One of the best resources I know of for keeping track of what’s going on in the world of apologetics is the Apologetics Awareness Twitter account (and it’s also on Facebook). Apologetics Awareness shared a post from Truthbomb Apologetics that mentioned a new FREE TO DOWNLOAD book. I looked over the table of contents and the chapter authors, and I think you should download it. I did.

Here is the introduction:

Science and Faith in Dialogue presents a cogent, compelling case for concordance between science and theism. The term theism refers, in this book, to the belief in God’s existence. Within theology, the term theism is often used to convey a range of presuppositions about the nature and attributes of God. Based on scientific and natural theological perspectives, two pillars of natural theology are revisited: the Cosmological Argument and the Argument from Design. The book argues that modern science provides undeniable evidence and a scientific basis for these classical arguments to infer a rationally justifiable endorsement of theism as being concordant with reason and science — nature is seen as operating orderly on comprehensible, rational, consistent laws, in line with the conviction that God is Creator.

Here is the table of contents:

• Chapter 1 – Logical fallacies and false dichotomies in the science and faith debate: impact on worldview and public opinion – Frederik van Niekerk
• Chapter 2 – Qualified agreement: How scientific discoveries support theistic belief – Stephen C. Meyer
• Chapter 3 – Cosmological fine-tuning – Hugh Ross
• Chapter 4 – Local fine-tuning and habitable zones – Guillermo Gonzalez
• Chapter 5 – Materialistic and theistic perspectives on the origin of life – Fazale R. Rana
• Chapter 6 – Are present proposals on chemical evolutionary mechanisms accurately pointing toward first life? – James M. Tour
• Chapter 7 – Engineering principles better explain biological systems than evolutionary theory – Brian Miller
• Chapter 8 – The evidence of foresight in nature – Marcos Eberlin
• Chapter 9 – Evolutionary models of palaeoanthropology, genetics, and psychology fail to account for human origins: a review – Casey Luskin
• Chapter 10 – Rumours of war and evidence for peace between science and Christianity – Michael N. Keas

You can find biographies of the chapter authors here, on the Discovery Institute web site.

The Evolution News blog has been publishing excerpts from the book. So far, they’ve featured Stephen C. Meyer and Guillermo Gonzalez.

Here’s Stephen C. Meyer:

This chapter reasserts this classical view and argues that scientific evidence does provide epistemological support (though not proof) for the theistic worldview affirmed by biblical Christianity (see e.g. Ac 17, Col 1, Rm 1). It will develop a model of the relationship between science and theistic belief that I call “qualified agreement” or “mutual epistemic support.” This model maintains that, when correctly interpreted, scientific evidence and biblical teaching can and do support each other. While accepting some disagreement about details as inevitable given the limits of human knowledge, advocates of this model affirm a broad agreement between the testimony of the natural world and the propositional content of Judeo-Christian theism — between science and religion so defined.

And Guillermo Gonzalez:

It is helpful to split fine-tuning into two distinct types, which we will call “global” and “local.” Global tuning deals with the global properties of the observable universe. These include the masses of the fundamental particles, the strengths of the four fundamental forces, the initial cosmological conditions, and the cosmological constant.

In contrast, local tuning includes things that are not universal in their properties: planets, stars, and galaxies. Not only do we know that planets, stars and galaxies do not have fixed properties, we actually observe them to vary in their properties over a broad range. We can study how life depends on the local parameters while keeping the global parameters fixed. We can also tally their numbers. For local tuning, then, we have the hope of accurately quantifying the available probabilistic resources and estimating how much of our local circumstances can be explained by observer self-selection.

Historically, local tuning has been explored within the context of exobiology or astrobiology. Motivated by the desire to find other inhabited planets, astrobiologists have sought to determine the full range of environments compatible with life (i.e. habitable environments). Over the past 20 years, considerable progress has been made towards this end. In the following section, I review the state of our knowledge about habitable environments (Gonzalez 2005). In the section ‘Implications for global tuning,’ I return to the topic of global tuning and describe how local and global tuning are linked.

I’m familiar with all of those chapter authors by name, and I’ve read most of them. These are some of the best authors on this topic. I’ve added the book to the right column of the blog, where I always display the book I’m currently reading. You can check my What I am Reading page to find out what I’ve been reading.