Richard Dawkins has redefined himself again. Earlier, Dawkins transitioned from academic works of theoretical biology to his popular atheistic manifesto, The God Delusion. Now, Dawkins has moved on to the scientific education of youth. Combining lavish color illustrations by David McKean with his own supple and enthusiastic prose, Dawkins aims to inspire a new generation with the belief that naturalistic science is the only source both of knowledge and of true “magic”-the poetic wonder of discovery. The book would not be much of a problem if it stuck to data and theories. But throughout the text, Dawkins inserts fatherly asides to caution the reader against supernatural, superstitious nonsense-the enemy of true science. The procedure is to offer sober science and an atheistic worldview as a package deal. C. S. Lewis discerned a similar danger in the “Green Book,” ostensibly a work of English grammar, whose actual effect was to inculcate moral relativism: “The very power of [the book] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy…who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory which they put into his head, but an assumption, which ten years hence…will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.”¹ Dawkins’s approach is to mold impressionable minds with the presumption that all that really exists is a closed physical universe of pitiless indifference (p. 235). Pursuing the logic of natural selection, he concludes that a living creature is simply “a survival machine for genes. Next time you look in the mirror, just think: that is what you are too” (74-75). This means that the “poetic wonder” of scientific discovery has no ultimate significance. There are no valuable truths to discover, nor valuable people to discover them: we are lumbering robots in a meaningless world. Like the Green Book criticized by Lewis, Dawkins’s book will likely produce more people “without a chest,” closed to the transcendent realms of God’s moral law and saving work.

Propaganda. Throughout Dawkins’s entertaining text, which explores biology, astronomy, chemistry, physics, natural disasters, and alleged miracles, Dawkins seeks to discredit biblical revelation by citing its stories as myths alongside pagan myths and modern “urban legends.” Thus Genesis is presented with Norse mythology (34-35) and Dawkins repeats the old chestnut that since there are elements in common between the flood account in The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Genesis flood, the latter is cultural borrowing (140-43). Although there are some similarities, many of these would be expected in any flood account, and there are also marked differences. Most importantly, Dawkins does not seriously consider the possibility that both accounts arise from an actual historical event. Worse, when archaeologists do find evidence of the historicity of a biblical event, Dawkins attributes it all to purely natural causes anyway (208-9). And he relies heavily on David Hume’s famous critique of miracles (254-65), with no reference to John Earman’s devastating critique, Hume’s Abject Failure (Oxford, 2000).

Invincible Ignorance. Evidently, Dawkins has adopted a position that makes it impossible for him to contact transcendent realities. Dawkins tells us he would never accept a supernatural explanation regardless of the evidence, “Because anything ‘super natural’ must by definition be beyond the reach of a natural explanation” (23). But refusing to allow supernatural explanations does not show they are false. And Dawkins continues to complain that “none of the myths gives any explanation for how the creator of the universe himself…came into existence” (163), refusing to allow the idea of a necessary being that has no origin. Interestingly, Dawkins never considers the possibility that theism might give a better explanation than materialism for the success of the science he prizes. Why does the world conform to orderly laws? Why should we expect our minds to be capable of discovering them? If he faced these questions without prejudice, Dawkins might begin to see that there is a deeper magic still.

-Angus Menuge

Angus Menuge, Ph.D., is professor of philosophy at Concordia University, Wisconsin.

NOTES

1 C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 16-17.

“Novels about family, relationships, and love,” is how bestselling author Jodi Picoult describes her books.¹ While it’s true that Picoult’s works cover these topics, in doing so they also delve into many areas of interest such as ethics, theology, and apologetics. Picoult’s works are relevant beyond being simple and innocuous airport reads. Indeed, Picoult’s writings present and influence ideas, but they are also influenced by current events and contemporary topics. Nineteen Minutes (2007), for instance, is about a school shooting and the aftermath of those events, while her latest work, House Rules, turns to the topic of autism, and purportedly her next book will address homosexuality. Of particular interest to Christians are Picoult’s views of religion. “I really believe that the root of so many huge problems has been religion,” says Picoult, “and drawing the line in the sand between those who believe what you do and those who don’t-just look around the world to see the ramifications of what Irenaeus did by deciding what constituted Christian faith, and what didn’t.”² Having published seventeen novels to date, Picoult’s works have also made their way to television and the movie theater. Television adaptations include The Pact, Plain Truth, and The Tenth Circle, while Picoult’s 2004 book, My Sister’s Keeper, made it to the big screen in 2009. For the purposes of this review, two books were selected: Keeping Faith (1999) and Change of Heart (2008). The former is of particular interest given the current state of atheism that is openly hostile to Christianity, while the latter addresses ethical issues and questions regarding the New Testament Gospels in opposition to Gnostic writings. There is a connection between both books in that a main character from Keeping Faith, Ian Fletcher, is also featured in Change of Heart. Keeping Faith is about a little girl, Faith White, who begins to have visions of a “guard,” later referred to as God. There are several unusual circumstances regarding Faith’s visions and later stigmata, mainly the fact that neither Faith nor her family is Christian (Faith and her mother are Jewish) and that the figure who appears to Faith is female, raising questions regarding God being depicted as male or female. Of more interest to atheist character Ian Fletcher is debunking Faith’s claims, stigmata, and even alleged miraculous healings. Eager to boost the ratings of his television show, self-proclaimed “teleatheist” Fletcher takes a road trip to the quiet New Hampshire town of Canaan, where most of the events take place. Fletcher is a particularly interesting character, especially in light of the rise of the so-called new atheism. Raised a Baptist, Fletcher turns to atheism as an adult and is eager to debunk any religious claims he encounters. His default stance is that religion, Christianity in particular, is false and harmful. Consequently, Fletcher hardly has an open mind about religious claims, instead presupposing that metaphysical materialism is true. While Fletcher fancies himself an erudite debunker, his reasoning, like the reasoning of many contemporary atheist writers, is often flawed. For instance, Fletcher offers clever analogies meant to demonstrate the inferiority of faith, but in reality his analogies are false. He says, “Sure, lots of people believe in God. Lots of people used to believe the world was flat, too” (p. 29). Later we read, “Ian’s offhand comparison of devout Catholics to toddlers who believed that a Band-Aid itself cures the wound was hotly debated” (31). In both instances, however, Fletcher has committed the fallacy of the false analogy. In his first statement, he is arguing that simply because lots of people believe something does not make it true. This is a true statement. Majority does not decide what is true; truth exists as it is regardless of how many or how few hold to the true position. But to compare belief in God to belief in a flat world-an idea discarded on the basis of demonstrable truth-is false. It is one thing to prove the world is round, but quite another to make the case for or against the existence of God. The shape of the earth is a clearly scientific and empirical proof, while making the case for the existence of God is a matter of metaphysical and philosophical reasoning. Similarly, the character’s remark about Catholics being like toddlers who believe a bandage (religion) will cure them is false in that many intelligent, reasonable individuals adhere to Christian beliefs not because they are deceived or misunderstanding toddlers, but because they believe there is compelling and reasonable evidence to support the existence of God and the reality of Christ. This is hardly toddler-like blind faith or misunderstanding. Fletcher is also staunch in his belief in the so-called “God of the gaps” approach that some people take: “People believe in God because they don’t have any other explanation for things that happen” (33). But this is simply not true and, as is often the case, misrepresents the relationship between science and faith. Scientism is the belief that science can be applied to every area of knowledge, even philosophical and religious, and is the supreme approach to understanding. However, this is not true. Even if science were to set forth explanations of all the scientific questions regarding human life and the universe, it would still be unable to address rudimentary metaphysical questions such as the meaning of life. As to questions in Keeping Faith regarding the gender of God, some Christian characters are forthright in stating that God is beyond gender. Being noncorporeal, this is certainly true of God. Throughout the Bible, nevertheless, God has chosen to reveal Himself as Father and the Son, Jesus, was born as a male into a patriarchal culture. The main point of critics of the view of God as male in the book, such as the MotherGod Society, has to do with oppression of women and women’s rights. A cursory examination of Christianity and Christian history, however, reveals that Christians have always been at the forefront of championing equal rights for women, as well as elevating woman far beyond competing cultures and religions.³ Change of Heart shifts to ethical questions and matters regarding the advent of Christianity in light of competing ideas, particularly Gnosticism. On the ethical spectrum, the primary question in the book relates to organ donation. In this case, a murderer on death row, Shay Bourne, offers to donate his heart to the daughter of the people he killed. Of particular interest beyond ethical questions in Change of Heart are matters regarding Gnosticism and the Gospel of Thomas. One character, Ian Fletcher again, claims there were “52 gospels found in 1945 in Egypt” (314). Fletcher goes on to state of the Gnostics, “They had their own gospels…The New Testament-in particular, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John-were the ones that orthodoxy chose to uphold…the Orthodox Christian Church felt threatened by the Gnostics. They called their gospels heresy, and the Nag Hammadi texts were hidden for two thousand years” (315). Unfortunately, the statements made by the Fletcher character are far from accurate. Like The Da Vinci Code and its outlandish claims regarding Christianity, Change of Heart is full of misinformation regarding the Gnostic Gospels, with the likely source being Elaine Pagels, cited by Picoult as her main research resource on the subject. There were not fifty-two “gospels” competing for inclusion in the New Testament canon. Moreover, the Gospel of Thomas is hardly a gospel in the sense that it is not comparable to the style and structure of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Thomas is more a collection of sayings than anything, some orthodox and some quite unorthodox. In reality, Gnosticism is a corruption of Christianity, which, most scholars agree, existed prior to it. Regarding Christians “hiding” such material, the very reality of Irenaeus’ work Against Heresies should be enough to demonstrate that Christians were not systematically suppressing Gnostic ideas, since Irenaeus wrote about such ideas openly.⁴ In Picoult’s defense, the points cited in this review do highlight areas where there is tension with traditional Christianity. However, Picoult’s books generally offer a number of competing points of view from the perspectives of different characters. As creative license dictates, an author may in fact represent ideas the author does not necessarily agree with in order to create tension or craft more realistic characters. Picoult herself appears open to various religious and spiritual ideas, but is generally noncommittal, coming across as open to belief but something of an agnostic on the matter. “I still don’t have all the answers about God,” she explains. “I don’t think any of us will, until it’s too late for us to be able to share them.”⁵ This perspective, however, results in a deficient epistemology (theory of knowledge). The agnostic position on metaphysical knowledge is, at best, a temporary place for the sincere seeker. There is simply too much at stake to remain so noncommittal when it comes to ideas and their potentially monumental ramifications. Granted, Christians should not claim to “have all the answers about God,” but we do have many answers, particularly answers to the big questions of life. This is not because Christians are privy to any esoteric knowledge, such as the Gnostics claimed to have, but because God exists and has chosen to reveal Himself not only through human conscience and creation, but through His Word and His Son. As a bestselling author, Picoult’s words reach millions of readers. While it is at times refreshing to see such candid discussion and religious ideas set forth in Picoult’s writings, it is unfortunate that some of her works perpetuate false ideas about Christianity and the Gnostic writings. How do we respond to writings like those by Picoult and other bestselling authors? We respond, first of all, with “gentleness and respect” (1 Pet. 3:15), while at the same time setting forth truth to combat errors. It is necessary to move beyond merely stating that some idea is wrong or questionable and also offer evidence and reasons to support our perspective, otherwise literary caricatures of Christians as simpletons who take blind leaps of faith may indeed become more accurate than they should.

