Review of The Best Argument for God

Yesterday I woke up feeling groggier than usual, but then discovered this email from a professor who just finished reading my book, The Best Argument for God, and it made me smile.

The book is very impressive. The amount of very up-to-date research (with many citations from the 2020s!), the combination of deductive and abductive approaches, the twist you put on various pre-existing debates or positions (PSR, etc.), your leaning into Christianity in your response to the problem of evil, the relevance of epiphenomenalism to the problem of evil, your particular take on the argument from morality (with little to no mention of God as a moral lawgiver): the book simultaneously draws on some well-known arguments while also being a novel approach. I have to say, you have a very unique, up to date, and wide-reaching reading history in natural theology that allows you to pull from a ton of different directions, with really interesting results. Your book showed me some new-ish turns things seem to have taken in the field, such as the idea that by default, unrestricted being is unlimited in power (omnipotent), whereas restriction (and so complexity) are required to peg a thing's power at a finite level. The repetition of the point that the world we inhabit is pretty close to the world we'd expect if God existed was striking; it takes repeated hearings for one to even entertain that, since we're primed to think the opposite. I think we're normally (culturally) given a story that's termed naturalistic and that fits a limited amount of the data quite well at first glance, and so it's easy to default to that; your book shows that's too quick and easy. It's an extremely interesting approach. I suppose I cut my teeth back in the day more on individual arguments, maybe sometimes presented as a group (cf. any W.L. Craig debate), but your very conscious pursuit of "worldview comparison" after deductive argumentation ties things together in a way I'm not used to seeing done. Also, you have a great pithy style: the book is chock FULL of argumentation, and you rarely waste a word at the sentence level. Frankly I think the book could profitably be read multiple times (or thoroughly outlined). Anyway, it's a great achievement that's clearly the result of immersing yourself in philosophy of religion for years. I hope your arguments get the attention they deserve. Congratulations again.