Conor Cunningham

Capable of irritating persons of all stripes

The good: I've never encountered anyone who could make Darwinism seem as genuinely inspiring as Cunningham does early in this book.

The fair: A large part of the book, perhaps most of it, is spent discussing the antinomies and paradoxes of philosophical naturalism. Cunningham does this well, but it's been done better before by Lewis and Plantinga and even Berlinski. While Cunningham's discussion may be more extensive, other authors have the advantage of clarity and even depth, in my opinion.

The bad:
1. Authors that spend an extreme amount of time quoting others run the risk of not putting together a coherent, systematic argument themselves. I think this is a weakness for Cunningham.
2. F-words in a theology book? Really?
3. Cunningham really lost me on the last chapter. On page 378, Cunningham dismisses the question of the historicity of Adam because it "rests on atheistic presumptions". On page 410, he informs us that "all religion is atheist". On page 397, he raises the spectre of "some sort of hellish postmodern Derridian differance", but I felt that Cunningham's own writing in this chapter suffers from the same incomprehensibility commonly associated with the worst of postmodernism. If this chapter is typical of modern theology, maybe the ultra-Darwinists' low opinion of theology is justified after all.… (meer)