There are so many books about science and religion. Yet another one? OK, you may think, this one is not about science and religion in general, but about the life sciences and Christianity in particular. But so what? Rather than being about Galileo and the Inquisition, will it be about Darwin’s “Bulldog” Thomas Henry Huxley defeating Bishop Samuel Wilberforce (a.k.a. “Soapy Sam”) in Oxford, and the like? Well, the answer is emphatically no. The present book is like no other book on science and religion that you have ever read. Based on his 55 years of scholarship and teaching, Michael Ruse has produced a splendid, and thoughtful, account of the deeper differences and similarities between the ways that the life sciences and Christianity approach nature and humanity. Drawing on the distinction between organicism and mechanism, Ruse shows how we can find influences of both on both the life sciences and Christianity. In the end there is no right versus wrong, no bad versus good, but a complicated relationship among two human endeavors to understand nature and our place in it. This is why one can accept both, only one, or neither of them. Read this book, and your understanding of both science and religion will never be the same again.

Kostas Kampourakis, Series Editor