A brilliant book which provides a first-class education to any who want to understand the complexity of Christian reasoning in proving or providing the ‘proofs’ of God’s existence.  Many great, but certainly not all, Christian philosophers and their detractors are covered (21 in total).  Levering covers the Patristic era, the Reformation and ‘Enlightenment’ eras, along with the 19^th and 20^th centuries.  In so doing he competently and arrestingly manages the key doctrines, figures, and proofs of those who demonstrate in various ways the existence of God, and those who oppose the very idea of God, or declare that such proofs do not exist.

Once striking fact in the modern world, made very clear by Levering, is the almost complete ignorance of modern ‘philosophers’, scientists, atheists or deists, on the construction and logic, indeed complexity and detail of the actual arguments made by Christian theologians and metaphysicians, who merged various strands of pagan Greek-Romano beliefs, science, naturalism and rationalism, with Christian dogma and revelation, to scaffold various, and at times quite different ‘proofs’ of God’s existence.  When you read a modern atheist’s dismissal of God’s existence and their sloppy, ignorant and often times intentionally deceitful ‘interpretations’ of what Christian philosophers and scientists actually said, it is clear that there is no engagement of a priori arguments by the moderns about God’s existence.  There is just cleavage and avoidance of the topic altogether, an impoverishment of education and learning, further highlighting the tawdry culture of our modern world, the lack of philosophical rigour, and the determination not to know truth or any reality outside of the physical. 

Before endeavouring to engage with the actual men from Tertullian, through Calvin and to Barth, Levering devotes some insight and energy into describing ‘scientism’, or the cult of ‘science’.  Levering: “When Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow claim that God’s existence is no longer plausible because all things could have come forth from the quantum law of gravity, they fail to recognise, as Hart says, that the issue is ‘the very possibility of existence as such, not only of this universe but of all the laws and physical conditions that produced it.’  Indeed.  The existence of anything is the point.  There should be nothing.  Hawking chatters about spontaneous generation creating all life.  Abiogenesis and spontaneous generation are proven to be impossible and about as ‘anti science’ a position as it is possible to attain.  The complexity of just one protein cannot be explained by chance and is mathematically impossible to have occurred in nature by random events.

Levering mentions Richard Dawkins, who utterly fails to grasp, either on purpose or through ignorance and mental sloth, the a priori, detailed, and variegated proofs of God’s existence.  Dawkins tries to rubbish St. Thomas Aquinas (13^th century intellect who synthesised Church theology, Neo-Platonism, and Aristotelian naturalism) without even bothering to understand the basic ideas of Thomism (p. 210).  A core premise of Thomism is the ‘Pure Act’ which acts on all objects but is itself unmovable and infinite.  He is not arguing or proposing a finite Deistic God who stands in the natural order of things as wrongly envisioned by Dawkins.  Rather the real crux of Thomism is to account for motion/change in beings in which there is an evident mix of potency and act, for which reason they cannot account for their own actuality.  The Pure Act is not put into motion by any other as imagined by Dawkins.

The ignorance of Dawkins and Hawking provides an excuse for many not to believe in God.  Rituals, prayers, reading, understanding the corpus of the Catechism is hard work.  Few want to invest in it when they can point to the lack of proof of God’s existence as evinced by ‘popular science’ and popular culture.  Levering quote and footnotes the notable philosopher Roger Scruton (Face of God) (p. 216), who states that the main question which is unanswered by modern science is ‘the topic of contingent being’, or the ‘being qua being’.  As David Hume recognised it is unbelief which is irrational, ‘it makes sense to believe in reason and God, and it may make a kind of nonsensical sense to believe in neither, but it is ultimately contradictory to believe in one but not the other.’  Unlike atheist claims there is no physical or biological evidence to rule out God, quite the opposite.  Complexity, order, the biological world, a mind, a conscience, a heart, a brain, DNA, the stars, the Sun….all point to a creator of a Pure Act, removed from a first cause, but omnipotent in design, natural laws, scientific and mathematical laws, and imparting the creation of something.  As Levering proves, there is no rigorous thinking in Atheism.