There is no shortage of books that set out, as this volume does, to demonstrate that ‘science and religion are not only compatible, but even mutually illuminating’. Nonetheless, Philip Rolnick's Origins is a welcome addition to the catalogue, not least because his approach will likely carry weight with more conservative readers: his very first sentence mentions Moses, for instance, as the assumed author of Genesis. The book ends with two surprising but valuable chapters, each dealing with a pair of ideas and their relation. While what is discussed in these chapters grows organically out of what has been covered hitherto, they constitute a far from obvious or expected way to conclude a book on theology and science. One concerns ‘the given and the earned’, taking in grace, nature, law, revelation and virtue. The other deals with ‘the old and the new’, and the contemporary value of tradition. The sense here is of an author expounding themes that have come to matter to him a great deal. Either would repay attention by a wider theological audience than those primarily concerned with the natural sciences.

Otherwise, Rolnick divides his attention between evolution and cosmology. He covers the science of the former within the framework of four perceived challenges to Christian theology. These are (1) the challenge raised by evolution to notions of ‘divine design’, (2) the challenge posed by natural selection to belief in ‘a God of love’, (3) the challenge raised by ‘struggle, pain, and death’ in evolution to the goodness of God and (4) the challenge of common evolutionary ancestry to the idea of human uniqueness.

On design, Rolnick makes the valuable, if now well-established, point that evolution gives as well as taking away: if certain contentions about God having designed creatures directly have become more difficult to articulate, responses to evolution have also reinvigorated the belief that God confers the nobility of agency upon the world and its processes, which we now see bringing forth creatures well-suited to their environment. Loose ends, however, remain. Rolnick holds that ‘humanity must be non-accidental, our existence divinely intended’; how that squares with the science is left more or less undiscussed.

The middle two ‘challenges’ are a little jumbled, both because they are not particularly clearly distinguished from one another, and because one of Rolnick's most perceptive responses on this front comes in an earlier chapter, when he suggests that the purpose of creation is not ‘comfort’ but ‘movement, vitality, growth, and freshness’. On human uniqueness, Rolnick's conclusion is that we are ‘not unique. But . . . we are also unique’: on the one hand, human beings are in historical, anatomical, physiological and genetic continuity with other creatures, on the other, we see significant human differences from other animals, in body, mind, behaviour, language, culture and religion. The material here is good, but the form of the argument – as a ‘close shave’ – is a little weak: it looked for a moment as if cherished theological notions of human superiority were under threat, but they turn out to be safe after all.

The chapters on evolution are primarily written for the troubled Christian, to unearth where the challenges to the faith might lie, and then not only to respond to them, but also to see how those challenges might improve our theology. In contrast, turning to cosmology, Rolnick is less inclined to see provocations to the faith. In fact, here he is more likely to see challenges to atheism, whether in the sense of a beginning that is thrown up by contemporary cosmology, or in what has been called the ‘fine-tuning’ of the universe for life. Here, it should be said, Rolnick's account of element formation in the early universe is particularly fine.

The final chapter in the cosmology section concerns the Logos, as the divine source of creaturely reasonableness. As he made his point here, that both the origin of creaturely order and of the human capacity to discern it come from God as Word, I was left wondering what underlying account of divine exemplarity the author would subscribe to. Some such account is necessary, but it is not spelt out. There are plenty of insights here, however, and if the book raises almost as many questions as it addresses, that is perhaps no bad thing.