All Christians affirm design because the entire universe is the creative work of God. However, believers differ over how to discern design, as well as the appropriate characterization of that design, whether primarily engineering or artistic. Intelligent design (ID) advocates adopt an engineering picture of design, a perspective playing a crucial role in their argument that design is empirically detectable in specific biological phenomena.

Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design

Stephen C. Meyer (Author)

HarperOne

624 pages

$14.59

Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

Stephen C. Meyer (Author)

HarperOne

560 pages

$15.44

In his recent books, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design (SC), and Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design (DD), Stephen C. Meyer, director of the Center for Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute of Seattle, articulates the case for design in its mature form. Although SC focuses on the origin of life and DD on the Cambrian explosion, Meyer's argument for ID takes the same form in both books and largely focuses on the intricacies of cells and DNA. Therefore, our attention largely will be on SC.[1] Of course the origin of life is an area of scientific research that presents a tremendous challenge to science. Meyer's response is to offer intelligent design as providing the best explanation for the extraordinary complexity and functionality embedded in DNA.

Meyer presents what he describes as "a rigorous case for intelligent design as an inference to the best explanation." He insists that an appeal to intelligent agency provides a better explanation for the exceedingly complex, albeit functionally specific structure of DNA and the nucleus of the cell. He has long championed this more modest, somewhat chastened line of reasoning, favoring ID for its explanatory excellence. Meyer compellingly articulates the probabilistic case for intelligent design: although material processes could explain these biological phenomena, and we may yet come up with just such an account, at present, the better account is provided by appeal to an intelligent agent. One strength of this claim, then, lies in its relatively modest ambitions.

Articulating the case as an inference to the best explanation serves well to highlight that Meyer's argument turns on both the case against the causal adequacy of fully natural processes as well as on the positive case favoring intelligent agency. ID has long suffered under the misconception that it engages in crude god-of-the-gaps reasoning or presents a simplistic argument from ignorance. Meyer deftly dispatches these common lines of objection. He does so by explicitly comparing the leading materialist origins-of-life accounts with the explanatory power of intelligent agency, an analysis which focuses readers' attention on the central decision point: At present, reason reveals of intelligent design to be a better explanation for the complexity of the functionally specific structure at the very heart of the biological world compared to explanations citing natural processes alone. This sets up "Premise One" of a two-premise, summary argument: "Despite a thorough search, no material causes have been discovered that demonstrate the power to produce large amounts of specified information."

"Premise Two" focuses on the competing hypothesis: "Intelligent causes have demonstrated the power to produce large amounts of specified information." What, precisely, does Meyer mean by "intelligence" in premise two? "By intelligent design I mean 'the deliberate choice of a conscious, intelligent agent or person to effect a particular outcome, end, or objective.' Clearly, intelligent agents, by their powers of choice, can make a causal difference in the outcome of events." The upshot is that reasonable assessment of the comparative strengths of each side of the ledger shows that the explanation appealing to intelligent agency trumps the promise of any currently conceivable natural process. Meyer concludes that "[i]ntelligent design constitutes the best, most causally adequate, explanation for the information in the cell."

In a head-to-head competition, Meyer contends, appeal to intelligent agency wins out primarily based on Charles Lyell's "Uniformitarian principle" which insists that the laws and principles at work in the universe in the past are the very laws and principles at work at present (this same principle figures prominently in Charles Darwin's work on evolution). We have no assurance that strictly natural processes have ever produced the kind of complex, functionally specific phenomena evident in the nucleus of the cell. Yet we do know that intelligent agency, in the person of human agents, does even now produce such functionally specific phenomena. Hence, Lyell's principle gives the nod to the latter hypothesis.

This comparative line of reasoning, the crucial move in the argument, does rest, however, on some underlying assumptions. First, as we have mentioned, the argument presupposes an engineering picture of design. This is particularly evident in Meyer's treating the nucleus of the cell as an information-processing system (i.e., DNA stores programming instructions like a hard drive; RNA reads these instructions; protein factories process DNA instructions). The inference that intelligent agency is the cause of DNA is largely based on our experience of human-designed information processing systems like computers and cell phones. Meyer draws liberally upon this metaphor (likewise in DD).

Nevertheless, talk of "genetic codes" and "information processing" with respect to the origin of life or the nucleus can be very limiting if not misleading. Taken literally, such descriptions suggest something like stored codes that are read and implemented by processors, like computers, which are rigidly deterministic processing systems. But, a deterministic information processing system is less effective or reliable in comparison with a teleological or goal-directed system. There is a clear difference between a nucleus functioning deterministically and one that functions reliably. The more steps there are to a deterministic program the more opportunities for unanticipated obstacles to render it unreliable (roughly, the human DNA "code" would be the length of tens of thousands of Meyer's books). Given the length of time over which developmental processes stretch, or the length of time over which self-replicating molecules must have formed in a pre-biotic environment, the abstracted notions of programs and processing seem inadequate to capture the exquisite precision and reliability of these processes. For example, teleology is more effective and reliable as a picture of how the nucleus' processes work so well over such extended periods of time in the face of myriad contingencies. The nucleus as a goal-oriented system appears to be able to flexibly function to produce its protein products under a wide variety of circumstances that a deterministic set of instructions wouldn't be able to accomplish with the same degree of reliability. Similarly, the more basic self-replicating molecular processes sought by origins of life researchers would also be goal-oriented. So in comparison with the limitations of the information processing metaphor, there is a powerful motivation for why so many biologists have continued using teleological vocabulary and explanations in genetics.

