From the reviews I read, it doesn't challenge atheist beliefs at all - the novel is just set in a universe where there actually is a god that regularly causes extinction events on inhabited planets. If I lived in such a universe, I wouldn't be an atheist either. I'm not so "religious" about my atheism I'll ignore evidence. Have you read some of Greg Egan's novels? If you like some speculative scifi, he's awesome at that. His two latest books (the Orthogonal series) are set in a universe with physics and biology very unlike our own, and you follow various scientists as they discover the laws of nature and build new technology (at times they seem to make incredible deductive leaps, but it would seem the same if we took a tour of Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Bohr, and Feynman - of course the narrative switches to the ones that make the breakthrough). His books Distress and Permutation City will also really get your head spinning.

Ferretz wrote:

Well, about challengeing beliefs, I disagree to some extent. In the author's opening commentary, he writes that he wanted to comment on the almost militant and absolute positiions both sides of the intelligent design vs evolution debate have. I think he wants to make each side of the debate take a step back and think.

I wouldn't really call it debate. You have on one side some religious fundamentalists who ignore all evidence to the contrary. And on the other you have scientists who throw out any hypothesis that doesn't fit the evidence. Some years back I was going on a radio show to discuss some stuff with a fundamentalist politician, and as preparation I called a professor in evolutionary biology and asked him about intelligent design. He said he'd never even heard of the topic being discussed on any scientific conference or mentioned in any publication. Insisting on following the evidence isn't "militant and absolute", is it?

Scientists are still human, and the history of science has many examples of fringe hypotheses being rejected by the mainstream for decades and then eventually they get the evidence to support them. And to be fair, most fringe hypotheses turn out to be wrong. I understand why few scientists would get on the boat for some attempt at proving the existence of god, I mean what are the odds? But once the evidence IS in, science and scientists accept it and adjust their theories. Compare that to say the proponents of intelligent design, who are so mindbogglingly and obviously wrong it would be hilarious if so many people didn't stick with it.

Holy wrote:

Many scientists I know believe in science. I personaly think to belive in science is as ill-advised as to belive in god(s). As far as I see it science and religion are two totally different things. You can not disprove theories of evolution, gravity, intelligent design, god or unicorns.

Of course you can disprove the theories of evolution and gravity. These theories make very detailed predictions that you can test. If some of these predictions turn out to be false, we will have disproven the theory. Of course at this point, throwing them completely out the window seems unlikely due to the mountains of supporting evidence - it would more likely be like what happened to Newton's mechanics with relativity theory. I just found this on google: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Disproving_evolution Intelligent design is disproven. Its predictions are flat out wrong when it makes them, though in most cases it makes no predictions (which makes it worthless as a scientific theory). The general argument behind it seems to be the claim that "what we're seeing can't happen by chance", but this argument is obviously false. Evolutionary theory does very accurately demonstrate how life has evolved by chance, and it fits to amazing degrees of accuracy on say predictions of mutation rates. God and unicorns - well, that depends. Disproving that no gods or no unicorns exist anywhere in any form, that's difficult. There might be invisible and intangible unicorns that have no effect on anything for example. And in an infinite universe, there's bound to be unicorns somewhere. But physical unicorns on Earth? That's pretty close to disproven. I'd also say that we're pretty sure that Thor the thunder god isn't responsible for lightning, and that a christian god didn't create the earth 6000 years ago (unless he made a very good forgery of a 13.7 billion years old universe). I mean, there are 9500 year old spruce trees in Norway.

Holy wrote:

You can just weigh the facts and decide which theory seems to be most likely. Therefore you should not belive in science but use it as a tool to understand the world and to achive your goals.

Ok. Theory of gravity and evolution: useful for understanding the world, has successfully been applied in numerous ways Theory of intelligent design, unicorns, gods: doesn't explain anything the world, makes wrong predictions, has never been applied usefully.

Holy wrote:

Where I do derive my morals from I do not know, but I do know that I have strong feelings about right and wrong, but this has nothing to do with science as far as I understand it.

Well, science is related to our morals as science is to gravity. Science doesn't create gravity, but some science explains gravity, and allows us to understand how gravity affects things so we can do all sorts of amazing technological feats. But let us say for example that you want to raise a well behaved child that will turn into a upright citizen as an adult. So, when your son is unruly, you slap him across the face, for the child's own good. Then science comes along with some findings, like that children that are punished physically are less happy and more likely to have dysfunctional relationships as an adult, and that reward/warning/consequence methods are more effective. This might sound far out, but there was a time not that long ago when a majority believed that it was a moral duty to discipline children physically. And psychology had a lot to do with changing that. Our you could take pollution, where science is responsible for creating an understanding of the ecosystem, its interconnectedness and the effects of pollutants on it, which has created a huge shift in society's moral attitude towards pollution. I wouldn't say that science dictates our morals, but it has a great effect through its explanation of the consequences of certain actions, allowing us to refine our morals and align them with the actual results of our actions instead of us stumbling around blindly and causing unintented harm.

Smokeskin wrote:

ID makes claims like "irreducible complexity", which doesn't hold up. It also claims that evolution is not true and species can't evolve, yet genetic statistical analysis confirms the common ancestor and the tree of species.

irreducible complexity isn't exactly a prediction made by the intelligent design model. its more of an observation the adherents of intelligent design thought they could use to disprove evolution. just because there is no system in nature that is not built off a simpler system doesn't mean there was no intelligent design. after all programers copy and adapt code all the time and we like to think they are intelligent. bricks are used in all manner of deliberate construction and the steel bar has been used and adapted for many different purposes. as for evolving species. genetic analysis of existing species shows similarities that mach the predictions of the theory of evolution but that could just be the intelligent designer using similar building blocks in similar creations. if we could observe the evolution of a new species in real time it might disprove intelligent design (i would need to do more research into the creationist doctrine) but so far every attempt to do that has failed. simple organisms with short generation times and high mutation rates are cultured in conditions on the very edge of there natural survivability zone and they do change to perform better but no mater how far or often scientists shift the conditions and force the organisms to adapt they have never managed to create a new species.

I very much like what George E. P. Box wrote: "essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful". As I see it ID is very useless as a scientific model, evolution is not. But ID seems to be a very successesful meme to achieve other aims, otherwise people would not promote it so vigorous. (Reading this last sentence again I feel a bit like lighting a match to check if the fuel depot is empty)