-Robert Velarde

Robert Velarde is author of The Wisdom of Pixar (InterVarsity Press), Conversations with C. S. Lewis (InterVarsity Press), The Heart of Narnia (NavPress), and Inside The Screwtape Letters (Baker, forthcoming). He received his M.A. from Southern Evangelical Seminary.

NOTES

1 Jodi Picoult Web site, http://www.jodipicoult.com/.

2 Picoult believes Irenaeus “was trying to codify the early Christian church by deciding what was ‘real’ gospel and what was heresy.” See http://www.jodipicoult.com/JodiPicoult.html#questions.

3 See, for instance, Alvin Schmidt, How Christianity Changed the World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), chapter 4, and Douglas Groothuis, On Jesus (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2003), chapter 7.

4 For a response to the Gospel of Thomas, see chapter 3 of Craig A. Evans, Fabricating Jesus (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2008).

5 http://www.jodipicoult.com/keeping-faith-chat.html.

Atheists can be the most religious people on earth. In Against All Gods, attorney and pioneer of the intelligent design movement, Philip E. Johnson, teams with Biola University philosophy professor John Mark Reynolds to supply eight essays assessing the impact of the devout doubters known as the New Atheists. It may seem paradoxical to refer to atheists as “religious.” Yet, as Johnson and Reynolds demonstrate, the New Atheists-represented by writers such as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris-approach their debunking missions with an evangelistic zeal that mirrors that of the most strident spiritual zealots. The essays offer sound and thoughtful critiques of the New Atheism and its methods, but Johnson and Reynolds are also forward-looking in their approach, as they discuss ways in which Christians can take advantage of the New Atheism’s loud, impassioned voice to contribute their own reasoned, yet passionate, sentiments to the public square. Johnson’s first essay offers a brief history of the New Atheism, praising its proponents for asking the right questions even as they reply with the wrong answers. He makes the poignant observation that the New Atheism has put less aggressive atheists into a bind, who are aware that the majority of the American public is still in some sense religious (even if not necessarily Christian), and the New Atheists could easily foment a backlash that ultimately would take atheism further out of public favor. Johnson then offers a chapter profiling a recent case of aggressive New Atheist evangelism. In 2006, Harvard University psychology professor Steven Pinker published an atheist manifesto in the student newspaper, which led the university to change the focus of a planned class on “the relationship of faith to reason” (p. 27) to a more general emphasis on what it means to be human. Johnson notes how the New Atheists misunderstand the nature of faith, while also paradoxically having a faith of their own in naturalism. Johnson’s third essay then provides a summary and discussion of evidence for Earth’s unique status as a livable habitat in a generally lifeless cosmos, and offers observations on the New Atheism’s concern to discover evidence for life on other planets, thereby verifying, in their view, the supposition that the universe is able to produce life without assistance from a deity. Johnson’s next essay discusses Darwinism as a worldview. For the New Atheists, Johnson shows, Darwinian theory is so fundamental to revamping the world in their image that it becomes, in essence, a religion. They are well aware of the ideological power that can be found in a theory like Darwin’s that serves as a “metanarrative” with “the power to explain everything human” (57). Ironically, whereas in times past Christianity occupied the position of the most respected worldview in academic settings, and Darwinism rose to challenge it as being elite and authoritarian, Johnson notes that it is now Darwinism that occupies the position of a widely respected worldview, and its proponents, especially the New Atheists, have turned out to be no less elite and authoritarian than supposedly were their Christian predecessors. Johnson’s final essay profiles the work of Victor Stenger, who speaks for the New Atheism from his perspective as a physicist and serves as an example of the elite, authoritarian attitude the New Atheists embody. John Mark Reynolds takes up the pen for the final three essays. The first gently admonishes the New Atheists for their superficial treatment of the Bible, and offers recommendations for more nuanced readings of the Scriptures and other “old books.” In this respect, the New Atheists tend to be highly literalist in their approach, reading the Bible with little to no concern for defining social, cultural, and literary contexts. Reynolds’ second essay advocates Christianity as a solid basis for education and virtue, in contrast to skepticism, which inevitably smothers the motivation for discovery under a blanket of doubts. Finally, Reynolds writes of the comparative effects of Christianity and secularism on history, also refuting arguments by New Atheists that perversely attempt to lay the blame for the horrors of atheistic regimes like Stalin’s at the feet of the church. Although the New Atheists would deny that they are religious, Johnson and Reynolds make it clear that the New Atheists are thoroughly religious people. Books such as Dawkins’s The God Delusion are their scriptures; Darwinism is their creed; they look to the glory and beauty of the universe for comfort and sanctuary; and they are possessed of a zealous certainty such that Johnson rightly describes them as “fundamentalists” (19). Against All Gods serves as a timely reminder for Christians to take the New Atheist movement seriously.

