2008-07-21 Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know?

This is quite a brilliant, albeit somewhat mad book that is designed to aggravate everyone in this already fraught debate. The best thing about it is that gives `intelligent design' an intellectual scope and reach that matches that of `evolution'. There is a tendency to reduce ID to whatever the Discovery Institute is up to this week. In fact, this book doesn't really focus on that aspect of ID. It's more about why we do science in the first place, and the striking fact that so much of the history of biology is full of Christians.

The book is also rhetorically risky. Fuller openly talks about ID as creationism, and focuses on the biblical religions as really the only ones relevant to science. He even calls for theologians to get more actively involved in the debate. Yet he doesn't regard this anti-science at all. On the contrary, he seems to think that a long-term belief in Darwinian evolution will make science extinct! Readers can make what they will of this suspicion.

Caution: This book recently got a hammering in the Guardian (12th July) but the reviewer, a videogames expert, didn't seem to have read it - or at least didn't understand it. Predictably several anti-ID blogs - and anti-Fuller blogs (they only partially overlap!) - piled in. The funny thing is that none of these people seem to have read the book either. Some even revelled in that fact. So judge for yourself.