More Books Of The Year 2018 (RJS)

When it comes to science and Christian faith several outstanding books have appeared this year.

My personal favorite is Andy Walsh’s Faith Across the Multiverse. In this book Walsh mixes fiction (usually science fiction of a sort), math, science, and the bible to explore our understanding of the Christian faith and the ways it can be made to live in our times. I’ve been slowly working through it and will continue. This is a good book for the science student, engineer or other interested Christian. It also provides insight into the coherence between modern science and Christian faith and may be useful to any one interested in evangelism today. This is for the science geeks among us (and I put myself in that category).

Speaking of evangelism … Mere Science and Christian Faith by Greg Cootsona came out of his experience working with emerging adults that questions surrounding science and Christian faith are often in play, either overtly – leading to explicit conflict and questions, or under the surface. His book is aimed at pastors and ministry leaders as well as 18-30 year-old emerging adults. It is designed to help people think through the issues involved and to develop the tools for interaction and engagement as new challenges arise.

If social science is more your bent … Elaine Howard Ecklund and Christopher P. Scheitle, Religion vs. Science: What Religious People Really Think, explore the myth and reality in religious views of science. Religious people do like science and the benefits it offers, but the myth of conflict is reinforced by some elements of reality. Ecklund and and Scheitle studied the views of religious Americans on creation, climate change, environmentalism, and more.

Finally, Denis Alexander, molecular biologist, former chair of the Molecular Immunology Programme at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge and emeritus director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, has recently published Is There Purpose in Biology? The Cost of Existence and the God of Love. This is an excellent overview of the evidence for evolution and the relationship between this evidence and a purposeful trajectory for the world. There is room for purpose in biology.