-James Patrick Holding

James Patrick Holding is President of Tekton Apologetics Ministries and author of Shattering the Christ Myth.

Chris Mooney, a journalist who specializes in science and politics and the author of The Republican War on Science, and Sheril Kirshenbaum, a marine scientist, have teamed up to write a book decrying the disconnect between sound science and public policy. While most books I review advance scholarly arguments, Unscientific America is a work of impassioned advocacy. Rather like the revivalist preachers who aimed to induce a spiritual crisis in their audience to draw them forward to the altar, Mooney and Kirshenbaum depict a catastrophic loss of influence of science over public life, which they hope will galvanize the institutions of science into action. As the authors point out, after the Second World War, there was a golden age of public science in America: “From 1953 to 1961, federal funding for research and development grew by 14 percent per year” (p. 26). Citizens and politicians were convinced of the need for scientific advances to develop the quality of life and to defend against the Soviet Union, a message reinforced by a centralized national media. Then the consensus was shattered, by concerns from the left about the environment and money-driven corporate science, and concerns from the right about the declining role of religious values in public life. Meanwhile, the scientists themselves did work that was increasingly specialized and esoteric, and “largely relied on two key surrogates-educators and journalists-to do their public relations for them” (31). However, neither of these surrogates succeeded in maintaining science’s public influence. Despite the ambitious attempts of the National Science Foundation to improve the curriculum, “over the thirty-year period from 1969 to 1999, U.S. science education faltered” (32), and science test scores showed no improvement. For a while, the media did have some success as evangelists for science. The authors hold up Carl Sagan as one of the most effective popularizers of science of all time, noting that from its beginning in 1980, his television series Cosmos “reached an estimated 500 million viewers around the globe, and galvanized untold numbers of students into scientific careers” (33). But after the 1996 Telecommunications Act, the media was deregulated and became increasingly market driven. In this environment, the authors claim, “informative or educational science content would often be among the first things that didn’t seem worth retaining” (49). First with cable TV, then with the Internet, citizens could choose to remain uninformed about “boring” science issues or else to have them filtered through divisive, political lenses. In this cacophonous, fragmented environment, Mooney and Kirshenbaum argue that it is difficult to develop public consensus on important scientific issues that bear directly on our quality of life. As proof, they repeatedly cite inaction over global warming: “We were warned and warned about it, yet for decades did nothing while the problem steadily worsened. In large part, that’s because the U.S. public continues to rate global warming as a low priority…and the politicians respond to that public-and both are getting their cues about what matters from the media” (73). Mooney and Kirshenbaum think that in the long run this failure of effective communication between science and the public, together with the short-term focus of elected officials, could have catastrophic consequences for our quality of life. Their solution to this dire predicament resides in fundamentally changing how scientists are educated, “so that communication becomes a central focus” (78), and perhaps “one significant criterion for career advancement in science would involve demonstrated success in science communication” (79). In other words, “there’s little other option for scientists and scientific institutions dissatisfied with the current state of affairs…than to take matters into their own hands” (80). The authors do see a couple of surmountable obstacles to this project. One is that some scientists are too aloof from the media, so that, for example, they enjoy criticizing scientific inaccuracies in popular movies, but do not offer their services in a more constructive way. Another is the way that the new atheists use science as a club to beat religion with, alienating people of faith from science. Thus PZ Myers’s public desecration of a communion wafer was “incredibly destructive and unnecessary” (96). While the authors think that “science has continually usurped terrain previously occupied by Christianity” (101), they refreshingly concede that “a great many leading lights of the scientific revolution and Enlightenment-Nicolaus Copernicus, René Descartes, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle-were distinctly religious and viewed science as a better means of understanding God’s creation and the laws governing it” (100-101).

Settled Science and Public Policy. The central weakness of this evangelistic missive is its almost complete intolerance for dissenting points of view, and its substitute of dogmatic presumption for serious argument. Nowhere is this more evident than in the treatment of global warming. For Mooney and Kirshenbaum, anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming should be accepted as fact and serve as the foundation of urgent public policy measures because it is the “scientific consensus” (15, 50). They assume that if science communication were more effective, there would be swifter and more vigorous action on energy and mitigation policies, which would obviously be a good thing. But there isn’t anything obvious about any of this. First, “consensus” is a political notion, not a scientific one. Scientific claims are not established by their sociological popularity among scientists, but by large bodies of data drawn from diverse sources, together with strong arguments to exclude rival hypotheses. Where such a foundation exists, consensus is irrelevant: no one ever cites the consensus over gravitational attraction or photosynthesis. Furthermore, the kind of consensus that does increasingly play a role in federal science funding is an unhealthy one, because it promotes exaggerated and alarmist claims, which are not justified by scientific data. Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, supports this claim. After all, who puts money into science-whether for AIDS, or space, or climate-where there is nothing really alarming? Indeed, the success of climate alarmism can be counted in the increased federal spending on climate research from a few hundred million dollars pre-1990 to $1.7 billion today….But there is a more sinister side to this feeding frenzy. Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves libeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse.¹ Mooney and Kirshenbaum seem to have confused the laudable goal of accurately conveying scientific findings to the public with the dubious goal of promoting the rhetoric of scientific fundraisers. Lawrence Solomon’s recent book The Deniers, an account of eminent scientists who dissent from one or more of the central planks of global warming alarmism, may not convince everyone that there is no significant anthropogenic contribution to climate change. It does show, however, that there are serious weaknesses in the available data. For example, Edward Wegman, an expert in statistics at George Mason University, showed conclusively that the famous “hockey stick” graph that appeared to correlate recent rises in temperature with increased manmade CO2, was an artifact of poor statistical method. The data do not exclude the hypothesis that most of our current warming is part of a natural cycle, like that experienced in the Medieval Warming Period. Further, in his recent book Cool It, Bjorn Lomberg shows the folly of diverting vast amounts of money to abatement measures, given their low likelihood of success, their negative economic impact, and the fact that efforts to reduce many other known causes of suffering, such as malaria, AIDS, and unsafe drinking water, would then be chronically underfunded. A discussion of these doubts and complexities is nowhere to be found in Unscientific America. Mooney and Kirshenbaum may be right that America could face catastrophe if the public are not better informed about science. But it is at least as likely that more effective dissemination of the interests of science lobbies to the general public is hazardous. One danger, which has already been realized, is that the general public becomes more distrustful of the institutions of science, which will deter high-minded truth seekers from entering scientific professions. But a greater danger is that policy makers will uncritically embrace scientific solutions to problems that turn out to have terrible, unforeseen consequences. In the Soviet Union, where science and politics were tightly fused, political ideology led government officials to endorse Lysenko’s theory of the heritability of acquired characteristics, because it seemed to cohere with Marxism better than the deterministic and “bourgeois” ideas of genetics. As a result, there were widespread crop failures, and Soviet biology stagnated. Mooney and Kirshenbaum never discuss the possibility of an American Lysenkoism, in which a scientocracy imposes large-scale scientific solutions to social problems that have irreparable consequences for human health or fertility, or which make human beings still more dependent on science for their continued well-being.