Shifting to a teleological view should be a welcome move for Meyer as it seems to lead naturally to his strongest point—that DNA performs a very specific function—but it comes at a cost. The information-processing picture gives us a number of intuitions that make it natural to pick out the highly specific functions that Meyer favors. In fact, Meyer appeals to the more muted teleological language of function, rather than that of goal or purpose, allowing him to cast the argument in the objective language of science. Biologists agree: The structure of DNA, however contingent, serves well to produce a functional outcome. There is nothing subjective in this. In spite of the complexity inherent in the coding regions of DNA, the specific arrangement "hits a functional target." That is, from among the vast array of possibilities, a DNA sequence that renders possible or enhances the life of an organism betokens the intentional activity of intelligent agency. Within the information processing picture, Meyer identifies precise functional targets for DNA, but there is a great deal of room for human interpretation, here, rather than an objective appeal to data. Within the context of the "life sciences," the function seems obvious: these phenomena exist for the production and promotion of life. This is what these biological phenomena do. But, can one assign a function, an intended role, to a natural phenomenon without first supposing that the broader context has a specific function? To speak of the function of particular phenomena is already to have provided an answer to this global question in favor of design.

It is indisputable that DNA works—it produces life. It is equally indisputable that the specific sequences are exceedingly improbable and that only a very small subset advances the interests of an organism. Therefore, echoing St. Thomas, ID insists: "Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence; as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer." But, even though the archer hits this bulls-eye, why suppose that, and not some other, must have been the intended target? Thus while purporting to offer objective, scientific grounds for design detection, Meyer's ID argument retains this objectionable feature of classical teleological arguments. Inherent in the notion of a functional outcome is the presumption that life constitutes a distinguished outcome. An objective observer will realize that, if life is the goal, then that arrangement, however improbable, functions magnificently. If some other outcome were the goal, however—say the more modest goal of replication—then that outcome would have no particular value. Even though selfish gene theories have faded, a strong case still can be made on biological grounds that living organisms are a byproduct of replication in particular environments rather than the goal. Since life has value—to us—we naturally insist that any means conducive to life has distinctive value. But that's an interpretation we supply. Functional sequences do not, as Meyer maintains, "constitute an independent pattern or target"; rather, they constitute a productive means to an outcome in which we are all personally invested. ID's "functional finesse" fails to avoid the inherent interpretive nature of this underlying assumption.

Second, Meyer's comparative analysis assumes that natural processes and intelligent agency are mutually exclusive explanatory rivals. This assumption reflects an all too common dichotomy in both Christian and materialist circles that has its roots in the deistic-mechanistic picture of the world fashionable from the early 18th century forward: events in creation are brought about either by God's direct, unmediated intervention, or arise as the result of natural processes with no divine influence whatsoever. Evolutionary creationists, in contrast, argue that mechanisms such as mutation and natural selection are not, in fact, "wholly blind and undirected," so there is an alternative to the strict dichotomy. Meyer doesn't so much object to the manner by which "theistic evolution" accounts for the development and diversity of life as to its undetectability. ID is all about the signature, supposedly empirically evident in the cell, which demonstratively establishes the activity of agency. On the evolutionary creationist account, the work is signed using invisible ink.

A third assumption of Meyer's comparative argument is evident in the second prong, namely that intelligent agency has special causal powers. "A vast amount of human experience shows that intelligent agents have unique causal powers that purely material processes lack," he writes. Specifically, an agent cause possesses "self-conscious mind in possession of thoughts, will and intentions," the central components that do the explanatory work vis-à-vis those complex, functionally specific biological phenomena in question. If material processes lack such causal powers, then intelligent agency cannot be material. The analysis assumes that this present, adequate cause—mind—is fundamentally immaterial.

Two salient observations about this assumption: First, Meyer offers very little substantive support for mind having unique causal properties inasmuch as it is immaterial. Any way you look at it, what support might be available must certainly be regarded as philosophical rather than scientific. At least on this side of the ledger, ID looks more like philosophy than science.

Second, when Meyer claims that "[o]nly persons have such minds and only minds of this kind can create complex specified information," he appears guilty of begging the very question at hand. Biologists discover that, "[i]n virtue of their specific arrangements, the bases in coding regions of DNA and RNA and the amino acids in proteins enable these molecules to perform biological functions" and wonder how this might have happened. Mind, Meyer points out "now stands as the only cause known to be capable of producing" such phenomena. From this it follows that "there is only one known cause." But this phrase, "only one known cause," is crucially ambiguous. It might mean that, among all the possible causes, there is only one that we have good reason to believe is capable of producing specified complexity. This point, however, poses (could there be others?) rather than answers the question.

In contrast, Meyer stealthily uses this phrase to suggest that, among all the causes, we know that only one is capable of producing specified complexity, shifting an argument based on the epistemic limits of our knowledge to one based on the ontological limits of reality. "Logically," Meyer rightly insists, "one can infer the past existence of a cause from its effect, when the cause is known to be necessary to produce the effect in question." This would constitute a deductive proof of that account. But Meyer overreaches when he goes on to say, "If there are no other known causes—if there is only one known cause—of a given effect, then the presence of the effect points unambiguously back to the (uniquely adequate) cause." For this deductive line of reasoning to go through, "only one known cause" must be read as a gloss on "no other known causes." But this can only mean that, in fact, we have positive knowledge that no other causes are adequate. Only then would it follow that the single cause would be necessary to produce that effect. This exclusivity claim has the effect of rendering an argument of otherwise modest pretensions into exactly the sort of eliminative deduction that Dembski formulated in terms of his explanatory filter. In the end, it turns out that the mature ID argument remains true to its roots.

As a final thought, reflect on the difference between the designing of a director of an artistic performance and that of a hands-on engineer manufacturing a product. A good director guides and works through the independent personalities, talents, and skills of actors to achieve the goals of the performance. For someone familiar with the director watching the play, the "fingerprints" of the director are clearly visible. To someone unfamiliar with the director, unwilling to make unwarranted assumptions as to her desires, beliefs, goals, or values, the director's "signature" will not be evident. Creation as an artistic performance would have this same ambiguity for those who are acquainted with God and those who are not so acquainted. This is a biblical ambiguity familiar to Christians. With its preference for an engineering picture of design, this is an ambiguity that ID cannot abide.

Both SC and DD are worthwhile reads. By recounting Meyer's own journey, these books should lay to rest much of the ad hominem reaction to ID. Also, by explicitly presenting the argument as an inference to the best explanation, these books serve well to focus attention on the philosophical, as well as the scientific, side of the ledger. Their strengths are in rendering transparent the extent to which ID's argument depends on the plausibility of this alternative proposal. As is evident in Meyer's formulation, at its core, the theory of design offers a theory of mind, a not unexpected outcome from a philosopher.

