Unpromising serpent
Review of Steve Jones, The Serpent’s Promise: The Bible Retold as Science (Little, Brown, 2013). This must surely qualify as one of the worst books I read last year. That I managed to finish reading it is itself something of a feat. Jones purports to be writing something different to the “Polemical works for and against the power of belief” (p. 4). But this book is nothing if not polemical. There is a (seriously held) view that science and religion have much that is complementary and that each can illuminate the other. Jones has dismissed this by page 5. What is more interesting is the reason why Jones junks this understanding. There is no exploration of the view, let alone a philosophical account of why it does not hold water. Rather Jones simply states “the view that science and doctrine occupy separate, or even complementary, universes and that each provides an equally valid insight into the world seems to...