Darwin's Dove: Faith Embraces Evolution

Juan Zanzeros is a Mennonite farm boy who got a PhD in computer science and ended up writing computer simulations of the physical laws of articulated bodies. An admirer of Charles Darwin, he struggled to integrate the truths of science and evolution with his faith. Darwin's Dove is the result. On the surface, this novel is a love story about two graduate students who create a computer simulation of evolution and are plunged into a fight for their ideas and their lives. But underneath the action and romance, is an uncompromising look at Christianity and Islam in the context of a Darwinian simulation. While evolution is a computational search algorithm of amazing generality, it has a serious intrinsic flaw: one does not get the mathematical beauty of emergent complexity without the artifact of suffering. The compassionate interaction between the students and their Darwinian simulation becomes an allegory that illuminates the ancient questions of creation and theodicy, of good and evil, and of resurrection and immortality. A demystified computational Christianity promises an antidote for the evil dregs of a search algorithm. Darwin's Dove is fully original with a trace of tragic humor.