1. Ralph Stearly, "Review Essay: The Cambrian Explosion: How Much Bang for the Buck?" Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith vol. 65, no. 4 (2013), pp. 245-257 contains good discussion of Myer's treatment of the Cambrian explosion. See also biologos.org/blog/the-grand-synthesis-reviewing-darwins-doubt-robert-bishop-part-1.

Robert Bishop is John and Madeleine McIntyre Endowed Professor of Philosophy and History of Science at Wheaton College. Robert O'Connor is associate professor of philosophy at Wheaton College.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

In Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind, historian Mark Noll laments that "far too many of us" evangelical Christians "still make the intellectually suicidal mistake of promoting 'creation science' as the best way to resist naturalistic philosophies of science."[1] Bradley J. Gundlach's study of the leading scientists, theologians, and philosophers in the Princeton Seminary and Princeton College community of the 19th and early 20th century suggests that they would have likely endorsed Noll's complaint. To be sure, as Gundlach convincingly demonstrates in Process and Providence: The Evolution Question at Princeton, 1845-1929, the orthodox Protestants of Princeton categorically rejected Darwinism because of its atheism. But they did not embrace antievolutionism. Instead, Gundlach's study reveals that the Princetonians affirmed developmentalism as quite compatible with their Reformed theology.

Process and Providence: The Evolution Question at Princeton, 1845-1929

Bradley J. Gundlach (Author)

Eerdmans

408 pages

$32.83

Rather than anachronistically recasting the history of science and theology at Princeton during this period into neat evolutionist and creationist parties, Gundlach explores how Princetonians themselves actually saw the evolution question. By giving them voice, he offers a fresh perspective on the major questions involved in evolutionary thinking during this critical period. In the first three chapters, Gundlach examines their assessment of evolutionary thinking starting with their response to Robert Chambers' Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, the immediate forerunner of Charles Darwin's work. While rejecting Chambers' proposal on both metaphysical and epistemological grounds, everyone on both the college and seminary faculty who addressed these questions, Gundlach proves, rejected materialistic evolutionism but embraced some form of non-Darwinian developmentalism of the natural world. Gundlach also explains the Princetonians' Battle Plan, as he labels it, for defending the faith. This plan rested upon two closely related convictions: the unity of truth and the division of labor. As the theologian Charles Hodge put it, "It is the weakness of our faith in the infallibility of the Scriptures, which makes us afraid of science, or unwilling that scientific men should pursue their investigations according to their own methods. If we firmly believe that the Bible cannot err, we should be satisfied that the well authenticated facts of science can never contradict its teachings." Instead of retreating behind the Bible and demeaning science, they sought to storm the enemy arsenal, seize and master its weapons, and turn them to their proper use in fortifying the citadel of faith.

In the next three chapters, Gundlach investigates the Princetonians' encounter with the evolution question in the far more forceful form which Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Thomas Huxley gave to it. Gundlach's careful analysis of the points of agreement and disagreement within the Princeton community is especially insightful. He corrects the misleading impression perpetuated by some historians who have pitted Princeton College president James McCosh over against the seminary's Charles Hodge. According to this caricature, McCosh embraced evolution while Hodge rejected it as atheism. According to Gundlach's more nuanced study, McCosh selectively embraced natural selection as an example of secondary causation carrying out the will of God, the great First Cause. Darwin's theory of the mechanism of evolution threatened religion no more than Isaac Newton's theory of gravitation did. Although it might have removed some of the mystery of the cosmos, it also revealed to humanity the beautiful intricacies of the natural world whose order, beneficence, and purposefulness glorified God. Darwin, of course, rejected this providentialist interpretation of his theory. On this point, McCosh agreed with Hodge's assessment: Darwinism's interpretation of natural selection as random inevitably led to atheism because it precluded, as both McCosh and Hodge insisted, divine intervention, most notably in the creation of the human soul.

Even though they affirmed inerrancy and the historicity of Adam, A. A. Hodge, Warfield, and J. Gresham Machen could not teach at some conservative seminaries today.

Gundlach devotes the subsequent two chapters to surveying the relationship between progressionism in evolutionary biology and progressionism in orthodox Calvinist theology among the generation of Princeton scholars who succeeded McCosh and Hodge. Gundlach's examination of the views of the theologian B. B. Warfield might surprise contemporary readers who assume that Warfield's commitment to biblical inerrancy inevitably led him to reject evolution. Well-known for co-authoring an 1881 article with A. A. Hodge that articulated the Princetonian understanding of inerrancy, Warfield, like numerous Princetonians before him, criticized atheistic naturalism. Yet Warfield, who embraced evolution even more than McCosh, went so far as to consider the possibility that an immaterial aspect of animal life served as a precursor to the human soul, constituting a second and essentially separate evolution alongside the physical one.

In the final chapter, Gundlach analyzes the demise of the consensus about theology and evolution at Princeton. After World War I, the origins debate entered a new phase when William Jennings Bryan led a national antievolution crusade that culminated in the 1925 Scopes trial. The discussion over evolution, Gundlach observes, shifted from persuasion to coercion, from a contest between debating "experts" (scientists and ministers) to an attempt to employ the coercive power of the state to enforce certain views about religion and science in the public schools. This newly politicized landscape produced a division between McCosh's heirs at the university and seminary. Princeton University biologist Edward Grant Conklin and director of the American Museum of Natural History Henry Fairfield Osborne, for instance, led the opposition to Bryan's antievolution crusade. Meanwhile at the seminary, some refused to be drawn into the debate over creation. New Testament scholar J. Gresham Machen, for example, declined Bryan's invitation to serve as a prosecution witness at the Scopes trial. Others, however, backed away from Princeton's longstanding selective embrace of evolution. For instance, Old Testament professor Oswald T. Allis, editor of the Princeton Theological Review, invited the Seventh-day Adventist George McCready Price to submit an article on "flood geology." As Gundlach explains, Allis could not find a scientist who was willing to write a piece on evolution for the journal, so at the urging of a friend, he asked Price. Price penned articles that questioned fossils as age-markers in geology and challenged transmutationism on the basis of botany. Price's "flood geology" later played a highly influential role in the emergence of "scientific creationism." Thus McCosh's heirs at the seminary turned to a man with little formal scientific training who once taught geology at an obscure college in Nebraska—a man who advocated views that contradicted nearly every Princetonian since the 1840s.

