Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., explained in a New York Times commentary what he meant when he said, during a show of hands at the first GOP presidential debate, that he didn’t believe in evolution. “If belief in evolution means simply assenting to microevolution, small changes over time within a species, I am happy to say, as I have in the past, that I believe it to be true,” he wrote. “If, on the other hand, it means assenting to an exclusively materialistic, deterministic vision of the world that holds no place for a guiding intelligence, then I reject it.”
Brownback said that “the premise behind the question seems to be that if one does not unhesitatingly assert belief in evolution, then one must necessarily believe that God created the world and everything in it in six 24-hour days. But limiting this question to a stark choice between evolution and creationism does a disservice to the complexity of the interaction between science, faith and reason.”
But on the National Review Online, conservative John Derbyshire responded that saying “here is Brownback talking about evolutionary biology” is a bit like “saying: ‘Here’s Paris Hilton talking about partial differential equations.’”
Posted by Rhonda Holman
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