The Aims of Science. I do agree with the authors’ concerns about the education of scientists. The training of scientists frequently does exclude vital areas that could make them better-rounded citizens. What is most needed, however, is not journalistic communication skills. Many scientists would greatly benefit from more exposure to the history and philosophy of science. They would then learn that the “methodological naturalism,” claimed by Mooney and Kirshenbaum to be essential to science, was not assumed by major scientists, such as Johannes Kepler, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton. They would also learn that philosophers of science reject attempts rigidly to demarcate science from non-science because they are vulnerable to counterexamples. While Robert Pennock, cited by the authors, defends methodological naturalism because science cannot investigate the work of the divine (104), philosopher Thomas Nagel rightly notes that “the fact that there could be no scientific theory of the internal operation of the divine mind is consistent with its being in large part a scientific question whether divine intervention provides a more likely explanation of the empirical data.”² Even more helpful to the education of scientists would be a stronger emphasis on ethics. Mooney and Kirshenbaum think it is obvious what we should do with the powerful findings of science. But each item on the list of woes they hope science will address-the energy crisis, nuclear proliferation, and climate change-is, on their own view, also a product of science. Science tells us what is possible, but cannot by itself say whether it is wise. This is not surprising, because science is a value-free enterprise: it reveals how to do something, but cannot tell us if we should. As scientific power increases, it becomes vitally important that scientists are trained to think deeply about the goals of human life.

-Angus Menuge

Angus Menuge, Ph.D., is professor of philosophy at Concordia University, Wisconsin.

NOTES

1 Richard Linzen, “Climate of Fear,” The Wall Street Journal, April 12, 2006, available at: http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220.

2 Thomas Nagel, “Public Education and Intelligent Design,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 36, 2, 189-90.

The Book of Eli, starring Denzel Washington in the title role, is a post-apocalyptic movie about a man on a mission from God. In the aftermath of a nuclear winter, Eli has received a vision from God to protect the last Bible in America and bring it safely out West, where civilization can start over. Eli is a crack marksman and expert swordsman uniquely equipped to protect the sacred book. He’s been traveling for thirty years through barren wasteland and cities, fighting off roving gangs of cutthroats who kill for food, water, sex, or fun, making this movie a violent action saga with a Christian spiritual theme.

Eli arrives at a town ruled by a ruthless leader named Carnegie (Gary Oldman), one of the few people who knows how to read, since most of the books have been previously destroyed. Knowledge is power, but so is religion. Carnegie orders his minions of evil biker dudes to seek out every book they can find in the hands of unwary travelers because he is searching for a Bible. Why? Because Carnegie, who reads Mussolini, is a fascist who believes religion is a force to control people. He explains that the Bible “is a weapon aimed at the hearts and minds of the weak and desperate. They’ll do exactly what I tell them if I tell them the words are from the book.” Imagine Carnegie’s delight when he discovers the visiting Eli has precisely what he is looking for.

The movie is a parable of the battle between two philosophies of religion, that of controlling power and that of civilizing freedom. Eli is a holy man who fights only in self defense, and refuses to fornicate when Carnegie sends in the beautiful Solara (Mila Kunis) to tempt him to hand over the book. Eli teaches Solara the lost art of prayer and even quotes to her Psalm 23 by heart. When she questions whether he knows exactly where he is going, Eli explains in Abrahamic fashion, “I walk by faith, not by sight.”

The question of the movie is whether Eli really is called by God or is self-deluded, since each of his escapes can be explained in natural terms. When he walks away from Carnegie’s gang and they all miss him with their gunshots, however, we start to consider that maybe there is something to his claim of divine protection. Eli is finally robbed by Carnegie and left for dead, but he continues on, like Isaiah, with his “face like flint” set toward his Jerusalem, explaining to Solara, “I was so caught up with keeping the book safe that I forgot to live my life according to it. To do more for others than I do for myself.” Though this is an inaccurate quote of the Golden Rule, it makes for a legitimate challenge to Christians who spend all their time defending the orthodoxy of the “greatest commandment” while neglecting the second commandment, which is like unto it: the orthopraxy of loving one’s neighbor as oneself.

Through a twist that I won’t divulge, we see that Eli is in fact protected by God and he manages to get to a small community that is trying to gather books in order to save civilization (like the Irish monks did during the Dark Ages). He is able to transfer the text of the King James Bible to their librarians who will publish it on new printing presses. The story is essentially the Christian doctrine of inspiration: God uses fallible human beings to communicate and protect His divinely breathed message to the human race-Incarnation versus divine dictation.

Unfortunately, the end of the movie adds a multicultural nod to Islam that spoils the otherwise Christian theme. When Eli transfers the Bible text to the good guys, he shaves off all his hair and dresses in what appears to be Muslim garb as he lay dying. The shaving of hair is commended in the Qur’an (48:27) and the hadith (Hajj 1623 ff) for holiness in a pilgrimage (Islamic terrorists also shave off their hair in preparation for Paradise). The King James Bible is then placed on a shelf between the Tanakh and the Qur’an, implying a moral equivalency of these sacred texts-an irony, since Muslims do not agree with The Book of Eli that the Bible is the divinely breathed Word of God, but rather consider it the corrupted word of men.

-Brian Godawa

Brian Godawa is the screenwriter of To End All Wars and the author of Hollywood Worldviews: Watching Films with Wisdom and Discernment (InterVarsity Press, updated 2009) and Word Pictures: Knowing God through Story and Imagination (InterVarsity Press, 2009).

Is it possible to write a review that is at the same time sympathetic and critical? I hope so, because that is my goal with Richard Stearns’s The Hole in Our Gospel (Thomas Nelson, 2009). Stearns, the president of World Vision, has written a book that is winsome, compelling, and often inspiring.

The Hole in Our Gospel is also theologically flawed and economically misguided. In other words, I have some serious criticisms of the book, but its overall charge to care for the poor and put our faith into action is a good and necessary challenge. The Hole in Our Gospel tries to answer the question, “What does God expect of us?” Stearns argues that God expects more from us than going to church, saying a few prayers, avoiding the big sins, and believing the right things. “The idea behind The Hole in Our Gospel is quite simple. It’s basically the belief that being a Christian, or follower of Jesus Christ, requires much more than just having a personal and transforming relationship with God. It also entails a public and transforming relationship with the world” (p. 2, emphasis in original). God changed the world two thousand years ago with twelve men, and He can do it again-if only we will give ourselves fully to the task of being the good news, and bring compassion and justice to a world ravaged by disease, hunger, and oppression.

It’s hard not to like Richard Stearns. His love for Jesus Christ and the church is evident. His concern for “the least of these” and disdain for many aspects of the American Dream are admirable. His tone, even in rebuke, is warm and humble. No doubt, World Vision is doing a lot of work near to the heart of God. And Stearns, no doubt, is on the side of the angels. There is a lot to be gained from reading The Hole in Our Gospel. But there are also a number of problems with Stearns’s book. Let me mention three.

