Superficially, John C. Lennox’s book God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God? looks like another “Science and Religion can get along” book, along the lines of Kenneth Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God (which I’m going to try to review tomorrow). Nothing on the back cover suggests anything else, not the book description nor the blurbs. Same goes for the descriptions up on Amazon. Nothing, that is, unless you count ridiculous vagueness as a clue that something’s fishy: “This book evaluates the evidence of modern science in relation to the debate between the atheistic and theistic interpretations of the universe, and provides a basis for discussion.”

In reality, the core of the book is a rehash of established anti-evolution arguments: the various claims of Jonathan Wells, Michael Behe’s irreducible complexity argument, and various claims about information theory. And what’s really strange is that the obscurity of the presentation isn’t limited to the outer cover: Lennox hardly mentions intelligent design except for a vague expression of dislike for the term. Wells’ name never appears except in the endnotes. Michael Behe is identified euphemistically as the author of “a book that has demonstrated a lot of critical discussion.” Other prominent members of the Intelligent Design movement are cited as authorities without any explanation at all of who they are.

Furthermore, Lennox generally talks as if there were no established criticisms of these authors, as if the many years of debate over Intelligent Design never took place. It’s as if when Lennox was writing his book, he was deathly scared that a reader somewhere might Google “Intelligent Design” and find out that his claims have been thoroughly refuted by credible scientists. In at least one case, it’s clear Lennox knows damn well his claims have been refuted: he claims that the probability of generating a particular 100 amino acid protein at random is 1 in 10 to the 130. In an endnote, he admits that actually the calculation behind this is based on a false premise, and the correct number is actually only slightly less than 1 in 1000, but hey, they’re both small numbers. This is like promising to make someone a trillionaire 10 to the 118 times over, and then giving them only a thousand bucks, because hey, it’s a lot of money either way.

In terms of original intellectual substance, the book is hardly worth noticing, but I still think the fact that most pro-science websites haven’t noticed it still unfortunate, because books like this are going to be important to the future of science in this country. A lot of what scientific literacy is is knowing where you can get reliable information about science. For that reason, it’s in the interest of purveyors of pseudoscience to keep people confused about what the issues are and the who’s who surrounding them. It’s also a lot harder to argue against things like teaching the strengths and weaknesses of evolution, rather than teaching some specific pseudo-theory, is unconstitutional. We need to keep an eye on this kind of stuff.