LET THERE BE SCIENCE:
Why God Loves Science and Science Needs God
By David Hutchings and Tom McLeish
Lion Books. 206 pages. £10.99
ISBN 978 0 745 968 636
The authors’ aim is to demonstrate that, despite the claims of popular atheists, science and biblical Christianity are friends, not enemies.
The book is well written, thoughtfully researched and will hold the interest of scientists and non-scientists alike. The approach is refreshingly different, as the authors collect stories and anecdotes about the history, challenges and personalities of science, grouping them in such a way that each chapter has a different common theme.
Science and faith
For example, Chapter 2 demonstrates that science goes back a long way historically, and has always run parallel to Christian faith without displacing it. In Chapter 4, scientific stories of larvae, pomegranates and Riemannian geometry are recruited to show that ‘science functions most naturally within a Christian framework’ (this framework being largely supplied by the book of Job). Chapter 6 recounts the way science makes sense of chaotic systems by looking at a bigger picture in which chaos is corralled by statistical theories. This they see as an analogy of the way that in the Bible ‘God uses randomness and predictability together in the rescue of the oppressed and hopeless’.
The weakness of the approach is, of course, just this analogical method. Analogies can help us understand difficult things but won’t satisfy anyone looking for answers rather than analogies. The hard questions, such as whether unguided evolution is compatible with the Bible’s account of creation and human origins, are sidestepped. The authors seem to subscribe to the ‘complementary’ view that God has written two equally authoritative books, nature and the Bible – a view that fails to recognise the priority of revelation over human philosophy. One bizarre result is that they praise Lawrence Krauss for his work in cosmology, but omit to identify him as a card-carrying new atheist. A readable and interesting book, but one that needs to be read with considerable discernment.
