The second member of the the panel is Professor Ted Peters.  Ted Peters teaches theology and ethics at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary and the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He co-edits the journal, Theology and Science, published at the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences. He is author of The Stem Cell Debate (Fortress 2007) and Anticiating Omega (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht / Eisenbrauns, 2007). Along with biologist Martinez Hewlett, he co-authored A Scientific and Theological Commentary on Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (Abingdon 2008) and Can You Believe in God and Evolution? (Abingdon 2006).

On why he feels it is important to discuss evolution today.

"This year, 2009, we commemorate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species as well as his 200th birthday. The Darwinian model of evolutionary change has provided a necessary framework to pursue contemporary research into genetics and related medical sciences that lead to the healing of so many persons from disease. Thank God for Darwin's science!"

Professor Ted Peter's View of the Key Moments in Evolution

1. It is extremely important to distinguish between the science of the Darwinian model of evolution from ideologies built upon this science. In the late nineteenth century we saw the rise of Social Darwinism, a social ethic that promoted the success of big business and decreed that society should "leave the poor to die by the roadside." During the same era we saw the rise of the Eugenics movment, and attempt to speed up evolution through improving heredity. Positive eugenics policies in Britain and the U.S. sought to encourage intelligent and healthy persons to marry and have large families; while negative eugenics in the form of "racial hygiene" in Nazi Germany used mass murder to elimate persons whose lives were "not worth living." Darwinian science should be celebratred while Darwinian ideology should be decried.

2. The John T. Scopes Trial of 1925 flags a point in history where fudamentalist Protestantism and secular Darwinism clashed in a battle for the public schools and for the wider American culture. Fundamentalists such as William Jennings Bryan decried the heartless ethics of Social Darwinism that had taken over militarisitc Germany; and he sought to preserve a wholesome and caring public ethic in America. Clarence Darrow and the media argued to the contrary, saying such biblical literalism and religious rigidity risked holding back the wheels of scientific progress. This clash continues right down to the present day.

3. The most important theological issue arising from Darwin's model of evolution is the problem of evil and suffering. If the human race is the child of a long pre-history within the animal kingdom replete with the viciousness of predator-eating-prey and the extinction of entire species, does this mean we have inherited in our genes a propensity for violence and destruction? Is the primordial wolf still present under the lamb's wool of civiliation, as novelist Jack London asked in his widely read novel, Cry of the Wild? If this is the case, which comes first: the human fall into sin or our biological propensity to commit violence? This question is much more serious for a theologian than the more popular question: which is right, Darwin or Genesis?