Gundlach's study is a model of careful historical analysis. Drawing upon a wide range of primary sources, including personal papers and published material, this lucid account provides a fascinating window into one of the leading citadels of theology and science in American higher education. By explaining the arguments of Princeton's philosophers, scientists, and theologians regarding evolution in their historical context, Gundlach's study helps to set the historical record straight.

Gundlach's study also offers several startling insights. Besides demonstrating the Princetonians' eagerness to embrace selectively some modified forms of evolution, Gundlach explains the critical impact that the fundamentalist antievolution crusade had upon the Princeton Battle Plan. Likewise, Gundlach describes the Princetonians' remarkably robust commitment to the Reformed doctrine of divine providence. The Reformed tradition's vision of God's sovereignty over creation and the reality and efficiency of creaturely activity, from universal laws like gravity to the minutest choices of individual people, Gundlach explains, was "a distinctive teaching of Calvinist orthodoxy that enabled the Princetonians to embrace evolutionary thinking (carefully construed) not only as compatible with their theology, but even as an expression of it."

Gundlach's work also contains some implications that might give participants in today's debates about theology and evolution reasons to rethink their approaches. By pitting purely naturalistic evolution over against an allegedly literal interpretation of Genesis 1-2, both militant secular atheists and "creation scientists" usually employ reductionistic binary reasoning when it comes to issues of science and theology. Gundlach's study, however, suggests other historic alternatives are available to Christian scholars. He shows that theologians and philosophers at Princeton had a thorough knowledge of contemporary science and that many scientists were well-informed about theology. The same cannot always be said of those who engage in the debate over origins today. Moreover, Gundlach demonstrates that "creation science" is actually a modern movement with shallow roots in Christian orthodoxy. Many conservative Protestants today continue the Princeton tradition's critique of modern evolutionary theories because of the metaphysical assumptions and antisupernatural bias in purely naturalistic explanations of the origins of the universe. Ironically, however, other conservative Protestants, especially some with an affinity for Princeton's Calvinist theological tradition, categorically reject Warfield's efforts to reconcile Christian theism with non-Darwinian evolutionary views. They favor an interpretation of Genesis 1-2 that actually stands closer to Price and his intellectual heirs. The distinguished Old Testament scholar Bruce Waltke, for example, resigned his position at Reformed Theological Seminary in 2010 because of his advocacy of theistic evolution and, more important, his criticisms of "scientific creationists" for denigrating modern science. Gundlach also demonstrates why, since the Scopes trial, such views have not often been welcomed in conservative circles. Even though they affirmed inerrancy and the historicity of Adam, A. A. Hodge, Warfield, and J. Gresham Machen could not teach at some conservative seminaries today because they held that Genesis could be harmonized with a non-Darwinian view of evolution. Perhaps Gundlach's study will help conservative Christians rethink some of the missteps made in the early 20th century.

1. Mark Noll, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011), 153.

P. C. Kemeny is professor of religion and humanities and assistant dean at Grove City College.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

Hillary Rodham Clinton is the clear front-runner for the 2016 presidential race. She has yet to announce she is running, and she may opt not to seek the nation's highest office again. But until she makes an official announcement either way, other Democratic hopefuls are in a state of suspended animation, few daring to make any public moves until Clinton has showed her hand.

HRC: State Secrets and the Rebirth of Hillary Clinton

Jonathan Allen (Author), Amie Parnes (Author)

440 pages

$7.64

HRC, a political biography of Clinton's time as secretary of state, offers insights into her style and character, helping explain why so many potential presidential candidates seem paralyzed. She is a formidable—and vindictive—political figure whose presence undoubtedly changes the game.

Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, journalists who cover domestic politics for Politico and The Hill, describe their book as a "tale of political resurrection for which the final chapters remain unwritten." Focusing their attention on the domestic political ramifications of Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary of state, they highlight her attempts to overcome the 2008 election loss, reshape the direction of American diplomacy, and establish a political legacy distinct from her husband's.

The authors stay too narrowly focused on this task, and, in so doing, miss the opportunity to frame their reporting with constructive context. Readers travel a dizzying pace from 2009 to early 2013, with a few flashbacks to the 2008 campaign trail interspersed. We learn a lot about how Clinton operates, but we're given far too little background to explore why she acts as she does and what makes her tick. Most readers think they know a lot about Hillary and Bill Clinton, which makes it even more essential to highlight relevant background material. Given the vast rumor mills that surround them, the authors should establish facts up front and set the stage for the rest of the book.

Allen and Parnes gained impressive access to Clinton's aides and friends, interviewing more than 200 sources, including several in her inner circle. Given the close-knit networks and strong bonds of loyalty described in the book, it is inconceivable that her confidantes would have participated in the project without her blessing. The authors should have cast a wider net and talked to more of Clinton's critics. Perhaps they inadvertently (or even knowingly) gave in to the fear of retribution that is a recurring theme throughout the book. The authors also get distracted, allowing melodrama, ominous foreshadowing, and gossip-filled anecdotes to detract from the central themes. Do we really need to know how much Clinton's Georgetown home is worth? Or its square footage? The book includes more discussion of Huma Abedin's baby shower than of the administration's response to the civil war in Syria.

Despite these shortcomings, HRC provides useful background for evaluating Clinton as a presidential contender. First, the book offers insights into her character. The Clinton who emerges on these pages is a compassionate woman with a keen intellect and a dedication to social justice. She is loyal to her friends in good times and in bad, unwilling to drop intimates even when it would be politically expedient. She is serious and tough yet good-humored.

