The Christian Century

 In the days before the Kansas School Board's August decision to strip the teaching of evolution from state science standards, the presidents of the Kansas university system issued a statement. "The simple fact is," they said, "people can believe both in God and in evolution."

Genes, Genesis and God: Values and Their Origins in Natural and Human History, by Holmes Rolston
Taking Darwin Seriously: A Naturalistic Approach to Philosophy, by Michael Ruse
Evolutionary and Molecular Biology: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action Series (Vol. 3), edited by Robert J. Russell, William Stoeger and Francisco Ayala

The 20th century began in Sarajevo and it will end in Sarajevo.” That saying, current during the war in Bosnia, wasn’t too far wrong. A grim age that began with the 19th century’s bleeding to death in a war sparked in the Balkans is ending, in places like Sarajevo and Kosovo, with the aftershocks of communism’s collapse.

Heated debate. Loss of faith. Religious discord. Questions about death, the universe and our place in it.

According to a new film, Charles Darwin wrestled with those issues as the implications of his theory of evolution became clear for society as a whole, but even more so, within his own family.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History will open a new permanent exhibit on the “discovery and understanding of human origins” in March and convene a panel of experts in an effort to bridge the gap between religion and science.

Followers of the media furor about evolution and God imagine that they have to choose between Darwinian theory and belief in divine providence. The most vociferous current contestants in this debate are either atheistic supporters of evolutionary theory or Christian supporters of the riposte position known as intelligent design. I suggest that there is a way to avoid this false disjunction altogether. New discoveries about the phenomenon known to evolutionary theorists as cooperation give us fresh reasons to regard evolutionary theory and classic Christian theism as entirely compatible—indeed, richly and convincingly so.