Cornelius Plantinga, Jr., Engaging God’s World: A Christian Vision of Faith, Learning, and Living (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), 145 pages.

This book was written to fill a need that concerned the leadership at Calvin College–wanting to keep Calvin a college that is Christian. Though presented to a wider Christian audience, Plantinga is a minister in the Reformed tradition and his writing is from that perspective. It would be good to note that the Reformed tradition places great emphasis on the main topics of the book, and that adds to the value of what Plantinga presents. My own theological perspective comes from Holiness and Pentecostal interpretations, yet I can easily read and admire Plantinga’s thoughts.

The book was commissioned to provide the basic background that Calvin College found was missing in its incoming students, students which largely had grown up in the church but nonetheless were rather clueless when it came to the great doctrines of Christianity. Plantinga deals with each of these doctrines: Longing and Hope; Creation; The Fall; Redemption and Vocation in the Kingdom of God. The book closes with an Epilogue and an appendix of talking points to enable discussion by and between the students.

Longing and hope repeats some of Plantinga’s thinking from his earlier award winning book Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin (Eerdmans, 1995). There he described Shalom for which we were made and hunger for and yet have trashed such that it no longer exists except as a hope. I was so impressed when I read the earlier book with this concept that it has become part and parcel of my own being and I pray that priestly blessing in Numbers 6 over my house every morning as part of the litany with which I start each day. I, too, long and hope for what Plantinga so magnificently and simply presents.

With the stage thus set, Plantinga next takes us to and through the marvel and wonder of Creation a place where we find creatures of wondrous particularity–each of them and all of them a display of God’s inventiveness and love. We learn that God revels in his creation, that lightning bolts say “here we are” to God; that the morning stars sang together as God unfolded his creation and all the angels shouted for joy. We have to do more than glance around; we have to lie on our backs and look into the night sky. We also have to study scripture which corrects our dull vision with special or particular revelation or what a prophet today might call illumination.

We learn there is a time to speak and a time to be silent; that this is the rhythm of God as is the time to work and to rest from work. We learn that marriage is good and that God gave our ancestors, that primal pair in the garden, a cultural mandate to multiply and fill the earth. Against the backdrop of all the good and the wonder in creation, Plantinga develops the horror of the fall, the onslaught of sin, culpable evil. God hates sin not just because it violates law, but because it also violates trust. Sin grieves God, offends God, betrays God, and not because God is touchy. God hates sin against himself, against neighbors, against a good creation because sin breaks the peace. Sin interferes with the way God wants things to be. That is why God has laws against sin. God is for Shalom and therefore against sin.

Cornelius G. Hunter, Darwin’s Proof: The Triumph of Religion over Science (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2003), 168 pages, ISBN 9781587430565.

The volume under review is a sequel to Hunter’s Darwin’s God: Evolution and the Problem of Evil (Brazos Press, 2001). The central thesis of the former book is that the theory—rather than fact—of evolution originally emerged in the mid-nineteenth century out of the deistic the concept of God with the added benefit of distancing God from the waste, pain, suffering, and evil so evident in the natural and human worlds. In Darwin’s Proof, Hunter further develops this main idea, but provides a creationist alternative to the naturalistic theory of evolutionary origins.

Hunter’s Ph.D. in biophysics (University of Illinois) means not that his interpretation of the alleged evidence for evolution is correct in all respects, but that it cannot be easily dismissed. This is especially the case in the first five chapters of the book where he lays out what he discerns to be the fundamental arguments against Darwinian evolution—its inability to account for the complexity of DNA structures, protein functions, enzyme pathways and cycles, nerve cells, and other life forms—and the inconclusiveness of the scientific evidence for evolution, especially the fossil evidence, data from comparative anatomy, and molecular, genomic, and phylogenetic (related to the evolutionary tree) similarities. Chapters six and seven then make more explicit the internal philosophical and theological contradictions (as Hunter sees them) of evolutionism.

The last four chapters constitute Hunter’s own proposal regarding the origins of life: adherence to a fairly traditional rendition of the biblical account of creation, fall and redemption as providing a narrative and philosophical framework for scientific inquiry in general and biological origins in particular (chapters eight and nine), and advocacy of the recently emergent and increasingly popular intelligent design theory as being compatible with Christian theistic approaches to rigorous scientific investigation (chapters ten and eleven).

Both Darwin’s God and Darwin’s Proof will be welcomed by creationists and anti-evolutionists. It appears that these are the audiences that Hunter is addressing, at least in part, by publishing this very accessible book with a press targeting evangelical laypersons. Be warned, however, that while many of the arguments in these two volumes may be simplistically called into serving traditionalist apologetic purposes prevalent in evangelical, fundamentalist, creationist, and even Pentecostal and charismatic circles, Hunter’s approach signals a subtle but very important shift in the contemporary science and religion conversation. That is to say, while Hunter’s own theological commitments seem fairly traditionalistic, his engagement with the sciences is rigorous (rather than merely instrumentalistic or apologetic), his rhetorical approach is fair (rather than merely polemical), and his interaction with evolution and its supposed evidences is sophisticated (rather than merely dismissive). I would urge even those who agree with Hunter’s theological position to read him in order to learn something about science in general and evolutionary science in particular. On the other side, defenders of Darwinian evolution will be challenged not only at the presuppositional level (that is, with regard to the ideological, religious and metaphysical commitments undergirding evolution) but also at the evidential level (that is, with regard to the specific interpretation of the scientific and, especially, biological data).