• The book—Why Us?—is by James Le Fanu, a British physician published in leading medical journals. He's a columnist for The London Telegraph and is not identified with Christianity. Astoundingly, mainstream-left Pantheon Books is the publisher.
Why Us? explodes at times into one of the best odes to joy since chapters 38-41 of the book of Job. Le Fanu wonders why this world holds a huge variety of bat species with extraordinary faces, when their "near-blindness should make them indifferent to physical appearances? . . . Why should the many thousands of species of birds yet be so readily distinguishable one from the other by their pattern of flight or the shape of their wing, the colour of their plumage or the notes of their song?"
Le Fanu does not write as a theist, but his poetic prose at times reminds me of Jonathan Edwards, who once declared that "there came into the mind so sweet a sense of the glorious majesty and grace of God, a divine glory in everything—in the sun, the moon and stars; in the clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers, trees; in the water and all nature." And earthworms: Le Fanu notes that humans depend on "the humble earthworm, without whose exertions in aerating the dense, inhospitable soil there could never have been a single field of corn. . . . Five hundred thousand to an acre passing ten tons of soil every year through their bodies."
Le Fanu goes on to explain how finely tuned the universe is, and why many 19th- and 20th-century minds embraced godless evolution despite all the evidence of design to the contrary. He then shows how much man's ingenuity in making artificial hearts and everything else is dwarfed by God's. Le Fanu eviscerates salvation by science: The double helix is actually impenetrable, the brain unfathomable, the genome over-rated, the self a mystery.
Christian readers of Why Us? will draw the conclusion that though we may think we've come a long way from Job because we now understand why thunder occurs, our real movement in comparison to God's majesty is about a millimeter.