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William R Brown. The Seven Pillars of Creation: The Bible, Science, and the Ecology of Wonder. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. xviii + 334 pp. $29.95, ISBN 9780199730797.
When I arrived at Cornell University for graduate school, I sensed rather quickly that science and religion had a strained relationship on campus. The university's founding president, Andrew Dickson White, had framed the relationship in 1896 with a two- volume work entitled A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, and the university's luminaries included Carl Sagan, who made such assertions as "The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be."2 Clearly, Cornell University was an institution of science, and religion had little place at the table.
As William P. Brown, Professor of Philosophy in Old Testament at Columbia Theological Seminary, explains in The Seven Pillars of Creation, the perception of a standoff between science and religion is commonplace, particularly around the topics of creation theology and evolutionary theory: "In their fight against 'soulless science/ creationists champion a view of creation so narrow that it is decidedly unbiblical. At the other extreme, certain scientists construe faith in God as the enemy of scientific progress and human well-being" (4). Part of the tragedy in this conflict, Brown observes, is that "misunderstandings and distortions abound as each side reduces the other to laughable caricatures" (4-5), but the greatest tragedy, particularly in the creation-evolution debate, is that it has all but dissolved the shared sense of wonder that both science and faith should cultivate.
To date, Brown argues, biblical scholars have been reticent to engage the debate, leaving it to natural scientists and theologians. The absence of biblical scholarship is unfortunate, since "the Bible has been either the point of contention or the unnamed elephant" (6) at the center of controversy. Biblical scholarship may not bring a final truce in the war between evolutionary theory and creation theology, but, Brown argues, it can enrich the conversation considerably and help to move it beyond simplistic caricature and ad homonym attack.
Brown certainly enriches the debate, for those willing to listen, by insisting that the biblical testimony of God's work of creation points to far more than a story of origins. With theologians...