Moral Proximity. In the worthwhile effort to get us to care about suffering around the world and not just suffering in our own lives, Stearns overshoots his mark and disallows any degrees of moral proximity. To have more compassion for someone closer to us geographically, socially, or culturally, Stearns argues, is to value one human life over another (107). Though he’s no fan of Peter Singer (the controversial ethicist from Princeton), he quotes from him approvingly, affirming Singer’s principle that moral responsibility cannot take into account proximity or distance (111). So Stearns asks (I’m paraphrasing): Why don’t we respond to other people’s kids like they are our kids? Why don’t we help starving people in Africa like we would if they were literally left on our doorstep? Does God have different compassion for different people in different parts of the world?

Stearns wants to shake us out of our apathy. Good, but this is not the way to do it. I’m not even sure Stearns really believes the implications of his argument. The fact of the matter is that we do care for our own children in a special way. Our hearts do break more for our friends than for people we’ve never met. This doesn’t mean we automatically think those other people are worth less to God. It just means we are human. Jesus didn’t weep at the sight of every illness or death, but He did weep when His friend Lazarus died (John 11:35). It is an impossible burden to think that we are obligated to help every orphan in the world like we should help the child drowning in the pool in front of us. Let’s stir up compassion, but let’s not burden each other with false guilt because we feel a special sense of obligation to help our friends, our family, and those next door. The renewed cry for social justice in our day will only be a helpful corrective to middle-class lethargy if the social justice advocates don’t exaggerate our failures and don’t overstate their case from Scripture.

In a similar vein, Stearns is quick to turn commands meant for the church into commands to care for the whole world. He dismisses the idea that the “least of these” in Matthew 25 refers to other Christians or even traveling missionaries, despite the use of the word “brother” (292-93). Elsewhere he concludes: “The Bible is clear from the Old Testament through the New Testament that God’s people always had a responsibility to see that everyone in their society was cared for at a basic-needs level” (123). This is an important conclusion for Stearns because it means that poverty is a justice issue. But there’s nothing in either Testament to suggest that Christians must see that everyone in society-including all those outside the covenant community-are to be cared for at a basic-needs level. This is not to discourage Christians from helping non-Christians. It does mean, however, that the church is not responsible for the redistribution of a society’s resources. Do good to everyone, the Bible teaches, and especially to those of the household of faith (Gal. 6:10).

The Hole in Our Economics. Stearns perpetuates a number of economic fallacies and half-truths. First, he argues, via Jimmy Carter, that the growing gap between the rich and the poor is the root cause underneath most of the world’s unresolved problems (98). Although Stearns says in one place that we are not to blame for the poverty of the developing world (123), this note is missing throughout the rest of the book. For example, he leads off Part 3 with John Berger’s claim that “the poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich” (95). So is poverty in the two-thirds world our fault or not?

Second, the way Stearns employs statistics is misleading. He states that “the wealthiest 7 people on earth control more wealth than the combined GDP of the 41 most heavily indebted nations.” But why say “control” instead of “earned” or “created”? He tells us that “the top 20 percent of the world’s population consumes 86 percent of the world’s goods” (122). But why not give statistics on what percentage of the world’s goods that twenty percent also creates? I’m sure many rich people are rapacious goons, but it is unhelpful to frame the numbers as if wealth were a zero-sum game. Stearns argues that “the wealthiest countries, where just one-fifth of the world’s population lives, spend 90 percent of the world’s health care dollars, allowing the remaining four-fifths of the planet to spend only 10 percent of the money” (141). This makes it sound like there is a fixed pie of health care dollars and all the rich countries raided the pie before the poor countries had a chance to get to the table. This is bad logic and bad economics.

Third, Stearns continues to argue for more government aid. He suggests that if the rich nations would only divert five percent of the military expenditures into aid, another billion people could be lifted out of extreme poverty (158). Not only does this ignore the possibility that military expenditure can actually help the poor, it overlooks the mounting evidence from people such as William Easterly (The White Man’s Burden) and Dambisa Moyo (Dead Aid), that governmental aid in places like Africa is more problem than solution.

Getting the Gospel Right. Lastly, and more significantly, The Hole in Our Gospel marginalizes what is central to the gospel. To be fair, Stearns acknowledges that reconciliation between God and man through the atoning work of Christ is part of the gospel (15). But the whole gospel, says Stearns over and over, is God’s vision for a new way of living (276). The “essence” of the good news is that God’s kingdom is going to begin on earth through the changed lives of His followers. But Stearns doesn’t make clear how one enters this kingdom, or that the in-breaking of the kingdom is bad news for those who oppose God and do not trust in Jesus Christ. No doubt, Stearns would agree with the apostle Paul that the gospel is the good news that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that He was buried, and that He was raised from the dead and appeared to many witnesses (1 Cor. 15:3-8). But what Paul labels “as of first importance,” I hear Stearns demeaning as a diminished gospel (279).

It seems that for Stearns the gospel is primarily something we do. The gospel is not an announcement of what God has done for us in history. The gospel is a “social revolution” (20). At one point, after quoting 2 Corinthians 5:20 that we are “Christ’s ambassadors as though God were making his appeal through us,” Stearns says, “God chose us to be His representatives. He called us to go out, to proclaim the ‘good news’-to be the ‘good news’-and to change the world” (3). This is certainly a curious gloss on what it means for God to make His appeal through us.

Frankly, for all its laudable exhortations, I find Stearns’s gospel exhausting and even triumphalistic and paternalistic at times. I can’t count all the times in the book we are told to change the world, start a social revolution, or usher in the kingdom of God. If only we gave more or had the will, we could eradicate hunger and win the war on poverty. For the first time in history we have the know-how and access to solve these problems, we are told. Now we just have to make it happen. The church around the world is waiting for us to act. Without our efforts and resources directed toward the developing world, their lot in life will never improve. According to Stearns, “This is not to be a far-off and distant kingdom to be experienced only in the afterlife. Christ’s vision was of a redeemed world order populated by redeemed people-now…It’s up to us. We are to be the change” (243-44, emphasis in original). Does God’s reign and rule really depend on us?

I think I know where Stearns is coming from. He wants our faith to work. He wants Christians to care about the world and not just about their “fire insurance.” I get that. I applaud that. He should be more careful in talking about the gospel, however, lest it become a generic message about how God is going to make the world a better place. “Preach the gospel always; when necessary use words” (23) is not a helpful saying. Besides the fact that there’s no record that St. Francis ever said this and every indication that he didn’t live this way, the pithy saying represents a confusion of categories. We must use words if we are to preach the gospel, because the gospel is a message we must proclaim. If we never live like Christians, we are not Christians. But to tell people that they must repent and believe in Jesus for the remission of sins, to tell them that God sent His Son in love to bear His just wrath, to tell them that they must receive the kingdom in faith like little children, is not a gospel with a hole in it. It is precisely the center, and Stearns’s call to action would have been more compelling if it more clearly radiated from there.

-Kevin DeYoung

Kevin DeYoung is the senior pastor at University Reformed Church in East Lansing, Michigan. A graduate of Hope College and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Kevin is the author of Why We Love the Church: In Praise of Institutions and Organized Religion (Moody, 2009), Just Do Something: A Liberating Approach to Finding God’s Will (Moody, 2009), and The Good News We Almost Forgot (Moody, 2010).

But DeYoung and Kluck have much to say about the church and their experiences in her service. Writing in a very engaging, personal style, our intrepid defenders of the church do not whitewash the problems that we all know exist in any local body of believers. They honestly face up to the divisions, the pettiness, and the formalism that can infect any congregation. In a humorous section one of the authors documents all the things that honestly bothered him about going to church last Sunday. While not every person can connect with each of his personal issues, everyone can understand the overall trials and tribulations of life in community to which he refers.

