Review: The Selfless Gene by Charles Foster
In his book The Selfless Gene: Living with God and Darwin, author Charles Foster seeks to harmonize the debate between the biblical account of creation and the theory of evolution. As such, he lays out in the earlier chapters the overwhelming evidence for evolutionary belief, then examines the biblical story in the light of both evolution and traditional fundamental interpretation of the first two chapters of Genesis. Finally, he pulls the threads together to present his own viewpoint based on the presented material.
The first third or so of the book was full of technical jargon and convoluted sentences. I didn’t enjoy it at all, at times feeling that the belief system I’d been brought up in was derisively undermined. I was in way over my high-school-educated head and nearly quit reading numerous times. I continued because my husband has done considerable reading and study on evolution, and this book offered a guideline for us discuss the topic. I read this book out loud to him in the car over various travels in the past couple of months, with many breaks for discussion.
It was worth completing to see how Foster assembles his beliefs based on the foundation laid. It’s definitely a slow, thought-provoking read, and I’d recommend it to folks who wonders whether God and Darwin can have anything in common.
Thomas Nelson provided me with a complimentary copy of this book with the understanding that I would post a review, the contents of which were entirely at my discretion.
I'll have to check this out. I've never had trouble reconciling evolution and creationism, but I confess I haven't studied it in depth either. I think if your foundation is a literal interpretation of the Bible, that would be more difficult to do. Whenever I asked these questions at home when I was growing up, I was assured (in essence) that time was measured differently and the Bible is man's inspired interpretation of God's Word. To me, that allowed for contextual differences that literal believers don't have the luxury of using. With that allowance, I could allow "seven days" to stretch over several million years.