Chance or Purpose? Buy It!

"The Christian idea of the world is that it originated in a very complicated process of evolution but that it nevertheless still comes in its depths from the Logos. It thus bears reason in itself." -Pope Benedict XVI

Here's a great book by Christoph Cardinal Schönborn that offers a serious, thoughtful approach to understanding and reconciling the singular role that "rational faith" plays in the heated debate over creation and evolution. I picked it up the other day (it's a short read) and I highly recommend it. Schönborn is as tough and scrupulous intellectually in dismantling the mindless propositions of American Fundamentalists, who, somewhat embarrassingly, assert that the world is only 6,000 years old, as he is in picking apart the straw-man arguments of the sterile, boring atheists, who narrowly squeeze out any room for God in their cold theories and dismiss the complexities of reality as random accidents of mere chance. To get a sense of the book's content, here is the publisher's synopsis:

Cardinal Christoph Schönborn's article on evolution and creation in The New York Times launched an international controversy. Critics charged him with biblical literalism and "creationism".
In this book, Cardinal Schönborn responds to his critics by tackling the hard questions with a carefully reasoned the "theology of creation". Can we still speak intelligently of the world as "creation" and affirm the existence of the Creator, or is God a "delusion"? How should an informed believer read Genesis? If God exists, why is there so much injustice and suffering? Are human beings a part of nature or elevated above it? What is man's destiny? Is everything a matter of chance or can we discern purpose in human existence?
In his treatment of evolution, Cardinal Schönborn distinguishes the biological theory from "evolutionism", the ideology that tries to reduce all of reality to mindless, meaningless processes. He argues that science and a rationally grounded faith are not at odds and that what many people represent as "science" is really a set of philosophical positions that will not withstand critical scrutiny.
Chance or Purpose? directly raises the philosophical and theological issues many scientists today overlook or ignore. The result is a vigorous, frank dialogue that acknowledges the respective insights of the philosopher, the theologian and the scientist, but which calls on them to listen and to learn from each another.