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“Evolution and Religion” is a book conducted in dialogue form. It is laid out in five chapters, each of which is a dialogue between the same four “guests” and a “host” on a public television show called Eternal Questions. As the title points out, the topic of these five episodes all focus on various questions to do with the relationship between evolution and religion.

As Plato, Galileo and David Hume all realized, the dialogue format is an effective one for its ability to highlight different positions while leaving the author free to treat them as seriously as he wishes. This book’s characters owe a lot to professor of religion Ian Barbour, who has written on four possible approaches one can take as to the proper relationship between science and religion (of which each character represents one). Here is a list of characters, a brief description of their position, and the name of a public intellectual they might be most closely associated with.

>>>Dave Davies – Davies is a fictional professor of biology who takes the position that religion and science are in conflict. He is an atheist who believes that science has beaten religion on every score. In this, he is probably best compared to Richard Dawkins.

>>>Martin Rudge – Rudge is a professor of philosophy. He represents Barbour’s “independence” position, seeing religion and science as two very different things (but much differently than Gould’s accomodationist position, Rudge simply suggests that science cannot answer most questions that religion gets into and vice versa). He is most certainly the voice of the book’s author Michael Ruse.

>>>Reverand Emily Matthews – Matthews is an Episcopalian priest and professor of pastoral counseling. She is quite a liberal Christian who accepts evolution and Christianity from the vantage point of Process Philosophy (almost pantheism). She takes Barbour’s “integration” position, arguing that science and Christianity are mutually reinforcing. She may best (though imperfectly) be represented in real life by theologian John Haught.

>>>Reverand Harold “Hal” Wallace – Wallace is a Southern Baptist minister at a large church. While Wallace professes to take the “dialogue” position that science and religion can and should be in constant dialogue, he denies evolution, is a young-earth creiatonist, and says, at some point in the book, that he believes that only “wrong science and Christianity” are in conflict, defining “wrong science” as that which contradicts Biblical literalism. He might best be represented by Ken Ham or Kent Hovind.

As you can see, four very diverse views are presented, and we get to hear each speak at length on issues ranging from the origins of life to the existence (and reason for) human consciousness to the scopes and limits of science.

My only real complaint about all of this is that, as has hopefully been noticed, there is no real good spokesperson character for intelligent design. The subject is brought up (and defended in different ways by the two Christians on the panel), but each does so in ways bearing little similarity to how ID is actually defended currently. (Matthews is much more friendly to the principle of self-organizaiton than intelligent design, and Wallace is too much of a young-earth creationist to argue for ID as much the as “scientitic creationism,” that ID folks tend to disavow). I was hoping that just as we have a Dawkins stand-in, we might have either a Behe stand in. ID is such a hot issue in the religion/evolution debates that I am suprised this book only spent a few pages on it.

Lastly, I STRONGLY suspect that the character of Martin Rudge was meant to give voice to the book’s actual author, Michael Ruse. And, further, I suspect that if a word count was done, we would find that Rudge gets more words in than anyone else, and that Ruse gave him the strongest case.

Overall, though, I liked this book a lot. Ruse has a unique ability to understand viewpoints with which he disagrees and to present them in a professional and respectful manner. Any dogmatists among us (pro- and anti-religion) should read this book to remind ourselves that all sides contain questions that have not been answered (maybe cannot be answered?). Any non-dogmatists among us should read this book to remind ourselves that we might be on the right track.

Ruse, a leading expert on Charles Darwin, presents a fictional dialogue among characters with sharply contrasting positions regarding the tensions between science and religious belief.