Why Not God? Rethinking Our Beliefs About Truth and Faith
Charles Mastroni
Emerald Lake Books, 2026, 233 pp.

Charles Mastroni was born in 1954. He studied biology as an undergraduate at Penn State, worked for years as a carpenter and site foreman, and then spent fifteen years in corporate purchasing, taking an MBA on the way. By his own account he also lived as a great many young men of his generation lived, until in 1989 he turned to God. He later attended classes at Reformed Theological Seminary, and is now deacon emeritus of his church in Connecticut, where he teaches and preaches. Why Not God? is the book he has written, at seventy, for the people he loves who do not believe. “Many people I care about don’t believe in God,” he says in his opening note. “My faith has brought me peace, hope and purpose, and I want others, especially those I love, to know that same joy.”

I should say where I stand, because it bears on everything that follows. I am a Catholic and a libertarian. I believe what Mr Mastroni believes about the Trinity, the Incarnation and the Resurrection. I share much of his dislike of the moral and political fashions of the past sixty years, and rather more of his suspicion of the people who enforce them. I therefore opened his book wishing to like it, and I do like parts of it very much. But I have to report that it is two books in one binding. The first is a testimony joined to a moral argument, and it deserves respect. The second is an attempt to settle questions of biology, physics and climatology by appeal to Scripture and common sense, and it fails. What is worse, the author believes that the first book cannot stand unless the second does. I think the opposite is true, and most of this review is an attempt to explain why.

I have read the book in a digital proof. I pass over the slips that any proof contains and that will no doubt be corrected, and my page references may not match the published edition.

What the book argues

The framework is something Mr Mastroni calls the TAKES model. Every view of the world, he says, has a theology, an anthropology, a theory of knowledge, an ethics and an account of salvation, and this is as true of the man who believes nothing as of the man who believes the Nicene Creed. Even the denial of God “is in itself a theology” (p. 3). Our beliefs under these five heads are not ornaments. They make us what we are and they decide how we live, so that it matters a great deal whether they are true.

Part One applies this to what the author regards as the leading errors of the age. Truth and morality are not relative. The religions of the world are not all the same. The Bible is a reliable record. The universe and the life in it are the work of an intelligent Creator, and the scientific accounts of their origin – the Big Bang and Darwinian evolution – are speculation taught to children as fact. Part Two, the longest in the book, describes the secular alternative. “Godless progressivism”, he says, has become a complete rival faith: “To its adherents, progressivism functions as a religion in all but name” (p. 119). Its objects of worship are examined in turn, and they include science, psychology, critical race theory, environmentalism, sex, drugs, communism and socialism. Part Three sets out the Christian answer under the same five heads, beginning with the Creed and ending with judgment and an invitation. There are two appendices, on the Resurrection and the Virgin Birth.

What is good in it

The best pages are those where the author is speaking of what he knows. In the middle of a chapter on the sexual revolution, he stops arguing and tells us something about himself:

“I woke up one morning with yet another woman I had no emotional connection with. This kind of life had no meaning, no goodness, and no future” (p. 165).

There is no arguing with that, and no need to. Later, writing about suffering, he mentions a cousin who was driving carefully when a drunk killed him and maimed his wife (p. 197). A man who has seen these things and come through them with his faith stronger has something to tell the rest of us, and I wish the book contained more of it.

The governing idea is also sound. Beliefs do have consequences. Nobody is without a view of what man is and what he is for, and those who say they have none have generally absorbed one from their surroundings without noticing. Mr Mastroni’s way of putting this – “we do not invent truth; we discover truth” (p. 19) – is the right starting point for any serious discussion. His case against relativism is the old one, and it is still good: the claim that nothing is true for everyone is offered as true for everyone. He adds the homely observation that “even thieves don’t want their possessions stolen” (p. 37), which says in seven words what moral philosophers have taken chapters to say.

There is, too, a real philosophical argument in the book, though the author seems not to know how good it is. Everything we see, he says, changes and passes away. Nothing of that kind holds its existence of itself. There must therefore be something that does, and “whatever has the power of existence in itself is pure being and must be eternal outside time” (p. 62). He connects this at once with the name given to Moses from the burning bush. The argument is put roughly, and credited to Descartes when it belongs to an older tradition, but it is recognisably the one that Aquinas built on the same verse of Exodus. I ask the reader to notice now, because I shall return to it, that this is an argument in metaphysics. It asks why there is anything at all. It would be exactly as strong, or as weak, whatever the physicists discovered next week.

