Book Review: The Comprehensive Guide to Science and Faith

Book by William A. Dembski, Casey Luskin and Joseph M. Holden

If you’re interested in Christian apologetics as I am, you may have read various titles on the subject, watched some famous debates and debaters as well as gained a reasonable grasp of many of the more common and powerful arguments for theism, the historicity of the Bible and/or intelligent design. Whether you consider yourself a novice at debating or arguing for your faith or frequently take to social media or your nearest public-speaking venue to verbally spa with the best opponents, it is always important to read around more broadly and see what new research has been done. I came to this book with this attitude, expecting that some of it would be quite familiar but hoping to find some new ideas and insights to add to my mental quiver.

That said, I was not sure how valuable this book would prove to be, so I held on to it for a while before diving in. It is fair to say that some of the early chapters felt like a bit of revision, covering the more common apologetics, albeit with more depth than you might come across in other formats. However, as the book advanced, I found ideas and arguments that I had never heard before, some of which are extremely detailed and interesting.

I would advise all believers of the Abrahamic faiths to give this book a listen as it will both help you better understand how to make an apologetic case and provide you with some of the more recent scientific discoveries and admissions that may not otherwise receive much attention. Non-believers would also do well to familiarise themselves with the ideas explored here to better understand an increasingly popular form of defense for Christianity in particular. And anyone with an interest in the topic, the history of the science/religion debate and who wants to just learn more would do well to start with this title. This book is not the final word on all topics but the bibliography and references provide many good places and scholars to add to your further research.

The nature of the text means that there is some repetition throughout, so much so that I think Dawkins, Darwin and Jastro deserve some writers' credits. However, this is not so bad considering how useful repetition is in learning a topic and each of the many authors seems to know their subject and the scholars with whom they dialog extremely well.

Each chapter is relatively short, probably around the right length for an average commute or two. This not only makes them bite-sized to some extent, affording a lot of variety as you move through the work but also means the text can be a useful resource should you need to familiarise yourself with an area of research or an author in the future.

There is a heavy focus on intelligent design throughout (though not all chapters deal with this topic explicitly) and to those of different persuasions, this may prove less interesting but I encourage you to give it a read anyhow and make up your own mind. You won’t find detailed counter-arguments from a materialist or atheistic point of view represented fully in the work as it is not a dialogue or panel discussion and never claims to be. I would say that opposing views are well represented though and further reading of some of those cited on the opposing side of the debate will help you get a more rounded perspective.

There were 2 chapters toward the end that I found less appealing that the rest but 44 out of 46 is a pretty high success rate so I thoroughly recommend this book as an introduction, revision or launchpad for future research on a great variety of topics and if you've never read into this before, or only a little, then you're in for a real treat.

Apologetics changed my life and the nature of my faith and I hope this book will help the same to happen for you.