Book Review

Origins by Deborah and Loren Haarsma

by Alex Snider

Many questions arise in discussions of Genesis 1 and 2. Were the seven days twenty four hours long? How, exactly, was the world created? Did it just pop into existence or did God create processes by which the world formed into what we experience today? Do humans share a common ancestor with other mammals? Were Adam and Eve really the first humans? How do we reconcile traditional religious views with the conclusions of modern science? These and many other questions are the subject of the book Origins: A Reformed Look at Creation, Design, & Evolution. This book was written by husband and wife Loren and Deborah Haarsma, both professors in the Calvin College Physics and Astronomy department. This book serves as a great overview on the topic of origins but it is not meant to be persuasive one way or the other.

The book can be divided into two parts. The first half of the book covers the origins of the Earth. It explains Young Earth Creationism and Old Earth Creationism and the different variants on each position. The authors give the scientific and theological evidence all sides of the argument and goes into a bit of detail on how some of the scientific evidence was obtained. The second part of the book addresses human origins. It states some competing arguments on this issue and gives some evidence for and against each one.

I liked this book. I thought that the Haarsmas did a great job presenting the issues at hand and not choosing sides. Coming from a geology background, I thought they laid out the issues of the age of the Earth very well and presented the evidence clearly. That being said, this book is intended as an overview. It doesn't go into a lot of detail and even remains quite shallow on some areas. I saw this happen particularly in the part on human origins. I think that this is a much larger issue than is presented in this book. Although, I suppose that if it really is such a big issue of debate, it might not have been appropriate to cover everything in such a broad overview.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is going to ministry of any kind. I think that at least knowing something about this topic is good. Even if you're not prepared to debate someone after reading this book, you'll at least get thinking about your position on the issues of origins.

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