Why We Love the Church is heavily documented, demonstrating a wide range of familiarity with what could be fairly and properly identified as the “anti-organized church” spectrum of publications. Both authors seem very sensitive to the accusation of straw-man argumentation, so references are offered for every assertion when representing those who are writing against what they would see as the biblical position. As a result, those who are not overly interested in investing time in the writings of those calling for a new way of doing church receive a fair education about their viewpoints as the authors respond to their claims.

But the strength of this book is its biblical focus on what the church is supposed to be, and its centrality to the purpose of God, not as determined by polls and focus groups, but as defined in inspired Scripture. Their central argument is fairly simple: the church is what she is because the Scriptures teach that is how God wants it. The Bible is to blame for the church, in essence, for the Bible presents a community with elders and deacons, worship, and preaching. It does not present the individual believer with his Bible under a tree, or a few people getting together at Starbucks over a latte and “sharing” their experiences, as “church.”

As an elder in a local congregation, I was particularly thankful to read, “I’m glad my pastor, rather than just freewheeling it, cares enough to study Scripture and a bookshelf full of dead authors to give me real spiritual food each Sunday” (p. 24). There is solid thought about the role of preaching and the wisdom of God in these pages, and when that is combined with a deep insight into the motivations of those abandoning the church, the result can bring forth a hearty “Amen,” such as here:

First, church-leavers think of the traditional sermon as boring, modern monologue. But the early Christians, not to mention the Reformers, had a more corporate understanding of the ministry of the Word. The preacher may have been the only one speaking … but the time was still considered corporate because preacher and listener would exult in the Word together. The preacher worshiped as he spoke the Word and the congregation worshiped just as much to hear the Word. If our preaching seems like an oration or a simple lecture and the hearers see themselves as passive pew-warmers, then we are to blame, not the nature of preaching itself. (75)

Why We Love the Church is written specifically to communicate with the disillusioned. For those who are still in the church, the authors seek to encourage and clarify the real purposes God has in the church. For those who have already left, they seek to answer many of the objections that may have played a role in their decision. For fellow lovers of the church, this is a book well worth reading, contemplating, and sharing with others.

—James R. White

James R. White is an elder of the Phoenix Reformed Baptist Church, the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries, author of more than twenty books, a professor, and an apologist.

In Only a Theory, Miller gives his take on the 2005 hearings in Kansas (at which I was an expert witness on the opposing side) and Pennsylvania, and explains why he rejects the criticisms of intelligent design theory (ID). Not confining himself to rebutting the scientific and philosophical claims of ID, he further argues that ID is a danger to America’s “scientific soul,” claiming that ID threatens to politicizescience and undermine its objectivity.

An Unsympathetic Reader

Unlike many scientists, Miller is a gifted public communicator. He writes clearly and well, and with all of the rhetorical flair of a trial lawyer. But he fails at the level of scholarship. An effective scholarly critic of a sophisticated theory must do careful and sympathetic exegesis of the strongest versions of the theory, and engage those. While Miller does cite both of Michael Behe’s books, he only cites the popular and dated work Intelligent Design (1999) and a magazine article by William Dembski. In an attempt to disarm his critics, Miller proposes to test ID by “embracing it,” claiming that “the most sincere compliment anyone can pay to a scientific idea is to take it seriously” (p. 44). But Miller does not take ID seriously, repeatedly saddling it with a picture of the designer that is easy to ridicule, but to which ID is not committed. Looking at the fossil data for the horse family and the patterns of appearance and extinction, Miller concludes, “Our designer doesn’t just design; he does it again and again and his designs don’t last… In other words, intelligent design is actually a hypothesis of progressive creationism” (52). But while a proponent of ID might believe that the designer works in this way, he need not.

Miller mistakenly supposes that inferring design from a phenomenon implies that the proximal cause of that phenomenon is the miraculous, creative work of the designer. But this involves two mistakes. First, a designer can work through unintelligent means. For example, if I see a computer printout of the architect’s plans for a new cathedral, I immediately infer that it was designed, but not that the computer (or its program) was the designer: the real designer, the architect, lies further back in the causal chain. Likewise, inferring design from the complex specified information in DNA implies nothing, by itself, about when that information was added to the system. It might have been specially added at a certain point or it might have been “front-loaded,” built into nature from the beginning. It is particularly odd that Miller ignores the latter possibility, because he spends chapters 5 and 6 arguing for the fine-tuning of the laws of nature, and for the nonrandom constraints on evolution imposed by the master

control genes known as Hox genes-”a tool kit for generating body form” (129)-and by convergent evolution into similar “adaptive spaces,” claiming that “the universe, in a certain sense, had us in mind from the very beginning” (161). One could argue this makes Miller a proponent of ID; indeed he writes: “There really is a design to life, but it is not the clumsy, interventionist one in which life is an artificial injection into nature” (134). Miller seems to oppose ID mainly because he wrongly thinks it must subscribe to a “clumsy, interventionist” picture of the designer that he rejects.

A second and closely related point is that inferring design is not the same as inferring a miracle. Miller makes this mistake because he misunderstands ID’s opposition to methodological naturalism (MN), the centerpiece of the minority report’s 2005 argument in Kansas. Miller thinks that ID’s agenda is “theistic science,” and supposes that by rejecting the idea that science must infer natural causes (MN), ID is calling for a science of the supernatural. Thus he confesses, “Try as I might, I couldn’t think of a single nonnaturalistic explanation of anything that didn’t involve a supernatural agent” (188). This is amazing given the fact that proponents of ID have repeatedly made it clear that inferring design says nothing about the ultimate metaphysical character of the designer. Citing William Dembski, I said in my written testimony at Kansas in 2005,

“[TJhe contrast between natural and supernatural causes is the wrong contrast. The proper contrast is between undirected natural causes on the one hand and intelligent causes on the other. “¹… [WJe can investigate whether nature manifests signs of intelligence without settling the question of whether the designer is supernatural, although there may be independent evidence for or against this further conclusion.²

This distinction explains why there are agnostic supporters of ID, like David Berlinski and Michael Denton, and why James Barham testified in Kansas that although he did not believe in the supernatural, he did believe that irreducible teleology (design) was part of nature. ID as science might find additional evidence (such as the fine-tuning of the cosmos) that is better explained by a supernatural agent than by an impersonal immanent teleology, but a design inference is not by itself an argument to the supernatural. Fallaciously claiming that it is, of course, is very convenient if one seeks to argue that discussing any evidence for design in nature in the public schools is a violation of the First Amendment. The truth is in fact just the opposite: MN means that students will hear only the evidence for undirected causes in nature, and that unconstitutionally favors some religious beliefs, including secular humanism and theistic beliefs that deny the natural knowledge of God.

Similar problems arise for Miller’s discussion of the empirical evidence for ID. Using the analogy of a standard fivepart mousetrap, Behe argued that many biological systems, including the bacterial flagellum, the blood-clotting cascade, and the immune system exhibit “irreducible complexity” (IC) because they have several well-matched parts, all of which are necessary for the system to function. Miller counters that a subset of the system’s parts might have some other function, which was co-opted,

noting that three of the mousetrap’s parts make a good catapult, and arguing that a protein pump called the Type III secretory system (TTSS) contains ten of the over thirty proteins in the flagellum. Miller does not claim that the flagellum evolved from the TTSS (a good thing, since several authorities think the TTSS devolved from the flagellum), but does think that the existence of the TTSS refutes IC, because it shows that parts of the flagellum can function by themselves (60).

