Book Review: Reasons

Reasons edited by Thomas Gaston

This is a book that needed to be written.

It is, in overview, a panoramic look at some of the key intellectual reasons for believing in God, Jesus and the Bible, stringing them together in a compact and readable volume. And what a timely work it is. In the developed world faith is popularly regarded as nothing but superstition - something for the ignorant and uneducated. The evidence of this book illustrates that this is far from the truth.

Yet it doesn't ignore criticism and is even honest enough to draw the readers attention to possible objections to its arguments. But the overwhelming message is that Biblical faith in the 21st Century is robust and, contrary to popular belief, reachable by reason.

There are two halves to the book. Initially it looks at reasons for seeking. Why in this world of ever increasing secularism should we be interested in a God? The book begins with the wide angle lens examining the general philosophical reasons for asking the question, before moving to the scientific grounds of the finely tuned universe and the origin of life on earth. In terms of biology's witness of God this is where the book stops. In some ways this is a little disappointing, but it is equally important to recognise what the authors haven't put in. More on this later.

The next chapter looks at Consciousness and explains how consideration of this subject should lead us away from mere materialism. It speculates that quantum theory could provide an insight in to how consciousness works (although having suggested this it could do with more explanation of what quantum theory is and how it might relate to the problem of mind). The chapter is an important one but it in my opinion it also needs to be clearer that it is not advocating a kind of floaty soul that is separate from the body.

The next reason to seek comes from examining the evidence of human morality, before the first section concludes with what is the weakest chapter of the book, on The Problem of Evil.

In some ways this chapter is a little out of place here. Suffering is more likely to be seen as a reason not to seek God. But having included it in the book I didn't find the conclusions satisfying. The tone was at times condescending and a lot of space is used arguing over how much pain is required for there to be a problem, which all felt a little irrelevant. Then, when considering natural disasters such as the 2004 Tsunami we are told that this is not a theological event. I don't find this satisfactory, neither do I think that it is useful to explain the existence of pain as because it is only 'temporary'. Unfortunately the chapter only begins to address the key issues at the end when it says 'Suffering is mandatory for spiritual development'. This is the area that needs to be explored in far more depth.

But the next section gets us back on track with Reasons for Believing. It is crammed full of useful information from the textual reliability and historical accuracy of the Biblical texts to the evidence of prophecy, the nation of Israel, and the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. There are many juicy morsels of information in these chapters that can't be conveyed properly in this short review, but certainly the gentle persuasion of the 'Resurrection' chapter is a particular triumph.

And here, after a short Epilogue, the book ends. But as alluded to above it is interesting to recognise what isn't included. There are no Intelligent Design type of arguments (that is if we don't include the very valuable chapter on abiogeneis). This is a great relief as they could have undermined the whole package. Though it does feel like there should be something more to say about life on earth. As yet this is still being worked through by Christian thinkers and a range of views exist. For example, there are Simon Conway Morris' ideas about convergent evolution making human beings an inevitability of the process of evolution, through to others who feel that the emergence of human beings required much more guidance. Either way it feels that the teleology of the earth's natural history should be an important topic.

The reader will leave this book amazed that such an enormous scope of argument has been covered in a little over 200 pages. This is the great value of the work. Such a wide range of issues surround belief in God, Jesus and the Bible, and in this one place a good number of them are dealt with expertly, each one building on the last.

The few criticisms discussed above certainly don't get in the way of me offering a hearty recommendation.