In the eight and final chapter Dowe pulls things together. He maintains that the best way to view science and religion is in terms not of conflict but of harmony. He rejects the strong indepedence view and sees 'considerable interaction' between the two.
Suprisingly he advocates an evidentialist position: 'if there is no evidence for the existence of God then it is not rational to believe in it'. He also believes that the designer argument is useful: 'the designer revealed by science is perfectly compatible with the God of the Bible...' (p. 195). He goes on '... it is true that the anthropic argument will not settle, for example, whether Christianity or Islam is correct, but if correct it does show that one of these or something similar is right, and that atheism is not (p. 195).
Dowe has, I think, shown that the conflict view of science and religion is erroneous. Galileo, Darwin and Hawking is one of the best science and religion books of 2005 - it is much better than most of those on the Science and Theology website list.
When I first started to blog my way through this book I wondered how effective historical case studies would be to tell us how science and religion should relate? I am still left with this unanswered question.
"If God is sovereign, then his lordship must extend over all of life, and it cannot be restricted to the walls of the church or within the Christian orbit." Abraham Kuyper Common Grace 1.1.
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