The account of idolatry seems to me the most useful thing in Part Two. Idols, says Mr Mastroni, “are often created when a partial truth is elevated above all else and substituted for God” (p. 104). Chesterton said something similar in Orthodoxy, when he wrote that “the modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad.” It explains why the causes of our time are so hard to argue with: each began with something true. The author is fair enough to say so. “The civil rights movement was both necessary and right” (p. 144), he writes, and he gives the same credit to the early campaigns for the equality of women and for clean air. His complaint is against what these became once they had won.

On human nature and politics he says a good deal that a libertarian can only applaud. “Every ideological idol that has tried to create heaven on earth has ultimately turned violent or oppressive to those who oppose it” (p. 122). Of the communes of his youth he remarks that the members “couldn’t agree on an equal division of work or goods. What a surprise!” (p. 172). And he asks the question that socialists have never answered:

“Where do we find perfect leaders who, while holding absolute power, will make everything equal and fair without favoring themselves or their families? Such people do not exist” (p. 173).

He applies the same realism to the laboratory. “Scientists are not anymore angelic than the rest of humanity” (p. 129), and those who depend on grants will tend to find what the givers of grants wish to be found. This is ordinary public choice economics, and it is none the worse for coming from a deacon.

Finally, the Christian exposition in Part Three is orthodox and often careful. He prints the Creed in full. He explains why “being” is a better word than “substance” for what the Father and the Son share, and he sees that even the words “begets” and “proceeds” are “concessions to our limited understanding” (p. 185). He ranks the motives for doing right, with love of God and neighbour at the top and “external obedience driven only by the desire to avoid punishment” at the bottom (p. 206). When he traces the present confusion about marriage to the separation of sex from procreation (p. 149), he has reached, apparently by himself, the argument of Paul VI in Humanae Vitae. I do not agree with everything in these chapters, as will appear. But they are the work of a man who has thought about his faith.

A question of the wrong kind

I come now to the main difficulty. It concerns chapter 5, on origins, and it spreads from there through the rest of the book.

My own position can be stated in a few words. Religion has nothing to say about the factual claims of the natural sciences. Whether birds are descended from reptiles, how old the universe is, and what a doubling of carbon dioxide does to the temperature of the air are questions of fact about the physical world. They are to be settled on their own terms, by the people who do the work, using the methods proper to the work. The Church has no more to tell me about them than she has about the relative merits of Windows and the Apple Mac. She has no competence in the matter and has not been promised any.

This is not a modern evasion. Galileo, in his letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, quoted a churchman of his own day – generally taken to be Cardinal Baronius – as saying that “the intention of the Holy Spirit is to teach us how one goes to heaven and not how heaven goes.” Augustine, twelve centuries earlier, had warned that a Christian who talks nonsense about the natural world while claiming the authority of Scripture brings the faith itself into contempt, since unbelievers who catch him out on matters they understand will not listen to him about the resurrection of the dead. Leo XIII, in 1893, wrote that the Holy Ghost “did not intend to teach men these things (that is to say, the essential nature of the things of the visible universe), things in no way profitable unto salvation.” I do not pretend that my own Church has always kept to this rule. The condemnation of Galileo in 1633 was a breach of it, and it took until 1992 for a pope to say so plainly. But the rule is the right one, and the breach is remembered because it did so much harm.

Mr Mastroni knows the rule. He states it himself, and states it well. “Genesis is not a book of paleontology, genetics or physics” (p. 99). The Bible “contains parables, prophecy, symbolism and analogy”, and so should not be read in a “strictly literal sense” (pp. 92–93). The days of creation may be ages (p. 101). Had he stopped there, I should have had no complaint. But he does not stop there. “No, birds were created as birds” (p. 76). “We are not derived, nor have we evolved from the animal kingdom” (p. 192). When the geneticists and the fossil-hunters say otherwise, his reply is that “science was not there at the creation of the world, nor were you or I” (p. 195). At this point Genesis has become a book of palaeontology after all.

