Gijsbert Van den Brink

After reading the authors' discussion at the end of the book, I know that they spent a lot of time and effort trying to make this an engaging story as well as an exploration of universal history from a theologically conservative and scientifically literate perspective. Unfortunately, at least in the English translation, the didacticism overwhelmed everything else. The idea of protons, neutrons, and electrons being conscious and having anachronistic conversations with one another was just too implausibly cutesy for me, though I can't think of an alternate way to provide a "first-person" account of the universe before the emergence of life.

Admittedly, I'm not the intended audience for this book, which was seemingly meant to work as a fable for older children, an introduction to theistic evolution for evangelical believers, and a science-positive tract for questioning agnostics. As a progressive Christian with an evangelical background, I'm wary of religious didacticism and found the insistence on biblical historicity a bit silly (by contrast, the reworking of the Fall story was slightly bizarre). While I appreciate the efforts to mesh faith in a personal God with an enthusiasm for science, neither the theology nor the Three Trees-style plot worked for me, so I found myself skimming once it became obvious most of the story would be Heilsgeschichte-via-random-objects.… (plus d'informations)

This was an imaginative book, and I appreciated the authors' attempt to blend science (cosmology, physics, evolution, etc.) with Christianity into a narrative history of the universe. There is, of course, no paradox involved; despite the opinions of many, science and faith are complementary, not contradictory.

That being said, I don't think that the implementation quite succeeds. The narrative is necessarily perfunctory, as it covers billions of years in a fairly small book, and it skims over the details of the scientific and Biblical history that it covers. The reader needs to have some familiarity with the subject matter already in order to fully understand what is being described, I think. The casual reader (i.e., someone without a background in science or Christianity) may not know what to make of the strong and weak nuclear forces, or understand why light appeared in the universe only after a few hundred thousand years, or who Womuntu and Maisha are supposed to be in the Bible.

However, I think the authors do succeed in making the presence of God -- or at least his purpose -- felt throughout the story, from the very beginning with the Big Bang to the present day and open-ended future. And that, perhaps, is the most important thing.… (plus d'informations)