The Territories of Human Reason
By Alister E McGrath
OUP, 304pp, £25/$35
Alister McGrath is someone who has frequently taken on the New Atheists, once charging Richard Dawkins with practising “the atheist equivalent of slick hellfire preaching”.
McGrath’s new book, subtitled Science and Theology in an Age of Multiple Realities, is a different kind of endeavour: a dense academic monograph in which he carefully edges his way across “distinct, yet overlapping and competing, epistemic territories and communities”. His hoped-for destination is “transdisciplinarity” – a way of allowing discourse across and within boundaries, especially the boundaries that mark out and notoriously wedge apart science and religion.