Other, less flattering, aspects of Clinton's character also surface. Clinton is a consummate politician who seems to calculate almost every action to maximize future gain. She and her husband Bill (a background player in this narrative, but one who plays pivotal roles) come across as vengeful and unforgiving. Hillary's aides maintain a detailed database of friends and foes. Allen and Parnes recount several stories to show that those who cross the Clintons often pay a steep political price, even years down the road.

Consider one telling example. In 2008, then-candidate Clinton met with Congressman Jason Altmire to seek his support for her as a Democratic convention superdelegate. He refused to commit to Clinton or Obama. Clinton left the meeting, yelling: "such a [bleeping] waste of time." When Altmire faced an in-party primary challenge four years later, Bill Clinton endorsed his opponent, who narrowly beat Altmire.

Whereas most biographers of Hillary Clinton give serious attention to her faith, HRC makes only passing references—on my count, a mere four mentions in 405 pages—and therefore misses one key element of what motivates her. A lifelong Methodist, even as her husband's church affiliation has waxed and waned, Clinton's faith appears to help direct her political steps. " 'She has something more driving her than just power. She has a very strong moral compass that she leans into,' said one longtime friend. 'So she doesn't wear [religion] on her sleeve, but I think if you had any length of conversation with her as a Methodist, and talked to her about her faith, she would be very insightful.' " It's disappointing that the authors did not heed this advice.

The book also casts light on Clinton's management style and policy priorities. Much ink will be spilled appraising Clinton's time as secretary of state as a harbinger of what she might do if elected president. But such analyses should be set against the constraints of the office. Cabinet secretaries and the immediate layers of people below them serve at the pleasure of the president and implement his policies. To be sure, Hillary Clinton was no ordinary cabinet member. A national figure with a powerful network and sky-high name recognition, she had far greater political resources than other administration officials. As this book documents, Clinton sought ways to make her distinctive political mark throughout her term in office and left a legacy of internal reforms at the State Department. She was often in the room when key foreign policy decisions were made, and her advice appears to have won the day at times. Clinton was a key player, but simply that. Barack Obama set the foreign policy direction that the State Department had to follow, he made the final decisions, and he bears ultimate responsibility for his administration's policy successes or failures.

Most readers know little about the everyday work of foreign policy. HRC is by no means a definitive account of internal State Department strategy, but it does offer a behind-the-scenes look at diplomacy in action and offers insights into Clinton's approach to international relations. Stories discussing fundraising for the USA pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, negotiations on the New START Treaty and Iran sanctions, and on-the-ground meetings and local outreach in Pakistan highlight different elements of Clinton's diplomatic strategy and her affinity for smart power theory.

She is a competent, intelligent manager with great attention to detail and deep concern for employee morale. She is a proactive leader who is willing to take risks. She relies heavily on an inner circle of confidantes, to whom she is steadfastly loyal. She is a careful student who is humble enough to learn from others. As the authors summarize, "Her strengths were in executing the good ideas that came to her and applying lessons learned from one problem to resolving another."

Although not the authors' central purpose, the book also offers insight into some of the political issues that animate Clinton most. On foreign and economic policy, she comes across as an ideological moderate much like her husband. In discussions of possible military action, Clinton is the hawk to Vice President Biden's dove. She works hard to include business interests among those of other stakeholders. While HRC devotes relatively little space to domestic policy, the authors show that Clinton's views on social issues, especially gay and lesbian rights, align more with the progressive wing of her party.

Finally, and perhaps most significantly for those with eyes on the 2016 election, HRC demonstrates the immense political power Hillary and Bill Clinton have amassed. After finishing this book, no one will question why potential rivals run scared. Serious presidential contenders must be prodigious fundraisers. Overall spending for Obama and Romney's presidential bids each topped more than a billion dollars. Donor pools in both parties are large, but ultimately limited. Everyone wants to back the winner, so big dollars flow to those with the most loyal following and those most likely to go the distance.

Clinton has a formidable fundraising advantage over potential rivals. The Clintons have devoted decades to building and cultivating an incredible network of donors—those who will write big checks and will bundle money from their own networks to bring in hundreds of thousands more. They also have deep connections with so-called Super PACs, political groups that can pour almost unlimited dollars into campaigns.

Vignettes scattered throughout HRC demonstrate the depth of the Clinton fundraising machine and the power the couple wields over Democratic politicians and donors. Aspiring politicians and those currently in office want to stay in the Clintons' good graces and fear potential retribution for opposing them or even staying neutral. Bill Clinton's political draw is powerful and likely unrivaled in the Democratic Party. His support can be instrumental to election victory; his opposition, a death knell.

Clinton's time in the State Department expanded her résumé. On top of her time as First Lady, she has more than a decade of legislative and executive experience, culminating in the four years at State that deepened her knowledge of foreign affairs. She is a master power broker with sharp political instincts. Few, if any, potential rivals can bring such rich background and expertise to the contest.

At the same time, a Clinton win is by no means inevitable. She was out-campaigned in 2008 and would need to build a fundamentally different and much more modern operation—spear-headed by campaign professionals instead of inner-circle advisers—to secure the nomination in 2016. Although quite popular during her time as Secretary of State, she remains one of the most polarizing figures in American politics. If she were to re-enter the political fray, opponents within and outside her party would be armed and ready to attack, and her negative ratings would rise.

If Hillary Clinton does indeed seek the presidency a second time, she will do so with a long political record behind her. HRC offers an incomplete picture of its complex subject, but it will give readers some insights into Clinton's character and some of the strengths and weaknesses she would likely bring to the Oval Office.

Amy E. Black is associate professor of political science at Wheaton College and author of Honoring God in Red or Blue: Approaching Politics with Humility, Faith, and Reason (Moody).

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

If the people who run The Onion ever decide to launch an academic publishing arm, I have a manuscript to recommend. The only problem is that they would first have to buy the rights to The Bigot, from Yale University Press. The book, an exercise in conspiracy theories and amateur psychology, reads like a series of tweets from someone on a cruise sponsored by The Nation. Hashtag #hitlerhomophobeteapartynormanpodhoretzkukluxklan.

