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 PrintableVersion God's big designHelpful and easy to readGOD’S BIG DESIGN This book is a helpful guide to what the first two chapters of Genesis reveal about God’s plan and purpose in creation, and Vaughan Roberts unpacks their message with relevant application to contemporary issues and the gospel. There are frequent robust assertions that ‘God alone is Creator’. Of the multiple trillions of stars and 35,000 known species of fish he unambiguously declares: ‘God made every one’. The Garden of Eden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil are presented as fact, not myth. Macro-evolution ‘remains a theory which is questioned by many’; ‘much that is presented as fact, not least in the area of origins and evolution, is still only a theory and is disputed even within the scientific community’. Elsewhere he is less forthright. The concept of our first parents as derived from ‘ape-like forebears . . . at some point in time is a valid view’ (p.33). Vaughan correctly anticipates an element of disappointment in not having a little more creationist engagement with modern science (p.10). The debate doesn’t have to be sterile or tedious. While there is a sense in which ‘the fundamental choice is not between creation and evolution, but between creation and accident’, more could have been made of the wealth of serious scientific critiques of the prevailing view of origins. Philip Johnson’s Darwin on Trial is mentioned in the further reading appendix; Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box could have been added. The chapter on the irreducible knee joint in Stuart Burgess’s Hallmarks of Design (Day One Publications) is on its own a compelling case for rejecting Darwin Evolution. The later chapters provide excellent material, flowing out of the creation account, on: Gender and life issues (‘We put the pet to sleep, why not grandpa?’); the environment (including animal welfare); sex and marriage (‘the maker’s instructions — God is for sex, sex is for marriage, marriage is for life’), and work (it should be much more than ‘a necessary evil separating one weekend from another’). The fourth commandment is considered from the perspectives of a still binding creation ordinance and a more loosely-interpreted guiding principle. Vaughan Roberts nails his colours to the mast of the second view, but then applies it in a fairly traditional way! A valuable book that is easy to read with something to say to a variety of potential reader categories. John Rosser,
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