The evidence for the ancestry of the human species among the apes is
overwhelming. But the facts are never "just" facts. Human evolution has
always been a value-laden scientific theory and, as anthropology makes
clear, the ancestors are always sacred. They may be ghosts, or corpses,
or fossils, or a naked couple in a garden, but the idea that you are
part of a lineage is a powerful and universal one. Meaning and morals
are at play, which most certainly transcend science and its quest for
maximum accuracy.
With clarity and wit, Jonathan Marks shows that the creation/evolution
debate is not science versus religion. After all, modern
anti-evolutionists reject humanistic scholarship about the Bible even
more fundamentally than they reject the science of our simian ancestry.
Widening horizons on both sides of the debate, Marks makes clear that
creationism is a theological, not a scientific, debate and that thinking
perceptively about values and meanings should not be an alternative to
thinking about science - it should be a key part of it.