The following information is from Amazon’s product description:
Theodicy attempts to resolve how a good God and evil world can coexist. The neo-atheist view in this debate has dominated recent bestseller lists through books like The God Delusion (Richard Dawkins), God Is Not Great (Christopher Hitchens), and The End of Faith (Samuel Harris). And their popularity illuminates a changing mental environment wherein people are asking harder questions about divine goodness. Surprisingly, these books please intelligent design champion William Dembski, because “They would be unnecessary if Christianity were not again a live issue.”
Entering the conversation, Dembski’s provocative The End of Christianity embraces the challenge to formulate a theodicy that is both faithful to Christian orthodoxy and credible to the new mental environment. He writes to make peace with three claims:
(1) God by wisdom created the world out of nothing.
(2) God exercises particular providence in the world.
(3) All evil in the world ultimately traces back to human sin.
In the process, Dembski brings the reader to a fresh understanding of what “the end (result) of Christianity” really means: the radical realignment of our thinking so that we see God’s goodness in creation despite the distorting effects of sin in our hearts and evil in the world.
Endorsements:"The End of Christianity towers over the others in profundity and quality . . . I have read very few books with its deep of insight, breadth of scholarly interaction, and significance. From now on, no one who is working on a Christian treatment of the problem of evil can afford to neglect this book."
—J. P. Moreland, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Biola University and author of The God QuestionA thought-provoking and well-worth reading book by a brilliant evangelical thinker on the perennial and puzzling problem of how to explain physical evil in the world before the Fall. I could not put it down. It has so much intellectually stimulating material in it.
—Norman Geisler"Believers have badly needed the kind of compelling case for biblical theodicy provided in Dr. Dembski's new book-grounded, as it is, not in traditional philosophical arguments (often not merely obtuse but irrelevant in today's scientific climate), but in intelligent design, of which Dr. Dembski is the world's foremost academic proponent."
—John Warwick Montgomery"William Dembski is a first-rate scholar who has focused his attention on the perennial challenge to Christianity: Why does God allow such evil and cruelty in the world? While staying well within the bounds of Christian orthodoxy, Dembski offers fresh insights that can truly be described as groundbreaking. Whether you end up embracing his solution or not, The End of Christianity is a book all Christians-and even non-Christians-need to wrestle with. We enthusiastically recommend it."
—Josh and Sean McDowell, co-authors of Evidence for the Resurrection and More Than A Carpenter
Get my ebook, "The Apocryphal Jesus," here
I like the man, but I have to wonder if this isn't, like Ehrman's terrible "God's Problem", an attempt to use his name and rep, made by his work in another field, to make some easy dollar$.
ReplyDeleteI hope it's decent, but I'd hate to think it's just about the €uros.
And thus Dembski destroys any credibility he might have had as an opponent of evolution on scientific grounds, at least in the eyes of its supporters.
ReplyDeleteEr, SmartLX, since Dembski has long since gone on record as saying that he admits common descent, I don't see what he has to offer to evolution denialists anyway. The only group he offers comfort to is the deistic evolutionists, who probably don't show up here at Atheism Sucks Redux in great numbers anyway.
ReplyDeleteDembski is however the source of the specified complexity argument which is still in use by ID proponents, for example Stephen Meyer in his new book.
ReplyDeleteWhile it's a genetic fallacy to say that the idea is scientifically invalid because it came from an evangelical Christian ID proponent, it's pretty safe to say that it's not what convinced Dembski himself to oppose evolution in the first place, and it doesn't apparently support a non-evolutionist position at all. It merely advocates deistic/theistic evolution. I doubt the Discovery Institute would be content with that.
SmartLX- agreed. But what the DI says that they are content with is a complex dance, since they want to eat their cake and have it too: they would like, or find it expeditious to keep funding flowing, to be a "big-tent" movement, embracing, or at least not alienating, YECs, OECs, Muslims, Moonies, and the odd atheistic evolution denier. You have to admit that they've got their work cut out for them....
ReplyDeleteOdd atheistic evolution denier like who?
ReplyDeleteThere was a guy commenting at UD for a while who claimed to be an atheist and denied evolution, but I've forgotten his name. I can try to track it down for you if you like.
ReplyDeleteYes please, Zilch. The forum at RichardDawkins.net gets a lot of people like that, who eventually turn out to be religious. Sometimes they're just sock-puppets of existing religious posters.
ReplyDeleteAt time of writing....
ReplyDelete'The Greatest Show on Earth' by Richard Dawkins. Amazon.com Sales Rank: #23 in Books.
'How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It' by James Wesley Rawles. Amazon.com Sales Rank: #68 in Books.
'The End of Christianity' by William Dembski. Amazon.com Sales Rank: #5,892 in Books.
Linky