The treatment of cosmology shows the confusion most clearly. On p. 64, having described the expansion of the universe from an unimaginably small beginning, the author says: “Now, if that doesn’t sound like creation ex nihilo, I don’t know what does.” On p. 120, the same theory has become one of two that “directly contradict the very first sentence in the Bible”, and the reader who doubts “spiritual warfare” is invited to reflect that this “is no accident”. Both statements cannot be right, and I think neither is. The theory was first proposed by a Belgian priest, Georges Lemaître, and resisted for years by astronomers who thought it smelt of the sacristy. Lemaître himself would have none of that. When Fred Hoyle accused him of dressing up Genesis as physics, he told the Solvay Congress of 1958 that his theory stood entirely outside any metaphysical or religious question. He was right. If the cosmologists abandon the Big Bang tomorrow for something else, the Creed will not be touched, because the doctrine of creation is about the dependence of everything on God for its being, at every moment. It is not a report of the first moment. Aquinas saw this in the thirteenth century: “By faith alone do we hold, and by no demonstration can it be proved, that the world did not always exist”. Mr Mastroni’s own argument from contingency, which I praised above, needs no help from astronomy and suffers no harm from it.

On the origin of life he issues a challenge: “Dear scientists, I challenge you to produce life from the completely inanimate matter that you claim existed millions of years ago” (p. 71). If they cannot, they “don’t have a basis for eliminating God as the Creator”. But nobody competent claims to know how life began. It is an unsolved problem, and may remain one for a long time. To rest belief in God on its remaining unsolved is to make the faith hostage to the next successful experiment. This is a wager that believers have lost repeatedly since the seventeenth century, and I can see no reason to place it again.

On evolution I shall be brief, for a reason that follows from my own principle. I am not a biologist, and whether Darwin was right is not something I can settle from an armchair. I treat the theory as a working hypothesis. It has organised the study of living things for more than a century and a half, the people who know the evidence overwhelmingly accept it, and I accept it on their authority in the same provisional way that I accept the drifting of continents. If they give it up, so shall I, and it will make no difference to my prayers. Pius XII said in 1950 that the Church does not forbid inquiry into “the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter”, provided we hold that souls are created by God. John Paul II said in 1996 that new findings “lead us toward the recognition of evolution as more than an hypothesis”. Neither pope was doing biology. Each was saying that the question belonged to the biologists.

Even so, a layman can see that the objections raised in this book are aimed at a theory nobody holds. We are told that a working pair of wings could not have appeared all at once in a male and a female of the same generation (p. 75). No Darwinian has ever said that it did. The underlying difficulty, that the early stages of a useful organ seem to have no use, was put with real force in 1871 by St George Mivart, a Catholic and a trained anatomist, and Darwin gave a whole new chapter to answering him in the last edition of the Origin. Whether the answer succeeds is for those who know the anatomy. But the objection has a history, and it is not mentioned. The hexagonal cells of the honeycomb, which the author thinks inexplicable (p. 76), have a section to themselves in the first edition of 1859. The calculation that makes the chance formation of a protein equal to “winning the Powerball 12,996 times in a row” (p. 72) measures the odds against a process that no theory proposes. Mr Mastroni remarks that the public “probably has never read” Darwin (p. 79). His own authority in these pages is Phillip Johnson, who was a professor of law.

What troubles me most is something else. The author has conceded the one point that he ought to have contested. “Scientific theories of origin lead children to believe there is no God,” he writes, and again: “Science eliminates the need for God’s objective framework” (p. 69). Richard Dawkins thinks so too. It was Dawkins who wrote that “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.” The two men agree that if the biology is true then God is redundant. They differ only about which half of the sentence to deny. I deny the sentence. A God who can be made redundant by a discovery in zoology was never the God of Abraham. He was a hypothesis in zoology, and deserved the fate of hypotheses.

It may be asked whether my rule leaves religion with anything to say about the world at all. It does. The Church teaches that each human soul is created by God, that the Fall was a real event at the beginning of human history however figurative the telling, and that a man who was dead on a Friday was alive on the Sunday. The last of these is a claim of fact. But it is a claim about one event in history, known by testimony, and not a claim in natural science. Science tells us that in the ordinary course of things the dead stay dead, and the first century knew that as well as the twenty-first. As Mr Mastroni says, “Death was common in those days, and people knew it when they saw it” (p. 222). That is why the claim was astonishing then and is astonishing now. Nor do I say that every join is tidy. Pius XII’s caution in the same encyclical about deriving mankind from more than one pair of ancestors sits awkwardly with what geneticists now say about ancient populations, and the theologians have not finished with it. But an untidy boundary is still a boundary.

