Geologists ring in on the intelligent design situation. There is some good stuff here, but it is a lot less than I had hoped for. There is a bit of geology, a bit of biology, a bit of paleontology, but nothing goes into much depth. Except...the constant accomodationism that shows a woeful lack of understanding of the view of both religious people and atheists, and aims for that common ground, or golden mean, that is probably unattainable for all but a cherished few who have decided to move God out of the realm of human affairs and into some vague ether of "something out there". One essay, the final, starts out well, but ends up poorly, by presenting an option the author appears to recognize is not doable, because there is no way that the truly religious will accept it (and probably not even the truly non-religious, but those don't seem to matter in this discussion). Several of the articles fairly drip with contempt for non-belief, and the constant refrain of "science can say nothing about God" is as ubiquitous as it is false (science can say little to nothing about "something out there", but can say plenty about the God being posited by the intelligent design creationists). In the end, it left me with a feeling that the book was more about reconciling science and religion than supporting science against the attacks of intelligent designers. ( )

I have a somewhat sick fascination with creationist beliefs that needs to be feed at least once year. For the Rock Record was just the nourishment I needed. In this volume Jill Schneiderman and Warren Allmon have collected essays and papers written by practicing earth scientists about the Intelligent Design movement and creationism in general and have tried to dismantle many of these movements claims about geology. From the onset though you can tell that scientist had a difficult to really critique the Intelligent Design movement from a geological perspective, since it hasn’t taken much of a stance on geology, or the fossil record. This might be because those in the ID movement aren’t very concerned at the moment with the geologic ramifications of their ideas or they known that they can’t remain neutral if they begin to speculate about an “unknown” intelligent creator and its handy work with rocks, and actively avoid all discussion of geology whenever possible (I suspect the latter). So really, this is more of critique of the creationist movement in general and the philosophical underpinnings of intelligent design from the perspective of working geologist.

Most of the earlier essays deal with paleontology and the fossil record exemplifies the theory of evolution; and how IDers manipulate the public into a misunderstanding about what the record shows and how the evolutionary tree unfolds. For me though the best early chapter was one that summarized all the various conjectures presented by creationist to explain the earth’s structure within their narrow view of the Old Testament. That chapter only was worth the cover price. Most of the other chapters sort out philosophical, political, and religious issues in the debates about intelligent design. It is important to remember that these are written more from experience then any formally training in philosophy of science or theology. Which I think makes them accessible rather the all too academic speech that so often characterizes these kinds of debates. Warren Allmon ends the book with a chapter on how scientist approaches the religion-science debate. He gets a few geologists to speak candidly about their belief systems.

There are a couple of flaws with this book that should be mentioned. Since, the Intelligent Design movement has been rather mum about geology; some of the authors have taken it upon themselves to fill in the logical conclusions of an Intelligent Design. Not an easy task and I don’t think those involved would characterize the geologist conclusions in quite the same manner. The other flaw is that since this was a collection of essays written independently of one another, there is a lot of rehashing of the same introduction of the Intelligent Design movement and how it’s not science, which can grow tiresome, but the meat of each essay is different and fascinating in its own right that reading the same intro over and over again is well worth it.

On the whole this is a solid book that treads over much of the same ground that so many other books have showing the weaknesses of the various creationist movements. The only real difference form all those other books is that geologist and paleontologist wrote it from their perspective. Thus giving it a much narrower focus. ( )