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Rating: 
Summary: a disappointment
Review: As a Christian, I found Colson's and Pearcey's magnum opun well worth reading, but this book (chapter in larger book) simply sides with the Intelligent Design side in the debate. I am sure the authors believe this is the Christian perspective, but I had hoped for insight into reconciling science and faith.
Rating:
Summary: a disappointment
Review: As a Christian, I found Colson's and Pearcey's magnum opun well worth reading, but this book (chapter in larger book) simply sides with the Intelligent Design side in the debate. I am sure the authors believe this is the Christian perspective, but I had hoped for insight into reconciling science and faith.
Rating: 
Summary: Keeps the issues clear
Review: The target audience of this series, as I understand it, is the average church-going Christian who would like to express his views to both family (esp. kids) and friends with a much better understanding of the issues - without having to get a doctorate in molecular biology. The target audience is not academia, nor 'intelligensia' - but that does not mean this book is neither academic nor intelligent. Addressing the first of the three general worldview questions "Where did we come from?", "What went wrong?", and basically "How do we fix it?", this book keeps the issues of the *theory* of evolution and the *theory* of creation very clear. Colson and his co-author discuss the 'faith vs. science' myth - (that they are somehow 'opposites'), as well as the Naturalism vs. Christianity debate. They point out that the latter is not a science vs. faith debate, but in fact philosophy vs. philosophy - that we don't fight science with the bible, but we fight bad science (or science so-called) with better science. They mention that naturalism and evolution are not truly scientific, being untestable and therefore 'unprovable.' They remind our detractors that there should be at least one piece of archaelogical evidence of a 'transitional form,' if this process has truly been going on for 14 million years (or whatever the current estimate), and has produced the human the eye, the brain, the lymphatic, cardiovascular, muskuloskeletal, reproductive, nervous, and digestive systems, etc... Don't be dissuaded; this book is a decent exposition of the issues at hand for the common man, while adding in enough science to settle the issue for most (non-Christians) - at least the ones that I've talked to. Most if not all have left our chats with serious doubts about evolution, and an open mind about other more scientifically supportable theories, such as that Creation. After all, it's really a simple issue - you don't need a MIT math professor to help you with simple addition. Cheers
Rating: 
Summary: What A Disappointment!
Review: What is badly needed is a case for a reasoned merger of Christian truth with scientific evolutionary theory. This has been eloquently done for Christian environmentalism, and I was looking forward to reading a thoughtful intellectual analysis of evolutionary theory and science from a Christian evangelical's perspective. What a disappointment! Colson and Pearcey had the opportunity to make a significant contribution, but chose instead to construct the usual tired strawman of equating science with naturalism and Christianity with allegiance to intelligent design. Neither naturalism nor intelligent design are science, and thus both are easily debunked from a scientific perspective. Furthermore, Colson and Pearcey cannot even identify cogent new arguments for intelligent design. Instead they rely on naive and easily refuted arguments, such as the "irreducible complexity" of the eye (nonsense, there are numerous examples of intermediate stages of light recognition and processing) or that a fish evolving a lung would drown (we have air-breathing fish, and many amphibians change from a gill-breathing to a lung-breathing state). In summary, if you want another stock argument for intelligent design, or if you like to read arguments that can easily be picked to pieces, get this book. Otherwise, don't bother.
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