I am fond of the Viennese classics, and I cannot leave this subject without recalling that Haydn, a devout Catholic, began The Creation with an orchestral picture of chaos and gave the first sunrise to the strings. Nobody in the Vienna of 1798 supposed that he was contributing to astronomy. They supposed that he was praising God, and they were right. That is how the first chapter of Genesis should be heard.

From Darwin to the camps

The author does not only think that evolution is false. He thinks it wicked. The theory, he says, “evaluates people by their genetic superiority to determine who is most fit to reproduce” (p. 13). It teaches “an ethical framework that espouses survival of the fittest” (p. 68). From this come Social Darwinism, the Nazi murder of the Jews and, at the end of the line, the sacking of people for their opinions:

“However, both belief systems are the result of Darwinian thinking. The difference between them is not in the underlying mindset, but in the degree of power held” (p. 88).

I think this the least defensible sentence in the book, and it is undone by the author’s own best insight. He says repeatedly, and rightly, that science describes and cannot prescribe: “Science offers nothing in this regard” (p. 7). But a theory that offers nothing in the way of morals cannot espouse an ethic. If natural selection is a fact about how populations of animals change, it tells us no more about how to treat the weak than the law of gravity tells us whether to push people off cliffs. The phrase “survival of the fittest” is Herbert Spencer’s, and Darwin borrowed it. T. H. Huxley, who did more than anyone to spread Darwin’s ideas in England, used his Romanes Lecture of 1893 to argue that ethics consists in resisting the process of nature and not in copying it. As for the strong trampling the weak, Mr Mastroni reminds us elsewhere to “look at how powerful people throughout history have treated the powerless” (p. 87). They needed no instruction from a Victorian naturalist.

There is nevertheless something true here, and fairness requires me to say so. In the first half of the last century a great many educated people did draw cruel conclusions from what they took to be Darwin’s teaching. The eugenic movement was real. It sterilised tens of thousands in America and far more in Germany, with the approval of progressive opinion. Among its steadiest opponents were Catholics: Chesterton wrote a book against it in 1922, and Pius XI condemned it in 1930. So the author’s unease about screening the unborn and about “designer babies” (p. 91) is well founded. But the argument against these things is a moral argument about the worth of every human being. It was made, and won, by people who had no quarrel with the biology. It does not need bad science to support it, and it is weakened by the association.

The Bible as evidence

Chapter 4 opens with the statement that “the Christian worldview is taken from the Bible” (p. 53). Here a Catholic must enter a respectful dissent. The Church existed before a line of the New Testament was written. Her members wrote it, and her bishops decided which books belonged to it. Mr Mastroni rests his theology on the Nicene Creed, which is the work of two councils, while adding a footnote to assure us that the “catholic church” it mentions is “not the denomination of the Catholic church as we know it today” (p. 183). I shall let that pass with a smile. But the question of who gave us the Bible, and by what authority, is never raised, and an unbelieving reader is likely to raise it.

The main argument of the chapter is that the New Testament survives in far more manuscripts, and far earlier ones, than any other ancient book. This is true, and it proves what it proves, which is that we can be reasonably sure what the evangelists wrote. It does not prove that what they wrote is so. The author’s own table shows the difficulty. It gives the Iliad 643 copies and a textual accuracy of 95 per cent (p. 59). Nobody concludes from this that Apollo sent the plague on the Greek camp. The figures for the classical authors are in any case taken from an apologetic table that has been in circulation for decades, and they would not survive a look at a modern edition. The first six books of the Annals of Tacitus, for instance, come down to us in a single manuscript, where the table has twenty. The chapter ends by telling us that the New Testament is authentic “unless you insist on believing that it is made up of lies” (p. 60). Those are not the only choices. A document can be honestly written and faithfully copied and still be mistaken, and it is with that possibility that the apologist has to deal.

On authorship the chapter is too confident for its own good. We read that “scholars agree Mark’s gospel was written first and then Matthew and Luke added their own accounts of their experiences with Christ” (p. 54). But Luke indicates in his opening verses that he was not an eyewitness, and is writing from the reports of those who were. And if Matthew was the apostle who sat at the receipt of custom, the critic will ask why he took so much of his narrative from Mark, who was not one of the Twelve. A Catholic is not obliged to throw over the traditional attributions, and I do not. But they need to be argued for, and “scholars agree” is being asked to carry more than it can.

