As stated in the Introduction, this book is intended for academics. I am reviewing it as a layman with an interest is the subject matter.
Inside this large collection of essays (54) is a smaller collection of really interesting and informative essays trying to get out.
Mikael Stenmark (Chapter 6) makes useful distinctions between religion & theology and between spectator rationality & agent rationality.
Richard Swinburne presents an excellent discussion of the role of natural theology in Chapter 11.
Stephan Barr's essay (Chapter 16) is a very good summary of modern cosmology and Christian theology .
Michael Ruse's essay (Chapter 22) on Darwinism and atheism is particularly well thought out and well written.
Simon Conway Morris's essay (Chapter 23) on creation and evolutionary convergence demonstrates how much his writing has improved since his 2003 book "Life's Solution," (not that it was poor then).
John Haught points out that biological evolution plus cosmology tells us much more than biological evolution alone in his essay (Chapter 26) on Christianity and human evolution.
Chapter 43, by Noreen Herzfeld, is a helpful discussion of Artificial Intelligence in the context of an analogy of humans trying to make computers in their own image, compared to God making humans in his image.
Chapter 46, by Alan G. Padgett, is a good introduction to the subject of miracles.
Chapter 47, by Robert John Russel, is an excellent summary of the current status of eschatology in science and theology, and options for going forward, focusing particularly on "the impasse between a cosmic future of `freeze or fry' and an eschatological future of new creation.
The obligatory pro- and anit-intelligent design essays are handled by Stephen Meyer and Francisco Ayala, respectively.
On the negative side, my impression of Paul Draper's essay on Christian theism and "indifference naturalism" (Chapter 27) favors IN over CT by begging the question and making unfounded assumptions. Draper makes a bunch of unsupported assumptions, then reaches the conclusions that he wanted to reach. His argument: assume that A > B, then A is > B. Repeat six times.
The book includes several essays by non-Christians. For example, Sean Carroll (the physicist) argues in Chapter 17 that the universe does not need God.
The last six essays are brief biographies of six significant figures in the field of science and Christianity: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas F. Torrance, Arthur Peacocke, Ian G. Barbour, Woldhart Pannenberg & John Polkinghorne. Christopher Knight's essay on Polkinghorne was particularly interesting because it pointed out some problem areas where Polkinghorne differs from other scientist-theologians.
Each essay ends with Notes, References, and Further Reading.
In summary, I found the book to be a mixture of excellent, so-so, and difficult-to-read essays.
