God: The Evidence (Hardcover)

Perhaps the overall problem is that Glynn purports to offer scientific evidence that God MUST exist (or at least probably does), while in reality, he merely refutes hard-core atheists who say that God CANNOT exist. Which, if you're not in that camp, isn't all that compelling.

And it's questionable how well he does even that. Chapter One is devoted to the logically useless claim that because the universe as we know it is highly improbable, some intelligent being must have made it. Which is kind of like saying that if you put on a blindfold and walk 100 miles, and end up in Pittsburgh, then every step you took along the way must have been designed to bring you to Pittsburgh. (He later mentions, in passing, that scientists don't buy this because it's teleological -- without defending it or justifying himself in any way!) In the same chapter, his supposed deconstruction of the well-known "monkeys typing Shakespeare" idea is rife with maddening fallacies, inconsistencies, and subtle but deadly conceptual flip-flops.

Chapters 2 and 3, about the mental and physical health benefits of faith, are presented well enough and based on, as far as I know, reasonably compelling data. But, as some readers suggest, there are cause-and-effect questions that are never addressed, and even if faith directly benefits health, that has nothing to do with the actual existence of God, so I frankly don't know why he wrote these chapters.

The much maligned near-death-experiences chapter is perhaps the most interesting, if only because it tells some fascinating stories that, if true, cannot be explained by known physiological processes. Of course, this doesn't mean they aren't caused by natural phenomena which we don't understand yet. This is a consistent flaw in the book's outlook. Glynn constantly puts admittedly intriguing phenomena to the test of "Can science explain it?" If not, Glynn implies, it must be God's work. Little attention is paid to the possibility that there are natural processes which we are not yet, and may never be, capable of comprehending. This may partially be the fault of hardcore atheist-scientists who have incurred his gentle wrath.

Still, by this point I wasn't thinking much about that anymore. What Glynn does well is write cogent, genuine, forward-thinking reflections on faith. The message of his last two chapters emphasizes the common bond of all religions, the need to dispense with hypocrisy and tribalism, and the rewards of spiritual peace. If he could stick to that, and get out of the science business, we might be getting somewhere.