The second appendix defends the reading of Isaiah 7:14 as a prophecy of the Virgin Birth. The Hebrew word, as the author admits, means a young woman. He replies that an ordinary conception would be no sign, since “Hebrew boys certainly seduced some Hebrew girls” (p. 230), so that a miracle must be meant. But in the chapter itself the sign is given to King Ahaz in a military crisis, and its point lies in the child’s name and in the timing: before the boy is old enough to choose between good and evil, the two kings whom Ahaz fears will be gone. A sign that waited seven centuries for fulfilment would have been of little use to Ahaz. The better course is the one the Church has generally taken. The Greek translators rendered the word as ἡ παρθένος. Matthew quotes them: ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει καὶ τέξεται υἱόν. And the prophecy, like many others, has a nearer meaning and a fuller one. That concedes the history and keeps the doctrine.

The first appendix, on the Resurrection, contains the strongest historical material in the book, and I wish more had been made of it. In the fifteenth chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians, written about the year 54, St Paul lists those to whom the risen Christ appeared. He introduces the list with the words παρέδωκα γὰρ ὑμῖν ἐν πρώτοις, ὃ καὶ παρέλαβον – “I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received.” These are the terms used for handing on a fixed tradition. What follows is therefore older than the letter, and may go back to within a few years of the Crucifixion. Whatever else is said, the belief that Jesus had been seen alive was not a legend that grew up over generations. The author quotes the passage but does not draw this out. He leans on weaker supports: the guard at the tomb, which only Matthew mentions, and the question “Why would anyone risk their life for a lie?” (p. 225). The death of a martyr shows that he was sincere. It bears on the truth of what he believed only if he was in a position to know, which limits the argument to the first witnesses; and of their deaths we have good early evidence for only a few. It is also not the case that “with minor respites, the church endured persecution for its first three hundred years” (p. 225). Before the edict of Decius in 250, persecution was local and occasional, and between 260 and 303 the Church was left largely in peace.

None of this means that the Christian story is false. I believe it. But I believe it as it has come to me, through a Church that has taught it without a break, and I do not think that I or anyone can be argued into it by counting manuscripts. The arguments of this chapter will satisfy those who are already persuaded. I doubt they will move the friends for whom the book was written.

Reason, nature and grace

A good deal of the book is given to distrust of the educated. “Too many fools with a PhD have new truths to peddle to you and me” (p. 5). Somewhere, the author is convinced, there is “a Chicken Little University” training scientists to announce that the sky is falling (p. 140). A chapter on knowledge ends by asking, “Whose mind is greater, the professor’s or the Creator’s?” (p. 203). The root of the trouble is “the Enlightenment’s claim that rational thought is the best determiner of truth” (p. 69), and the remedy is common sense, instinct and tradition.

I have some sympathy with the feeling. Universities do produce a great deal of confident nonsense, and those who work with their hands often see through it sooner than those who do not. But as a principle it will not do. If our nature is fallen, our common sense is fallen with it, and there is no reason to think that instinct escaped a ruin that overtook reason. The Christian tradition has never set faith against the intellect in this way. The author lists Augustine, Aquinas and William of Ockham among the glories of Christian civilisation (p. 7). All three spent their lives in hard reasoning, and two of them did it in universities, which were themselves an invention of the Church. The question between the professor and the Creator is not a real one, since nobody has to choose. The real question is whether a given professor is right, and that can only be decided by examining what he says.

Behind this lies an uncertainty about how deep the damage of the Fall goes. In one place we are told that humanity was “poisoned with evil in mind, heart, body and soul” (p. 177). In another, that “a body with an infection is still a body” (p. 193), and that the image of God survives in us. The second is the Catholic view, which holds that human nature is “wounded in the natural powers proper to it” and has “not been totally corrupted”. It is also the view that the first half of the book requires. An appeal to conscience and to the moral knowledge found in every culture makes sense only if conscience can still be trusted to some degree.

A related point concerns the foundation of morals. Mr Mastroni writes that “the Creator of the universe is also the Creator of ultimate truth and morality” (p. 39). If morality is something made, it might have been made otherwise, and the unbeliever will ask whether cruelty would be good had God commanded it. The older answer is that goodness is not a thing God created or decreed. It is what he is, and the moral law is the law of our nature because that nature comes from him. I think the author would agree if the choice were put to him, but his wording gives the point away.

