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Although they betray their skepticism about the sufficiency of naturalistic processes to account fully for organic development, Giberson and Yerxa clearly favor the scientific story's basic chronology. They emphasize that virtually all scientists in every discipline agree on about ten billion years for the universe (some would extend that span by several billion years), five billion for the earth, a half billion for multi-celled organisms, and about one hundred million years for Homo sapiens. Against this timetable, they pit the tenets of Henry M. Morris and the scientific creationists associated with his Institute for Creation Research.
For simplicity, Giberson and Yerxa focus on Morris as the author of the modern fundamentalist creation story, though Morris would surely defer to Moses in that respect. In a series of three hardhitting chapters, the authors establish Morris' religious commitment to a literal six-day creation within a strict biblical time frame; lay out the scientific dimensions of Morris' creationism as largely a sustained critique of evolutionary naturalism; and detail the narrow, conspiracy-theory mentality that underlies Morris' vilification of evolutionism as the diabolical source of virtually all social ills.
It's not a pretty picture. But Giberson and Yerxa are just as hard on the alternative offered by such naturalistic scientists as Wilson, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Hawking. Returning to the creation story of modern science, Giberson and Yerxa now call its proponents the "Council of Despair" for their starkly reductionist picture of life. "We are but selfish genes in a purposeless world, matter become conscious, fighting a powerful delusion that we are here for a purpose," the authors state in summary of this view. No wonder Americans reject it. "Is there a middle ground?" the authors ask.
In the final third of the book, Giberson and Yerxa turn to the so-called "muddle in the middle," leading into a detailed examination of the intelligent-design paradigm. Gaps in the biblical narrative, age-long days of divine creation, and various divinely guided forms of evolution compete for attention here. After offering quick glimpses of these various middle-ground concepts, the authors focus on the modern intelligent design movement, which they trace back to the mid-1980s and present as blossoming in the 1990s with the work of Phillip Johnson, Michael Behe, and William Dembski.
Giberson and Yerxa see the intelligent design movement as having "attracted so much attention that it has succeeded in dominating the origins debate" since the early 1990s; indeed, they suggest, it is "setting the agenda for much of the debate." This may be true at Christian colleges, but not in general. Certainly Giberson and Yerxa can cite sympathetic articles about intelligent design in The Wall Street Journal, First Things, Christianity Today, and the like, but such publications are among the movement's natural allies.
After seeming to fall under the influence of Johnson's prose, Giberson and Yerxa revert to their customary critical mode. They note that intelligent design has made virtually no inroads into secular science. Although "there is a growing body of serious literature assessing intelligent design," they conclude, "most of this literature is quite critical, and the rest is produced by identifiable design theorists." And if they looked at America's conservative Protestant subculture, they would see that while Johnson's attacks on evolutionary naturalism are welcome as far as they go, Ken Hamm's Morris-inspired Answers in Genesis ("a ministry begun in 1994 to proclaim the authority of the Bible from the very first verse," via books, cassette tapes, radio broadcasts, and other media) continues to gain more adherents at the grass roots.
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