Our culture still has tremendous things going for it, in part because the average person rejects nihilism. But the signs of nihilism are all around us. In the book, we begin in Shakespeare and show how there are prominent literary critics bent on explaining away the genius and worth of Shakespeare, critics who claim that Shakespeare is just a dead white male trying to propagate the patriarchy, or just the product of Darwinian sexual selection. This attack on artistic genius is widespread. Materialism denies genius and, in the process, levels our culture. One university, for instance, offers a choice between studying Shakespeare or Tupac Shakur. This should give us pause, even those of us who never understood Shakespeare. In certain quarters we’re seeing a slide into a kind of barbarism tarted up as nihilistic sophistication.

Throughout. Historical scientists look for something in the present with the demonstrated power to produce an event from the past. Take the origin of life. We now know the first self-reproducing cell not only required an elaborate and intricate structure, but a tremendous amount of new information in its DNA. As design theorists we ask, “What in the present produces new information?” Our uniform experience tells us that there is only one type of thing that does this–intelligent agents. But we also have uniform experience at detecting a high category of intelligence, genius. In the book we apply that experience to the evidence of creative genius we find throughout nature.

Yes, but it’s not a simple answer. You’ll have to read the book.

Reductionists strive to describe wholes strictly according to their parts, to identify ultimate reality with smaller and smaller parts, all the way down to the atomic and subatomic levels. We argue that reductionist science is misguided. As the best biologists now realize, the living wholes are just as real as their parts. And as we demonstrate in our treatment of the history of chemistry, the best science has always assumed that nature was a work of genius possessing an underlying elegance and harmony. Reductionism is being overturned in a variety of fields by the latest evidence in favor of a kind of wholism — the living cell over the parts; the living animal over its material parts. And stepping back further, we find that the fine tuning of the physical constants of physics and chemistry find their greatest meaning in the drama of biology.

The book would make an excellent resource for a capstone course, pulling together the arts and sciences to demonstrate the rich interconnectedness of our world. Since we cover so many different fields, we strove to make every chapter readily accessible to non-experts.