Two arguments about the life to come also deserve notice. The first is that without it there is no reason to be good: “If you no longer exist and are kaput, what would be the motivation to live a good life versus an evil one?” (p. 214). This is a poor compliment to virtue, and the author has already answered it, in the passage I praised, by placing obedience from fear of consequences lowest among the motives. Socrates, whom he quotes with approval, thought the just life better in itself. The second is a proof of immortality. Whatever exists, we are told, exists within eternity, and so can never cease: “Our thoughts exist, so they will survive in eternity” (p. 215). What this shows is that it will always be true that we lived. It does not show that we shall go on living, and if it did it would prove the immortality of every mayfly.

Lastly, there is the explanation of natural evil. Earthquakes, floods and disease are traced to the sin of Adam: “When humanity became corrupted, nature did too” (p. 199). But the author accepts that the earth is “billions of years old” (p. 62), and elsewhere, when it suits his argument about climate, he reminds us that life has survived “multiple ice ages, meteor strikes, volcanic eruptions” over some four thousand million years (p. 139). On that reckoning, catastrophe and death were at work for ages before there was a man to sin. He cannot have the old earth as a stick to beat the climatologists and a young one to explain the earthquake. Aquinas, who had no fossils to consider, already denied that the Fall altered the nature of beasts: “the nature of animals was not changed by man’s sin, as if those whose nature now it is to devour the flesh of others, would then have lived on herbs, as the lion and falcon.” What Scripture means by the groaning of creation is a harder question than this chapter allows.

I say nothing at length about the doctrine of the Atonement in chapter 11, in which Christ endures the Father’s wrath in our place. It is the account taught in the Reformed churches, and Catholics have generally put the matter differently. But that is a disagreement among Christians, and an old one. It is not a fault in the book that its author belongs to his own tradition.

History with one eye

Mr Mastroni’s use of history follows a rule that he does not state and may not have noticed. When Christians do evil, it is “the misuse of religion” (p. 8), “the result of misapplied doctrine and not the intention of the founders” (p. 81). When unbelievers do evil, it is unbelief bearing its natural fruit. I happen to think that there is a connection between atheism and the horrors of the last century. But an argument that counts every Christian crime as an accident and every secular crime as an essence will convince nobody who does not already agree, and it is open to the obvious retort. The America of the author’s childhood, which he recalls as a time when “most of the culture believed in God” (p. 168), was also the America of segregated schools and lunch counters. He honours the ministers who led the movement against these things. There were ministers on the other side as well.

The details are often loose. Einstein appears in a list of minds produced by “Christian thought and a belief in God” (p. 7). Newton, Leonardo and Bach are grouped as men who “all believed in God” (p. 78); Newton did, but he rejected the doctrine of the Trinity and would have failed the test of orthodoxy set in chapter 11. Malcolm X is praised, as “a minister for the Nation of Islam”, for preaching “that all people were equal and created by God” (p. 160), which is not what the Nation of Islam taught about white people; fourteen pages later the same body is listed among the cults. Nietzsche is treated throughout as an enemy. Yet nobody saw more clearly than Nietzsche that those who give up the Christian God have no right to keep Christian morality, which is the author’s own thesis. We are told that “every culture in the history of humanity” has “unquestionably accepted” marriage as the union of one man and one woman (p. 193). Every culture has made it a union of men and women. A great many, including that of the Old Testament, have allowed a man several wives, and King Solomon, cited on p. 89 as “exceptionally wise”, is recorded as having seven hundred.

These are small things taken one by one. Together they give the reader who is looking for a reason to stop reading more reasons than he needs.

The idols and the magistrate

I turn to politics, where I am closest to Mr Mastroni and for that reason most anxious to mark the differences. There is much here that I am glad to see said. Living in England, I can confirm that he is right about my own country: “people have been arrested for text messages that were deemed politically incorrect or considered to be hate speech” (p. 172). He is right that during the pandemic people were dismissed from their work for declining an injection, and right that those who dissent from the current orthodoxies on race and sex are liable to be hounded out of their livelihoods. He is right that “public schools are hardly qualified to determine whether children have gender dysphoria” (p. 114), and that giving powerful drugs to children on the strength of a fashionable theory is a scandal. Dr Hilary Cass, reporting to the National Health Service in 2024, found the evidence for doing so to be weak. On all this I am with him.

