Giberson is an internationally known science-and-religion scholar, speaker, and writer. He has lectured at the Vatican, Oxford University, London’s Thomas Moore Institute, the Ettore Majorana center in Sicily, the Venice Institute of Arts and Letters, the University of Navarre in Spain and at many American venues.

Karl Giberson teaches science and religion at Stonehill College and is a leading voice in America’s creation/evolution controversy. He is the author of ten books, including Saving Darwin, a Washington Post “Best Book of 2008,” and The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, with Randall Stephens. He lives in Hingham, Massachusetts.

In 2008 Giberson was asked by Francis Collins to be the vice-president of his new BioLogos Foundation. (www.Biologos.org). BioLogos was a new initiative promoting science to religious constituencies inclined to reject it.