The Bigot: Why Prejudice Persists

Stephen Eric Bronner (Author)

Yale University Press

235 pages

$32.28

This is the kind of book that makes you wonder whether peer review should be anonymous. Because really, when you're done with The Bigot you will want to go to the homes of the people who gave this book their stamp of academic approval and ask in all seriousness: "What were you smoking?"

Stephen Eric Bronner, a "Distinguished Professor of Political Science" at Rutgers, says he didn't write this book "with the naïve idea of converting bigots." Rather it is "to help educate the bigot's enemies." And there's not much point in trying to "compartmentalize" the kinds of bigotry either. Because "prejudices such as anti-Semitism, homophobia, racism, sexism and religious intolerance … intersect in their ideological and political expressions." Spoiler alert: They intersect in the Republican Party, which is basically run by the Tea Party. And neoconservatives. Who have a lot in common with neo-Nazis. I digress, but then so does Stephen Eric Bronner.

Bronner sees bigotry as no less a problem today than it was a hundred years ago. The bigots are just better at hiding their true feelings. But Bronner's got them figured out. And his assumptions allow him to cite a study from the 1920s to justify his pronouncements about bigotry today. So, for instance, "The bigot is most often found in nonurban settings and parochial communities among the lower middle class, low-level bureaucrats, small business owners, individual contractors and farmers—though industrial workers, particularly white men, are among others who can also prove racist and authoritarian."

Bigots are mostly white male hicks, Bronner concludes. And bigots "have always felt at home in the United States," he explains, citing the Ku Klux Klan, the John Birch Society, and the Moral Majority. Have bigots been more at home in the U.S. than in other countries? Which ones have historically been more tolerant? He doesn't mention.

He just continues with the forward march inside the bigot's head: "Myths have always held a particular attraction for the bigot," he pronounces. "They offer an intricate network of symbols and meanings for making sense of life even today." Never mind that myths have always held a particular attraction for … all of humanity. But what does Bronner mean by "myth" anyway?

He offers the example of someone in Mali who helped to amputate the left foot and right arm of four thieves. (Someone in the government? Someone acting on his own? We're not told.) The man said, "It is not us who ordered this. It is God." Bronner explains this incident by writing, "myths are easily adaptable to the self serving outlook of the bigot. They are nonfalsifiable by definition, they contest modernity and they rest on traditional beliefs—and that is why they appeal to him." Ahh yes, the problem of traditional beliefs.

It is here that Bronner begins his long slide down the slippery slope. People cut off each other's limbs in the name of "traditional beliefs." Whether those traditional beliefs are that homosexual behavior is sinful or that thieves should only have two limbs or that evolution didn't happen or that "women always want 'it' and blacks are cattle" (another attitude Bronner detects but doesn't actually attribute to anyone in particular), they are all offensive and all within the purview of the bigot.

The way Bronner manages to elide all of these beliefs is positively dizzying:

The bigot tends to emerge from an authoritarian family structure, sacrosanct traditions and an insular community …. The authoritarian family not only enforces sexual repression, which suits most religious and traditional institutions well, but also serves as the "factory" in which the ideology of an authoritarian community is molded. It is well known, for example, that children who have been beaten by their parents tend to find violence acceptable in dealing with the problems of marriage and social life. Breaking the circle of authoritarian influence is a complex and multifaceted endeavor for which there are no quick solutions.

Did you catch that? The bigot tends to be a traditionally religious person who beats his children, and those children grow up to beat their wives—with the support of their churches, of course. In fact, Bronner goes so far as to explain that "Hitler knew what he was talking about when he insisted that he was only finishing what the Church began."

All of these religious folks—umm, bigots—want the state to impose their religious beliefs on others. They oppose pluralism because "pluralism reduces religion to just another claim. Opposing it thus becomes a matter of institutional preservation for Islamic Salafis, or Catholic believers like Opus Dei." No footnote there, or any explanation of how Opus Dei demonstrates its opposition to religious pluralism. In fact, that was the only mention of the group in the book.

Bronner never quite manages to reconcile his views about how the bigots with their traditional beliefs come from the white lower classes with the fact that the groups most likely to practice religion are blacks, Hispanics, and white members of the middle and upper classes. In his haste to dismiss Charles Murray as a bigot, Bronner must have missed his most recent book addressing this question.

But why let facts get in the way? Let's proceed with the psychobabble. People like Martin Luther King, Jr., and Gandhi are okay with Bronner because they were tolerant of others. (I guess he excuses their belief in "myth," or maybe he thinks that they didn't really believe in any.) But the bigot just can't deal with these men:

They were secure in their faith but the bigot playing the role of true believer is not. He fears the Other because his own faith is weak—it is simply a shield to insulate him from criticism and justify his definition of public life. Genuine people of faith are those whom the true believer does not want to know. Their strength he sees as weakness, and their religious tolerance he sees as betrayal.

Still no footnote. But where would Bronner find one? After all, who knows whether the faith of the bigot is real? God, perhaps?

If it is beginning to seem as though Bronner is arguing in circles and simply labeling anyone he doesn't like a bigot, that's exactly the sense one gets from the book. Bigots, he writes, can be discovered through their belief in an originalist interpretation of the Constitution, their opposition to campaign finance reform, and their support of a flat tax. I'm not kidding. "Everyone knows that people of color would disproportionately suffer from a flat tax as well as other regressive attempts to shrink the tax base and, subsequently, bankrupt the welfare state." So obviously the people who support it are racists. And since "everyone knows" this, again, there's no need for a citation.

Like many on the academic left, Bronner is not satisfied with merely suggesting that those who disagree are wrong. They also are evil. And their ideas do not even merit a hearing. He goes after those tricky bigots who "believe that the content of speech is always secondary to the right to speak." (You know, like the authors of the Constitution.) "This logic," warns Bronner, "permits intolerance, places stupidity on the same level as intelligence, and attempts to bind future generations to the ignorant prejudices of those that preceded them. 'Repressive tolerance' is willing to accept hate speech, flat out racism, the denial of global warming, or the rejection of evolution as mere matters of opinion." Well there's a good reason to throw out the First Amendment tomorrow. You know, like they regularly do on college campuses.If you've ever wondered just how impenetrable the bubble of higher education can be, this book is the answer. "The bigot," as Bronner writes, "is always primarily concerned with proving what he already thinks he knows." Sounds like someone else I know.