This, however, is a serious mistake. Behe defines IC as a property of the whole system, not of its parts. He never denied one could make something else functional out of a subsystem’s parts, but this is irrelevant. As Casey Luskin argues, the existence of the unicycle does not show that the bicycle does not need both wheels to function. Secondly, Behe’s challenge is that the flagellum cannot be built gradually by Darwinian means. Noting the existence of the TTSS as a possible island on the way does not show that it could: as Dembski argues, this is like claiming we can walk from Los Angeles to Tokyo because we have found the Hawaiian Islands. More fundamentally, it does not show how all of the parts of the flagellum were made available at the same time and place, how the relevant interfaces were all compatible, or how they were properly coordinated by their assembly instructions.³ Indeed, Miller admits, “the existence of the TTSS today doesn’t answer the question of how the flagellum actually evolved” (61).

Miller also argues that the blood-clotting cascade is not irreducibly complex, because, “The genome of the fugu, or puffer fish, lacks three of the factors—and its blood clots just fine” (63). However, Behe’s actual argument concerned a core system, which is the same in puffer fish and other creatures.⁴ And Miller inaccurately recounts that during the Dover hearings, when presented with fifty-eight peer reviewed articles on the immune system, Behe merely said that this was not “good enough” (73). Actually, the words belonged to Eric Rothschild, who was questioning Behe, but Judge Jones attributed them to Behe.⁵ Behe actually said, “It’s not that they aren’t good enough. It’s simply that they are addressed to a different subject” since none of them contained data supporting a “step-by-step, mutation by mutation analysis.”⁶

Miller realizes that the fundamental question is whether Darwinian processes can generate the information necessary to specify new biological structures. He considers Dembski’s argument for a Law of Conservation of Information (LCI), according to which unintelligent processes can shuffle around complex specified information, but cannot produce it. As a counterexample to LCI, Miller cites Thomas Schneider’s program “ev,” which simulates the parallel Darwinian evolution of populations of digital organisms over many generations. Miller claims that ev “unequivocally shows that this process leads to an objective and quantifiable gain in information” (76). But, on inspection, ev gets this result only because the algorithm is not Darwinian but teleological: it relies on a measure of the distance between a digital organism and its future target called the Hamming distance, analogous to an Easter egg hunt in which children are assisted in their search by hints of “warmer” and “colder.”⁷ When Miller turns to real-world examples the results are the usual unimpressive examples of microevolution, for example antifreeze in fish. As Behe points out, “The job of the antifreeze protein is a very simple one, and it is relatively easy to improve the protein incrementally … The antifreeze protein is not so much a molecular machine as it is a blood additive.”⁸

Miller does have a strong conceptual objection to design, which ID theory needs to address. He rightly notes that a completely unspecified designer is scientifically useless, “since arbitrary design … could be consistent with anything” (65). What this shows, however, is that the bare idea of design must be supplemented with more specific models that attempt to capture testable design principles. Miller provides no good reason to think that scientists should not try to do just that.

—Angus Menuge

Angus Menuge is professor of philosophy at Concordia University, Wisconsin. He is the author of Agents under Fire and many articles on philosophy of mind, intelligent design, and apologetics.

Stephen C. Meyer earned B.S. degrees in physics and earth science from Whitworth College (now Whitworth University) in 1981. He worked as a geophysicist for an oil company from 1981-1985, then obtained M. Phil. (1987) and Ph.D. (1991) degrees in the history and philosophy of science from Cambridge University. After an extensive academic career, Meyer became Director and Senior Fellow, Center for Science and Culture, Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington, in 1996.

Signature in the Cell follows in the same great tradition as its predecessors. In Darwin’s Black Box Michael Behe developed the concept of “irreducible complexity,” the idea that some biological structures are too complex to have evolved by chance. This book was followed by The Design Inference, William Dembski’s complex mathematical demonstration that specified complexity requires ID. Both these books were based on solid science, and both were widely criticized by the scientific community.

Signature considers the information content of DNA and the improbability that this complex molecule could arise by chance. Drawing on disciplines such as biochemistry, molecular biology, information theory, probability and statistics, and computer science, Meyer makes a compelling argument for design. He looks at what he calls “the DNA enigma” to rule out other possibilities for the origin of life and to support his position on ID.

One very valuable section of the book is the discussion of possible origin-of-life scenarios. Meyer reviews the extensive literature on the subject, from the famous Miller-Urey paper in 1953 to current “RNA world” theories. By pointing out significant shortcomings in these ideas, the foundation is laid for the alternative of ID.

The broad scope of the work is both a benefit and a drawback. Signature offers a comprehensive survey of relevant material from a number of disciplines. This broad-based effort is also somewhat of a drawback because the reader needs some familiarity with the science in order to follow the arguments. However, it is well worth the effort in order to grasp the picture that Meyer so deftly paints.

One of the many enjoyable aspects of the book is the way the story unfolds. The material is not covered with just a “here are the facts” approach. Meyer shares his journey with us and relates his thoughts, experiences, and ideas as he develops his premises and conclusions. We share the questions, the challenges, the “aha” moments when things start to fall into place. We read the names of many famous scientists, not as dry footnotes of who did what, but in conversation.

In addition to the compelling science component, Meyer offers a rigorous defense of the ID movement. He is very conversant with the major objections to ID and answers them convincingly. The accusation that ID is a “science stopper” is dealt with effectively with his analysis of what science is and is not. In addition, Meyer lists a number of testable predictions (one of the requirements for any scientific theory) that come out of ID research.

Many evolutionists argue that ID is nothing more than “stealth creationism,” a not-so-subtle attempt to introduce the Genesis creation story into schools. What the critics fail to realize, as Meyer points out, is that there are ID supporters in many world religions and some who profess no religion. Yes, there are theological and metaphysical implications for ID, just as there are for Darwinism or any number of currently controversial scientific issues. Just because these implications exist should not exclude the theory from the scientific arena.

Signature in the Cell provides two valuable contributions to the debate about life. First, the “DNA enigma” directly challenges the reigning scientific paradigm as to how life in all its complexity originated and is replicated. Second, the book contains a very useful overview of the basic concepts of intelligent design, the arguments offered by ID opponents, and the responses to those arguments. The book deserves to be on the bookshelf of anyone even remotely interested in this issue.

—Donald E Calbreath

Donald F. Calbreath, PhD, retired in 2006 after twenty-two years on the chemistry faculty at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. His research interests involve the relationships between brain neurochemistry and human behavior.

Former Catholic nun Karen Armstrong has emerged as a recognized, popular voice on behalf of contemporary, postmodern religious sentiments. Her book The Case for God is the latest of nearly two dozen books she has written on religious subjects, in which she primarily focuses on the great monotheistic faiths (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam).

Despite its title, The Case for God does not present a “case” for God in the sense that it discusses proofs for God’s existence. Rather, Armstrong offers a highly summarized chronological survey of ideas about God, with emphasis on Christian and Jewish thought. Many of the chapters consist of biographical snippets about prominent figures within these traditions, such as the apostle Paul, the philosopher Anselm (1033-1109), and Martin Luther (1483-1546). The book also highlights some prominent figures in Greek and Islamic thought.

Armstrong offers little that is original, primarily distilling the findings and assumptions of liberal religious and biblical scholarship for a popular audience. She takes for granted such positions as that the Pentateuch was not authored by Moses, but was rather composed by four independent authors (designated in modern times as J, E, D, and P) (p. 30f£.) who were generally inaccurate in their reports of history. She also takes for granted that the Gospels were written very late (83), and were not actually authored by the persons whose names are on them. There is no interaction with scholarship offering contrary viewpoints.

