The Selfless Gene by Charles Foster
I was raised as a Young Earth Creationist. I have always been Young Earth until fairly recently, when I became convinced that Day-Age Creation was right. So lately I’ve been loving books having to do with Creation and Evolution. When I saw The Selfless Gene: Living with God and Darwin on the BookSneeze review list, I couldn’t resist ordering it.
Foster opens up with saying that he is not a professional evolutionary biologist nor a professional theologian. He’s right. I admire him for trying to reconcile Evolution with God and the Bible, but I am afraid it was a little short of what I expected. He almost makes God secondary, and natural selection primary. In doing this, he almost ascribes deity to natural selection when it is nothing more than a process. Also, to get Evolution to become reality, you must explain away Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. His attempts at doing that are excellent, however. In comparison with Evolution, I think he could have also addressed Young Earth Creation a bit more. Also, he totally ignored Old Earth Creation (day-age).
This was the first book I read from Charles Foster. He did a nice job, and I look forward to reading more from him. Look for his other books, including The Jesus Inquest (Thomas Nelson, 2010), Wired for God: Biology of Spiritual Experience (Hodder, 2010), The Sacred Journey (Thomas Nelson, 2010), and Tracking the Ark of the Covenant (Lion Hudson, 2007).
I am a member of Thomas Nelson’s book review program at www.booksneeze.com.
