Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Brief review of "God's Undertaker" - John Lennox

From amazon.co.uk.

In an ideal world, people would read books that they disagreed with. The books would be so persuasive that people would change their minds, and the population would move quickly to an intellectual synthesis which worked.

In the real world, people simply don't read. Those people who do read, read books which they agree with, and then chuck them at friends who either also agree (which at least makes them feel a little better about the world in general), or other friends who don't agree, and who don't bother reading the books, or who if they do remain unconvinced.

However, there is value in reading a book which reflects your own position, as I discovered when I read Lennox's book. Of course, I was already convinced that anything other than atheism wouldn't lead to the end of science as we know it. I was also convinced that miracles and so on weren't a problem to science, but that naturalism had serious problems in various areas. Lennox in this book rounds up much of what has happened roughly since the death of Carl Sagan, with the many contributions to the naturalism/theism debate being given weighting in his text roughly in accordance with their significance. The conclusions that he comes to, and defends, correspond pretty much with where I had ended up - so part of the value of reading a book that I agree with by an intellectual heavyweight was being encouraged that the conclusions I had come to were intellectually defensible.

If you are undecided, or if you are convinced by The God Delusion (why?? It has been taken apart!! Not one brick of his argument has been left on top of another!) then this is probably as good a single-volume case for theism in science as you are likely to get. But, of course, you won't read it.

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