Naomi Schaefer Riley is the author most recently of Got Religion? How Churches, Mosques, and Synagogues Can Bring Young People Back (Templeton Press).

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

I would like to commend myself for not beginning this review with "Aaron Belz is da bomb." And I think you, reader, should commend yourself for reading this review that doesn't begin that way, and me for writing it, because the probability that you will purchase Aaron Belz's new book is now much higher than it would have been if you had continued in your ignorance of Aaron Belz and his new book, assuming that you were in fact ignorant of him and it before you started reading this review, which it is perhaps presumptuous of me to assume, in which case I apologize. But my larger thesis remains, and it is that Aaron Belz is da bomb, notwithstanding my reluctance to begin this review by saying so.

Glitter Bomb: Poems

Aaron Belz (Author)

W. W. Norton & Company

96 pages

$15.95

Belz makes me want to be a little silly, as you might have noticed. This is a poet who will write, in a poem entitled "Trois Poésies Antique," "Watch out for the wack kings, / clanking their armor, / riding their dope horsies over the hill." Sound advice, perhaps, but a bit lacking in the Eliotic touch. Belz has that sweet silliness with which late Ashbery, James Tate, and their wise-guy epigones have saturated the marketplace:

When I say
"I dig graves"
what I mean is
I enjoy and/or
understand them.

That's "Hippie Slang," in its entirety. The poem-as-corny-joke is a particular forte of Belz's: "I scream, you scream, we all scream / when we get stabbed in the heart."

But if Belz's aesthetic is familiar, he works it with the new-minted sheen of a sexting mallrat in bubblegum lip gloss. He rarely settles for cutesy or zanier-than-thou contortions (although I want the ten seconds I spent reading "On the Loss of a Finger" back). "Violets, Time and Motherhood" improbably begins, "One night I lay musing, among violets." The tone, after dozens of goofball pages, is impossible to mistake, and the succeeding lines grow purpler until they're practically winking at the reader. And yet the poem achieves a poignant dissonance: "One night I lay awake in a music of voices. / It all came to me suddenly, and so I ran / far from the madness, and into a field."

Like Ashbery, Belz makes comedy out of "what Wyatt and Surrey left around, / Took up and put down again / Like so much gorgeous raw material," mixing registers not (or not only) in order to mock or ironize, but with something like wistfulness:

Like, I might be driving along, and the
iPod might shuffle to that one Coldplay song:
why now? Here, where the road
gracefully descends to Steak 'n Shake,
where the trail ends

The second sentence begins with a traditional lyric deictic placement: think of Keats—"Here, where men sit and hear each other groan"; of Ammons—"here / where we can watch / the closing up of day." It descends into the vulgar poetry of consumerism, then resumes its contemplative register, confident in its accommodation of the jingly present.

This is a common enough tactic in contemporary smart-ass lyric poetry, but Belz is better at it than most wack kings. A poem that's mostly concerned to joke around about "the other stuff I'm picking / well enough on my own, such as my nose," suddenly digresses to observe a racehorse who "faltered in the muddy stretch, coat full of foam." As in Ashbery's work, the high style of that line is part of the joke, which doesn't mean it's not admirable writing. To an extent, the point is to question such distinctions.

Which brings us to Belz's "My Last Duchess":

That's my last duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. She's not.
She was too flirtatious, so I had her killed.
Now I want to marry your master's daughter.

As a joke—literalizing what in Browning's original is all indirection—it's not much (a poet friend of mine thinks it banal for this reason). But I read it as a weary commentary on the teaching of literature, Belz's sometime profession and my own. Inevitably, Browning's poem, like Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants," gets reduced to an object lesson in subtext, as if literary works were riddles for students to puzzle out. Browning's superb rhetorical control and social satire go missing. Belz's flat lines reveal how little the "message" of a poem matters.

It's perhaps ironic to discover such subtextual contraband in Belz's parody, but he's sneaky that way. To say he isn't "merely" a comic poet implies that there's something wrong with being a comic poet. I don't believe that, and Belz is one of the best comic poets we have. But even his silliest poems can break—with panache—into anxiety, heartbreak, longing, loss. "There's no I in team," he writes, "but there's one in bitterness / and one in failure." Glitter Bomb glitters with inanity, but keep an eye out for unattended baggage. Watch out for the wack kings.

Michael Robbins is the author of two collections of poetry: Alien vs. Predator (Penguin) and The Second Sex (just published by Penguin). He teaches creative writing at Montclair State University.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.

David Mitchell's brilliant new novel, The Bone Clocks, spans roughly sixty years, half of them spent (1984 to the present), half not (the present to 2043). Sure, its characters—many of them the heirs or exploiters or prey of a secret loophole in mortality—strain that timeline. And, thanks to their incredibly long memories, centuries lapse in the course of their flashbacks. Then again, The Bone Clocks's chronological glitches are nothing compared to its prodigal geography. Its characters hurtle unimpeded between the known continents. As well as past them.

They visit, specifically, secret principalities—realms that exist alongside the world as we know it and in which two clans of "atemporals" (beings able to put off death) are at war, most pointedly over the worth of "temporal" lives. The nobler clan, Horology, has been granted their approximate immortality unbidden (by what deity or accident they don't know). The Anchorites, conversely, wrest deathlessness to themselves. When the tribes clash, though, their ferocity impinges upon and smudges ordinary mortals' ongoing stories.

So the atemporals do work together to do one thing. They conspire to smuggle the paranormal into an otherwise realistic fiction. Standing behind them, of course, is Mitchell, who, as his fans already know, has an uncanny knack for at once perfecting and flouting the rules of genre. This knack shows up even in the tiniest details of The Bone Clocks. Take the pastoral lyricism that Mitchell infuses with technological jargon, describing "brand-new leaves ooz[ing] unbundling from swollen buds and a wood …. Bluetoothed with birdsong." On a larger scale, meanwhile, one section of this novel begins by standing exquisitely in line with a shelf's worth of other Oxbridge bildungsromans only so that Mitchell can marry it to fantasy.

