The blurb on the back of this book tells the prospective reader that it is a ‘comprehensive survey of 2,000 years of debate … It provides a neutral … account of the topic’. Having read it, I can confirm that that's all true – and it sums it up.
For some tastes, An Introduction to Design Arguments will have simply too much coverage (depth will be judged to have been inordinately sacrificed to breadth). For those with limited antiquarian interests, for example, much of the material in the earlier chapters, detailing arguments which – post-Darwin – all right-thinking people would discard instantly were they ever to be presented (as nowadays they are not), will elicit little interest. More controversially, some will find the discussion of Intelligent Design strangely fulsome (surely debate around this argument is a phenomenon largely confined to the United States and it is sustained there for political as much as philosophical reasons) and the discussion of the fine-tuning version of the argument by contrast rather too brisk (surely this is the argument with most hope of actually working). But, for good or ill, it's all there; nothing is omitted. And so, if one really does want ‘a comprehensive survey of 2,000 years of debate’, as the blurb puts it, this is the book.
The author's inclusive attitude is not confined merely to his choices over what he includes, but extends to his choices over how to discuss what he includes; it is again as the blurb says: he provides a ‘neutral’ account. The tone is thus somewhat that of a bystander to a tradition of debate, rather than a contemporary participant in it. This will not be to everyone's tastes either, but if one really does want a book that keeps philosophical engagement with the substance of the arguments it lists at arm's length, one will not find much to complain about here. In short, some would wish on reading this book that it had been a bit more partial and a bit more partisan, but, in its own blurb's terms, it is an unqualified success. It does what it says on the tin.
