Show Me God brings together the great cosmologists of our time to talk about their discoveries--and the implications about God. In exclusive interviews, Stephen Hawking, George Smoot, Alan Guth, Arno Penzias and others speak of how their discoveries affect life's big questions: creation, the fine-tuning of the universe, why we're here, and the nature of God. Getting as close to the discoveries as possible, Fred Heeren interviews Nobel prize-winning astrophysicists, NASA team leaders, and top theoretical physicists to explore life's big questions. Heeren uses humor, dialogues, and a multi-media format to examine the issues; he also tells the stories of how the major discoveries were made.

In _Show Me God_, Heeren gives an overview of what scientists have learned about the cosmos in the 20th century, and stresses how science and the Bible are not incompatible. He includes interviews with scientists such as Stephen Hawking, George Smoot, and others, several of whom first made the discoveries he's discussing. He does an excellent job of explaining a lot of pretty heady science like the red shifts of galaxies and microwave radiation in the universe in a way that makes sense to the layperson.

The major strength of Heeren's approach is his interviews with scientists, only one of whom is a Christian himself. The science facts are absolutely fascinating, and I found myself remembering explanations from _A Brief History of Time_ and _A Short History of Nearly Everything_, both books that I had read earlier this year. Reading those books beforehand made this book much more comprehensible than it had been when I attempted to read it in high school. At the same time, Heeren's explanations were quite good, and I found myself understanding what the previous books were talking about much better for having read this one. Unfortunately, the weaknesses of this book kept me from rating it as high as I would have for the science alone. Heeren has two audiences in mind: the unbelieving skeptic and the Christian who wants to have more of a background in science to be able to witness to the unbelieving skeptic. This means that he not only introduces the book to both audiences in two different chapters, he also at times spends a paragraph or an entire chapter speaking to one group and not the other. It was very distracting to have him not talking to me for chunks of the book at a time. The second weakness was the gimmicky way in which he tried to make the science more accessible, which he did by inserting a science fiction story as the third chapter and by breaking things up with conversations with his imaginary editor Carl that were riddled with lame jokes. I thought that, overall, it would have worked better to let the science facts speak for themselves and let the reader both make the inferences for himself and decide when the science was getting too much and take a short break from reading (I did manage to do this on my own with _A Brief History of Time_, after all). All in all, I would keep the book for reference to the science facts and explanations, but would not read the entire book again. ( )