Where I part company is over the remedy. “Don’t lay your moral trip on me either,” he says to the progressives (p. 128), and I cheered. But within a few lines he is lamenting the Supreme Court’s decision of 1962 against official prayers in state schools, and it becomes clear that his objection is to the content of the moral trip and not to the laying of it. He wants God restored to public life by public authority. He wants the drug laws kept, because “permitting the use of drugs is not true freedom” (p. 46). His definition of liberty is that “actual freedom depends on fair laws and the obedience of society’s members” (p. 45), with the rules of the road as his model.

There is a confusion here between two things that share a name. Christians have always spoken of a freedom that consists in mastery of our passions, and they are right to. But political liberty is something else. It is the condition of not being coerced by other people, and it is perfectly consistent with using that condition badly. To merge the two is to hand every ruler the argument that he is forcing his subjects to be free, and the people whom Mr Mastroni most dislikes use exactly that argument. The harms he lists as following from drugs – theft, assault, the neglect of children – are crimes already and can be punished as such. The taking of the drug is a vice. Aquinas, who was no libertarian, held that the law should not try to suppress every vice: “human laws do not forbid all vices, from which the virtuous abstain, but only the more grievous vices, from which it is possible for the majority to abstain”, and chiefly those “that are to the hurt of others, without the prohibition of which human society could not be maintained”. A Church that began under persecution, and that asked of Caesar only to be let alone, should be the last body on earth to want the magistrate in charge of souls. If the state’s schools are teaching children falsehoods about sex, the lesson I draw is that the state should not have the schooling of children. Putting a different catechism into its hands would only change the victims.

The same blind spot appears in what he says about the family. He observes that the collapse of marriage has “placed a tremendous burden on the welfare system” (p. 168), and blames the sexual revolution. I would ask him to consider whether the arrow also runs the other way. Charles Murray argued forty years ago that the welfare system, by paying for fatherless households, helped to produce them. If so, the idol at work was the state, and a writer so alert to idols might have noticed it. He is also too quick to call European social democracy “communism light” (p. 171). I have no love for it. But a tax inspector is not a camp guard, and words used for everything end by meaning nothing.

That leaves environmentalism, to which the book returns again and again. Here I must be careful, because I am a sceptic myself. I distrust predictions of catastrophe that come with dates attached, having read of Paul Ehrlich, who promised famine for hundreds of millions in the 1970s and then lost his famous wager with Julian Simon on the price of metals. I notice also that every proposed remedy involves giving governments powers they have always wanted for other reasons. And I agree with Mr Mastroni that for many of its followers the cause has taken on the character of a religion, with its own sins and its own indulgences.

But I cannot follow him further, and the reason is the one I gave about evolution. How much the planet is warming, and why, and with what effects, are questions of fact. They are no more settled by calling the other side idolaters than the descent of birds is settled by quoting Genesis. A belief may be held in an idolatrous spirit and still be true. When the author writes that “the Christian belief is that the world will end when God chooses to end it, and not a second before” (p. 140), he is saying something I believe, and something that has no bearing whatever on the sensitivity of the climate to carbon dioxide. Nobody supposes that divine providence rules out floods and droughts short of the end. The believer who says that God will not let it happen and the activist who speaks of the Earth as though she were a goddess are making the same mistake from opposite ends.

Judged on their own terms, as they must be, the author’s factual arguments are not strong, and those of us who are sceptics should say so before our opponents do. He objects that reliable temperature records go back less than two centuries, a tiny fraction of the history of life (p. 139). But the question is about the next hundred years, and there are other records in ice and sediment. He says that before the present alarm “scientists were vigorously claiming an impending ice age” (p. 138). Some were, and the newspapers made much of it. But when the scientific papers of 1965 to 1979 were counted, seven predicted cooling and forty-four predicted warming. He says that the forests were supposed to die of acid rain and did not (p. 138). They did not, in part because sulphur emissions were cut, by just the kind of regulation to which he elsewhere gives credit for cleaner city air (p. 163). There is a serious sceptical case to be made about the reliability of models, the costs of the policies and the motives of those who promote them. It is a case in physics and economics, and it gains nothing from the pulpit.

For whom is it written?

