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Is Belief in God Good, Bad or Irrelevant?: A Professor And a Punk Rocker Discuss Science, Religion, Naturalism & ChristianityThis is an odd book. It is a series of emails between a professor of church history and a punk rocker who embraces naturalism. As an apologetic, this book doesn’t come down on either side. Greg (from the group Bad Religion) gives good arguments for adopting the naturalistic worldview, and he corrects many of Preston’s misconceptions. Preston gives good arguments for the Christian worldview, and he also corrects many of Greg’s assumptions.

But the book ends without much of a solution. Neither one is converted to the other worldview. Nothing has changed by the end of the book, except that they have enjoyed some good intellectual stimulation through their exchange.

Intervarsity Press put out this book last year, so I’m assuming that the publishers at IVP thought that Preston clearly comes out better than Greg in the emails. That’s not necessarily the case, though. Greg has some strong arguments, and Preston doesn’t answer all the tough questions. Unfortunately, some of the hard questions that Preston does answer lean in the direction of open theism and not historic Christianity.

This book is interesting. It’s neat to see the correspondence between these two men. But I think a blog would’ve been a better place for these letters to be published. It’s as if the publishers just copied and pasted the emails into a new document, changed the fonts, and then sent it to the print shop. I’ll admit that there are some good portions of the book. But to get to them, you have to wade through the small talk about Greg being “under the weather,” Preston’s favorite Bad Religion CDs, and the niceties that fit well into emails and letters, but should never have made it to the final draft of a book.

written by Trevin Wax. © 2007 Kingdom People Blog

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