5 stars

Lion / 9780745953717 / paperback / 224pp / £8.99

This is a revised edition of Lennox’s important book, with extra material added. The author is an Oxford professor of mathematics, who has debated with Richard Dawkins, in Oxford. His is an orthodox Christian worldview, and while he delivers a detailed (at times scientifically technical) demolition of the materialist idea of self-origination (nothing to everything, undirected), he does not (as other Christian scientists) retreat back into anything resembling evolutionary theism. His analysis looks at the cosmological, and then biological, impossibility (statistical/numerical) of self-origination, then concentrates on the necessity of information input – rapidly emerging as the “naturalist” Achilles heel – and yes, he makes a useful distinction between ‘naturalism’ and ‘materialism’ (p. 29). Another book by him should examine the psychological/political motivations of the New Atheist religion. As the blurb says “an excoriating demolition of Dawkins’ overreach from biology into religion” (Melanie Phillips).