WHAT IS MAN?:
Adam, Alien or Ape?
By Edgar Andrews
Elm Hill (Harper Collins). 327 pages. £11.99
ISBN 978 1 595 556 844
The subject couldn’t be more important. This book deals with the leading intellectual question of the day: how does humanity ‘fit’ in the world of Science – are human beings, like the waxing and waning of the moon, just physical phenomena?
Closely related to that is an increasing discomfort with science itself: has the discipline lost sight of its original calling to ‘follow the facts wherever they lead’? Has it become a propaganda machine for scepticism? The author is in no doubt. As his extract in the September en puts it ‘… science is today commonly recruited to promote agnosticism, atheism or mere indifference to anything of a spiritual nature…’.
This is the backdrop against which Andrews attempts his apologetic. As Emeritus Professor of Materials Science at the University of London he is well qualified. His purpose is clear: ‘working on the evidence of secular science (we can) build a case for creation that cannot be dismissed out of hand even by skeptics’.
The emphasis is on science. The first third is devoted to cosmological issues – can the universe self-create, what has SETI found in its search for extra-terrestrial life, the fine-tuning arguments, multiverses? The second confronts biological concerns – human uniqueness, genetics, the fossils, evolution theory, human consciousness etc. The final part deals with the biblical world-view in relation to all these, culminating in a defense of the Resurrection.
All the material is helpful and the author takes pains to write simply. That said, I found the opening section on cosmology hard-going. Is it the best place to start? Or would the section on worldviews not be better – if only to remind everyone how destructive the materialistic presupposition has already been, not just in philosophy but in society. And when the author says ‘I get a lot of help from philosopher, George Berkeley…’ (p.210) – one of the 18th-century British Empiricists who started us on the downward spiral philosophically (despite his theism) – my confidence in him as a worldview guide is somewhat shaken.
Overall, however, the book is useful in the current discussion on science and faith.