The title asks a question of the unbeliever, and the opening note promises that “this isn’t an academic argument or a sermon.” But the unbeliever who reads on will find himself told that his doubts about a designing intelligence are “willful ignorance” (p. 69), and asked what “atheist scientists” will say “when they meet the Creator at the end of their days” (p. 74). He will find the secular view of life summed up as “You must win” (p. 31) and “To hell with society’s norms and rules. If it feels good, do it!” (p. 32). The author admits that the contrast is deliberately stark. It is so stark that no unbeliever I know would recognise himself in it. There have been atheists of austere and self-denying life, and the Stoics managed a demanding morality with very little hope of heaven. An argument addressed to the worst version of an opponent is heard only by those who were never going to be opponents.

The choice of sources works in the same direction. The author explains that many of his references “are not from scholarly journals but from news sources, Google searches, and cultural references because these are what actually influence worldviews” (p. 6). That is candid, and as a description of how opinions are formed it is fair. But it means that he is in dispute with headlines. The serious case against Christian belief – Hume on miracles, the argument from evil, the plurality of faiths – is hardly touched, and the problem of suffering receives about three pages. Meanwhile the quarrel with American progressivism fills something like ninety-five pages, against forty for the Christian faith itself. An English reader will also find himself a long way from home among the school boards, bail statutes and television programmes. The verses that close many of the sections are kindly meant, and I think they should be cut.

Conclusion

There is a better and shorter book inside this one. It would keep the testimony, and enlarge it. It would keep the argument that everyone has a creed, the argument from the dependence of all things, the account of idols as truths that have forgotten their place, the warnings against every scheme to build heaven by force, and the whole of Part Three. It would leave the age of the earth and the ancestry of birds to those who study them, and the temperature of the air to whoever can measure it, and it would say so with relief. It would lose nothing that a Christian needs.

Mr Mastroni’s title asks why his friends will not consider God. One reason commonly given, in my experience, is that they suppose belief would require them to deny what they were taught in the laboratory. They have been told so by atheists who wish it were true. This book, with the best of intentions, tells them that the atheists were right about the choice and wrong only about which side to take. I think that a mistake, and a costly one. The God in whom the author and I both believe made whatever the sciences turn out to find. We can wait for their findings without anxiety, and get on in the meantime with the things that he did reveal.

Further Reading

The book and its sources

• Charles Mastroni, Why Not God? Rethinking Our Beliefs About Truth and Faith (Emerald Lake Books, 2026).
• Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin on Trial (1991). The author’s main authority against evolution.
• Timothy Keller, The Reason for God (2008). One of the author’s sources, and a more patient attempt to answer the sceptic.

The Church on science and Scripture

• St Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, translated by J. H. Taylor (Ancient Christian Writers, 1982). The warning against Christians talking nonsense about nature is at I.19.39.
• St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 46, a. 2, on whether reason can show that the world had a beginning; and I, q. 96, a. 1, on the animals before the Fall.
• Galileo Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615). The source of the remark about how one goes to heaven.
• Leo XIII, Providentissimus Deus (1893), especially section 18.
• Pius XII, Humani Generis (1950), sections 36 and 37.
• Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum (1965), sections 11 and 12, on the truth of Scripture and its literary forms.
• John Paul II, Message to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on evolution, 22 October 1996.
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, sections 385–412, on the Fall and original sin.
• Université catholique de Louvain, “Georges Lemaître: Beginning or Creation?”. On Lemaître’s refusal to mix his cosmology with his theology.

Darwin and his critics

• Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (first edition, 1859; sixth edition, 1872). The chapter on instinct deals with the cells of the hive-bee; the chapter of “Miscellaneous Objections” in the sixth edition replies to Mivart.
• St George Mivart, On the Genesis of Species (1871). The best of the early objections, by a Catholic biologist.
• T. H. Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (1893). Darwin’s champion on why nature is no guide to morals.
• Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (1986). The atheist statement of the view that Darwin makes God unnecessary.
• G. K. Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils (1922), and Orthodoxy (1908).

Law, liberty and morals

• St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 96, a. 2, on whether human law should repress all vices.
• Paul VI, Humanae Vitae (1968).
• Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (1984).
• Hilary Cass, Independent Review of Gender Identity Services for Children and Young People: Final Report (2024).

The environment

• Paul Sabin, The Bet: Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth’s Future (2013).
• T. C. Peterson, W. M. Connolley and J. Fleck, “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus”, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 2008. Summarised in Nature’s news blog.