Ayala does a decent job explaining the facts of evolution -- but not more than decent. (Better, more thorough, more scientifically bracing: "Why Evolution is True," by Jerry Coyne. I'm beginning to think longer really is better in evolution books. There are no shortcuts to the evidence and a reader unwilling to gird for a long argument will probably refuse to be persuaded anyway, or is incapable of being persuaded.) It's comforting to see a genre evolving as authors vie to be the best explainer of the science of evolution, mentioning but minimizing the threadbare objections that fill popular understanding. And I praise the author for trying to bridge science and belief, and for taking the stand during the Dover school board travesty as the voice of religious believers who are intelligent, genuinely curious, and humane. His work there is heroic.



That said, I think Ayala fails. Bridging religion and naturalism will take, well, a miracle, and I was disappointed that this book contains no miracles. We're still stuck at Gould's prayer for "non-overlapping magisteria" (translation: Can't we all get along? Pleeease?) and the reader of this book is left, at the close, in the heavenly waiting room. Ayala's defense of the religious magisterium is only pious. As a veteran of Catholic schools I heard the echo of countless well-meaning, church-loyal religion teachers who thought they were giving intellectually restless children an answer by saying science is science, revelation is revelation. Sadly, they weren't. The evidence is not the same, and never will be. What science offers is provable and disprovable, it moves forward, assassinating pieties (including its own) along the way. It destroys paradigms, scatters clouds and peers into space and time and finds nobody there.



It simply isn't good enough to say that what religion says (and which religion? the world is made up of more than Dominicans. Is the palm reader's word as good as the pope's?) should be accorded the same authority as what chemistry says. Or astronomy, or physics. Compared to science, scriptures and oracles are a foundation of sand--a worldwide, ever drifting, mountain of sand.



Among other traps, Ayala falls into the because-I-say-so method of reconciliation: I am religious, and I believe science tells us true things about the world (including biological evolution), therefore there is no conflict between science and religion. QED. So: I, Mark Sanford, am a devout Christian who believes infidelity is wrong, and yet I jetted away to canoodle with my Argentine girlfriend, therefore Christian faith and infidelity can coexist harmoniously. Not QED. We know the name of that argument, and it's not reconciliation. Speaking kindly, we call it cognitive dissonance. Less charitably, we call it hypocrisy. I'd label it, in "Darwin's Gift," wishful thinking.



I was hoping to discover (again, in my miracle) that Ayala had thought it all through. Instead, he felt it through.



Augustine's and Aquinas's proofs for God's existence haven't persuaded anybody outside of seminary for hundreds of years. Nor does William Paley deserve the fulsome treatment Ayala provides. Paley's watch was demonstrably wrong, as wrong as geocentrism, as wrong as the theory of bodily humours. The more thorough class of evolution-explaining books lays this out. Nor is theology evidence. In these excursions the author weakens his book significantly.



The title, by the way, is the author's distinctive assertion that evolution can solve the theodicy problem. He no longer has to blame God for nature's manifest cruelty, inefficiencies, massacres and mysteries. Whew. It's all because of natural selection and its wobbly, non-intelligently-designed path. Somehow I'm not reassured. Ayala proves that God is not a shoddy designer after all -- he's no designer at all! Except as the secondhand shaper of unchallengeable "revelation" somehow collected in a volume of peculiar short stories and homilies (myths, as they say, to die for), or perhaps as the still, small voice one feigns to hear in a cathedral nave. This is an old, old problem: the more one learns about the world, the less space remains for the old sky god, the punisher, the inexplicable he-who-must-be-obeyed. Humanists say this god has run out of road entirely--but yet ethics, morality, and something forward-seeming remain. This is a profound, painful challenge to the old pieties, and it's been raging for a couple of centuries now. It will keep raging. Barring a miracle.