Saving the Neanderthals: Sin, Salvation, and Hard Evolution [Hardcover]

What happens when the wrench of evolution is dropped into the hopper of Christian theology? Written by a philosopher, Saving the Neanderthals takes evolution as its foil and shows what might have to change in Christian theology in order to make theology compatible with evolution. If the Christian faith is shown consistent with what Mark S. McLeod-Harrison calls hard evolution, then the softer versions will also be compatible. Indeed, that is exactly what the book argues, specifically for the Christian doctrines of sin and salvation. These doctrines typically rely on some fairly strong realist version of essentialism, which hard evolution denies; but McLeod-Harrison proposes an approach to sin and salvation that is compatible with the anti-essentialist claims of hard evolution.Mark S. McLeod-Harrison is professor of philosophy at George Fox University.

In Saving the Neanderthals, Christian philosopher Mark McLeod-Harrison brings the conceptual resources of philosophy to bear on the question of whether theologically orthodox faith (particularly the doctrines of sin and salvation) can be sustained in light of so-called 'hard-evolution'. Thus McLeod-Harrison deploys a range of philosophical concepts which are rarely employed in the faith-and-evolution literature. These include modal logic, natural kinds versus anti-essentialism, methodological naturalism versus metaphysical naturalism, human uniqueness versus biological persons, and the scope of the image of God viz. human ontological solidarity. McLeod-Harrison concludes that, in light of hard evolution, traditional doctrines of sin and salvation need to be modified, yet these modified versions still fall within the scope of Christian orthodoxy. Consequently, even if hard evolution is the way biological life arose on our planet, Christian faith has 'nothing to fear' from hard evolution. McLeod-Harrison models the Christian scholar facing challenging questions of our day head-on. He has provided a stimulating and slh