I sat under Dr. Lennox’s teaching for a week some years back and really enjoyed it. So I anticipated that I would like this book and I have not been disappointed. The book is very readable and very well reasoned. All but the last 30 pages have a very nice flow to them — I don’t know what happened in that end part, either the editor got tired, or perhaps I got tired, but things seemed like they repeated themselves a lot.

Dr. Lennox knows a lot about a broad range of subjects. I think he knows more than I do about every area, even those that I consider my professional specialties. His sections on information conservation in algorithmic design were very insightful and clear.

I have been looking for some time now to see what ever became of the line of reasoning that A. E. Wilder-Smith brought out some years back regarding the shortcomings of the Miller/Urey experiments on spontaneous creation of amino acids from chemical stew triggered by the application of high voltages. If you have only had the standard text-book understanding of Miller’s experiment, Wilder-Smith’s explanation of the requirement that all amino acids that go into making life-as-we-know-it take the L-form simply devastates the Miller results. I have wondered for some time why no one seems to make more of this? Who would carry on Wilder-Smith’s intellectual legacy? I’ve found it in Dr. Lennox’s fine book. He applies further statistical analysis to the generation of amino acid chains, showing that in addition to the L-form requirement all of the bonds must be peptide bonds. This reduces the likelihood, not that further help was needed, by another factor of 2^100 (for chains 100 amino acids in length), that Miller-type amino acid chains would be suitable for life.

One of the things I enjoyed most about the book was the precision with which Dr. Lennox put forward the dichotomies between religion and science. In fact, in contrast to how we most often tend to phrase the debate, Dr. Lennox argued forcefully that the real debate is between theism and atheism, not between science and religion. His arguments on this were backed up with examples from Galileo to Dawkins and will be very helpful in reframing the debate in the coming months.

Highly recommend this book to anyone interested in keeping up with the current wave of thought on this subject.

Full Bibliographic entry:
God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?, John C. Lennox, Lion Hudson plc, Oxford England 2007.
ISBN: 978 0 7459 5303 8