For the most part, The Case for God consists of stylized, yet simplified, narrative history and the reportage is generally fairminded. For example, in contrast to many popular treatments, which portray Galileo as a faultless victim of ecclesiastical tyranny and ignorance, he is admitted to have “also made mistakes” (183) and to have represented intolerance after his own fashion.

Factual matters are frequently vehicles through which Armstrong expresses three thematic concerns, and it is clear that she has selected her historical examples in the service of illustrating these concerns.

The Inaccessible Mystery. One such theme is summarized in the statement that it is “very difficult indeed to speak about God” (x). According to Armstrong, the application of reason and logic to religious experience is misguided, and has resulted in extremist understandings of religion, particularly fundamentalism on one hand, and the hostile expressions of the “new atheism” on the other. There is also no possibility of anyone having a “last word” (xvii) about God, because God is “infinite” and the ultimate truth God represents “lies beyond words and concepts” (320). Arguing over religious matters is “counterproductive and not conducive to enlightenment” (xvii).

Armstrong offers an illustrative anecdote in which Buddha refuses to answer questions about things like the existence of God, for he regarded the answers to such questions as “useless information” that did not “lead to peace and to the direct knowledge of Nirvana” (23). It is not hard to reach the conclusion that the reason why concepts such as Nirvana (in Eastern religions, the state of being free from suffering) are “inexplicable” is because there is nothing to explain. One may be rightly suspicious that the designation of ideas as “inexplicable” is a ruse designed to put off those who seek rational explanations. In essence, Armstrong does not resolve the rational aspect of religious belief with this tactic; rather, she declares it off-limits to further discussion.

Armstrong is also insensate to the innate contradiction in her claim that God “lies beyond words and concepts.” Aside from the fact that she is using words to tell us that God is beyond words, in order for Armstrong to say with any authority that one cannot have a “last word” about God, she must presume to have exhaustive knowledge about God. Put another way, unless Armstrong herself has the “last word” on God, she has no grounds to declare that anyone else’s “last word” is inauthentic-and this does not even account for the possibility of God offering self-revelations about His character and purpose.

As noted, Armstrong’s historical examples are selected carefully in order to illustrate her chosen themes. An example of this is found in her decision to highlight the early church writer Origen (94-96). Though a formidable apologist for the Christian faith in his lifetime (AD 185-254), Origen frequently resorted to interpreting Scripture as allegorical, in order to explain apparent discrepancies. Armstrong apparently chooses to feature Origen rather than other commentators of his era with literalist exegetical practices in order to illustrate that Scripture is best interpreted in a nonliteral fashion.

The Nonfactual Experience. A second theme of the book is that religious expression does not require any factual basis; rather, it is to be grounded in experience. This follows naturally from the first theme, in which Armstrong has already discarded rational analysis as a tool for understanding religion.

For Armstrong, religious expression is more about acting than about believing: “It is no use magisterially weighing up the teachings of a religion to judge their truth or falsehood before embarking on a religious way of life. You will discover the truth-or lack of it-only if you translate these doctrines into ritual or ethical action” (xiii). Religion is created to help us find value in our life (8) and religious experience has the purpose of being therapeutic, such that religious rituals “lift us momentarily beyond ourselves” (10). Correspondingly, Jesus’ demand that people place their faith in Him has nothing to do with believing in His divinity, but rather with following Jesus’ ethical demands to feed the hungry, aid the poor, and “live compassionate lives” (87).

In saying this, Armstrong places the ethical cart before the epistemic horse. Our faith is in vain if Christ has not actually risen from the dead (1 Cor. 15). The historical occurrence of the Resurrection and God’s other actions in history provide us with the necessary substantiation for our own moral reactions. Armstrong’s epistemology provides no rational basis for ethical behavior.

Armstrong also reads “experience” into unwarranted contexts. For example, when she describes the christological controversies of the third century, she claims that the discussion was raised by people because “it touched the heart of their Christian experience” (107). There is little to suggest that “Christian experience,” as opposed to scriptural interpretation, had anything to do with the controversy between those who held to the heretical doctrine of Arius (who believed that Jesus was not eternal, but created at some point in time) and those who held to the orthodox position championed by Athanasius.

It is not surprising to see Armstrong profess that the Trinity “reminded Christians not to think about God as a simple personality and that what we call ‘God’ was inaccessible to rational analysis. It was a meditative device to counter the idolatrous tendency of people like Arius” (115). The Trinity is hardly “inaccessible to rational analysis” as Armstrong claims, and there would be a number of expositors who would be quite surprised to hear this. Reducing the doctrine to a mere “meditative device” further implies that Trinitarianism was formulated in such a way as to distract people from considering whether the doctrine was rational.

A Tolerant Condescension. A third frequent theme of the book is that religious traditions are merely mythic expressions intended to aid people in expressing their spirituality. This theme also naturally follows from the first two. Armstrong is quite insistent that literal interpretations of certain religious texts are erroneous. She asserts that humanity has “lost the art of interpreting the old tales of gods walking the earth, dead men striding out of tombs, or seas parting miraculously” (xv). Our own literal interpretations, she says, “would have been very surprising to our ancestors” (xv) and texts like the New Testament were “not primarily concerned with factual accuracy” (83).

But how does Armstrong know this? How does she know that the book of Exodus, or the Gospel narratives, or even pagan creation narratives such as the Babylonian Enuma Elish, were not intended to be taken literally? Our primary clue to determine the intention of a document is genre, and in that respect, while we can recognize some biblical texts as nonhistorical in intention (e.g., Psalms and Proverbs), the texts that Armstrong alludes to here are not in this category: Exodus appears to be in the genre of historical narrative, while the Gospels-despite Armstrong’s claim that they are “not biographies in our sense” (83)-are quite definitely in the format of ancient biographies. The genre “package” of these texts indicates that they were generally meant to be taken as literal history. Armstrong’s claim that “our ancestors” would be surprised by such an understanding is not borne out by the evidence. For example, the Gospels, as ancient biographies, are very similar in structure to other ancient biographies such as the Agricola of Tacitus.

It appears that Armstrong’s attempt to reclassify the biblical documents is not based on any sort of serious genre study, but on a desire to place the biblical texts off-limits from historical scrutiny, in accordance with the first two themes that have already designated questions of historical fact irrelevant. It is also clearly intended to validate her contention that the Bible “gives us no single, orthodox message and demands constant reinterpretation” (28). Armstrong firmly resists the idea of a single, indisputable truth in religious matters, which she dismisses as the product of a “fundamentalist mind-set” that holds “the belief that there is only one way of interpreting reality” (308-9).

It must be admitted that Armstrong is equitable in her condemnations. She also decries the New Atheists, such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, for making blanket statements about religious people being deranged (306) and for “believ[ing] that they alone are in possession of the truth” (303). Nevertheless, in reading Armstrong, one is struck by the implicit irony in her approach. On the one hand, Armstrong would undoubtedly see herself as a model of tolerance, willing to give all religious views “equal time” and equal credence. At the same time, it is clear that this equanimity is grounded in a view that all religious traditions are equal in the sense that they are all substantially wrong, merely artificial creations designed as coping mechanisms for an insecure human race. Armstrong’s veneer of tolerance is thus, ironically, a highly condescending approach in which she places herself in a transcendent position, trying to rescue the rest of us from the grasp of debilitating religious literalism-a classic example of when “tolerance is intolerant.”

There is little question that Karen Armstrong speaks with clarity and passion for the postmodern religious establishment. It is unfortunate that in so doing, she ends up having so little of substance to say.

—James Patrick Holding

James Patrick Holding is president of Tekton Apologetics Ministries and author of Trusting the New Testament (Xulon Press, 2009).