Good News for Science
349 pages, $14.50 (paperback), ISBN-13: 978-0-9820486-1-0
Dr. Davis Young is a respected professor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he has taught for 26 years. Calvin College was founded by the Christian Reformed Church and named in honor of John Calvin the sixteenth century Protestant reformer. This does not mean that Calvinism is promoted by the book. Young is a professor of geology and graduate of Princeton and Penn State with a Ph.D. from Brown University. As a person trained in geology myself, I appreciate the accuracy of his scientific comments and his refusal to embrace the errors seen in some writers from religious schools.
The subtitle is “Why Scientific Minds Need God” and the thrust of this book is to explain the Christian faith to scientists seeking to understand Christianity. These explanations are very well presented and easy to understand. The fact that the book addresses the scientific community should not be a deterrent to even high school students interested in putting science and faith together in a constructive way.
This book is designed for college students and professors. The broad subject matter includes systematic theology curriculum, biblical studies, scientific evidence, moral arguments, and the evidential Christian world-view. Young exposes the errors of atheists like Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Russell, Sagan, and Stenger; but he also deals with the errors and misguided arguments of some fundamentalists.
The book is well written and challenging in its approach, although some readers will not agree with all of Young's conclusions. We recommend this book to mature readers who want contemporary answers to the challenges of modern-day atheism — and especially to college students struggling with their faith.