Its diverting snags and postmodern play notwithstanding, The Bone Clocks begins and ends with one character, Holly Sykes, and her story holds this narrative together. Indeed, the novel opens with her chronicling "A Hot Spell" in her adolescence: a rash entanglement with a used car salesman and its unthinkable aftermath. It closes with her septuagenarian voice: practical, wry, and unflappable except when her loved ones suffer.

Granted, five books lie between the first and last sections of The Bone Clocks—and each is narrated by a character other than Holly. Mitchell, moreover, swivels so boldly in the gaps between these books that Holly, who runs away from home in the book's first pages, goes missing habitually in this narrative. In book three, for instance, she's papered over by a war reporter's story; in book four, by the bitter discourse of a novelist whose popularity is on the wane. She disappears for pages at a time. But always reappears—silhouetted against the snow or holding a crowd in thrall or alone in a churchyard—making this cubist panorama of a fiction compelling for the simplest reason: we look for her, we pull for her.

The Bone Clocks, then, seems to nudge its reader in two directions. On the one hand, it passes down to its readers what a beggar in its second book demands of posh, pretty Hugo Lamb. "Think larger," the panhandler tells him. "Re-draw what is possible." Hugo, for his part, finds the directive hard to resist or to obey, hard to sound, hard to silence. Read this novel, and you will, too.

On the other hand, for all its cerebral virtuosity—for, that is, every time a character from one of Mitchell's previous novels puts in a winking cameo, for every arcane history the writer crams into an aside, for every wry allusion it deploys—this is first and last a book about conscience. It is a book about cunning and compassion. It is a book about the mortal Holly Sykes, who has both.

In short, Mitchell does not exact quite as much from his readers as intrepid beggars do from his characters. Like his debut fiction, Ghostwritten, and the film-adapted Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks commands its audience, primarily, not to "think larger" but to imagine passionately along with its own fiction's largess. And if you read this novel with a pencil in hand, your task will not be to "re-draw what is possible." Mitchell has beat you to that. Rather, your task will be to rough out his plot's incredible genealogy on the book's back matter. Your task will be to decorate his story's margins with whatever idiosyncratic shorthand you use to signal perplexity and epiphany, to flag outlandish allusions and inside jokes, to single out the author's own drawing at its best.

None of that is bad. Indeed, I don't read David Mitchell's novels because I need him to enjoin me to "think larger" than he thinks (I can't) or to scrap the half-possible worlds he conjures and start sketching (I oughtn't). Rather, I read Mitchell's novels because their cunning isn't tiring and their charity isn't condescending, and we do need more books like that.

Why? Because, too often, smart writing is also hard enough going that the only readers whom it rewards with truths about conscience and compassion are those who belong to a literary élite, and this is a problem for two reasons. 1. Literary élites tend to congratulate themselves for their expertise as they read, which makes it easy to miss the real prize: truth, artfully dressed. 2. Lay-readers tend to be put off when what they thought would be a story is instead the transcript of the literati whispering shibboleths back and forth.

Let me be clear. I'm not saying that writers should gag their wit or that readers attuned to writers' witticisms should deny themselves glee. That would be hypocritical of me, as I smilingly dog-eared a page of The Bone Clocks for no other reason than that it contained a droll, willfully cumbersome riff on William Blake (viz., "What immortal hand or eye could frame these charted miles, welded girders, inhabited sidewalks and more bricks than there are stars?"). What I'm saying is that smart writers sometimes permit the élite wit they can call up to supplant, at worst, or, at best, to limit the circulation of whatever truths they would champion.

David Mitchell doesn't number among them. He doesn't allow his virtuosity to trump the case he makes for virtue. Which is why it's the readers who scrutinize his fiction only for its wit (or evidence of their own)—not the readers who fail to notice his erudite showmanship—who will miss out on what The Bone Clocks offers.

Put otherwise: the accusation that a 22-year-old Holly levels at one of this book's cleverest characters trumps what an enigmatic vagrant commands him on the order of "thinking larger." For when Holly accuses Hugo Lamb of "sifting what [people] say for clues instead of listening," she's also remonstrating with those who sift through books for clues instead of reading, and the novel Mitchell's put her in backs her. You could come to The Bone Clocks with very little literary cunning and still find its story compelling and its morality legible.

The stunning thing about David Mitchell, however, is that you could also come to this novel impatient with simplistic moralizing or sentimental drivel or donnish condescension and not find it wanting. Admittedly, parts of The Bone Clocks—especially its rendering of the future—flirt with portentousness, in both senses of that word, but nowhere does Mitchell dole out moral pablum. On the contrary, even his axioms are frowzy (e.g., "Civilization's like the economy, or Tinkerbell: If people stop believing it's real, it dies"). And it's possible that, given time, this novel's last hundred pages or so will smack more of prescience than portentousness.

Whether 2043 bears any likeness to the last book of The Bone Clocks, however, is trivia next to Mitchell's deeper thesis. Here it is: as the years elapse, we need to tug cunning and compassion and conscience along with us, and an unlikely story makes a good rucksack for those things.

Furthermore, apart from cunning and compassion and conscience, the world will only produce likely stories, stories that proceed according to the flat templates of genre. So that to reduce another person's sadness into cliché will prove easy, as in "cue crying scene: a scene as old as hominids and tear glands. It's happening all over Planet Earth, right now, in all the languages there are." And evil regimes will issue edicts using the same old mad-lib in which "treason, under Clause Whatever of the Stability Law Act of Whenever, would be dealt with by a bullet through the head."

"The world's default mode is basic indifference," says The Bone Clocks's third narrator. Then he insists that what "is written about [reality] at least makes a tiny dent in the world's memory," and that such dents vex indifference, even if they cannot derail it. By the same token, true fictions at least make a tiny dent in the world's imagination. Fair enough—but in my imagination, Mitchell's novels have left craters and foxholes, and I cannot tell the two apart.

Jane Zwart teaches writing and literature at Calvin College.

Copyright © 2014 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.