If Francis Crick, William Dembski, Michael Ruse, Alan Guth, Roger Penrose, Howard Van Till, and all their friends all got together for a discussion, what would they talk about? No need to speculate - this book, The Nature of Nature, contains papers from all of these top scholars as well as many others. Just listing out the big names in science that contributed to this volume would be a more than adequate review.
It turns out that all of these scholars are focused on the "big questions" of life - where did we come from? what is the nature of consciousness? what is the nature of ethics? what is the nature of nature itself?
While these questions all sound philosophical, this book focuses on scientific approaches to each question. The book, at over 900 pages, is impossible to summarize in such a short review. However, I will say that on every question, there are multiple perspectives offered, giving the reader a broad view of the ways which each question can be approached.
For instance, on the nature of the mind, there are essays from Nancey Murphy, who gives an explanation as to how the mind can function as a purely physical entity, John Tooby, who provides an evolutionary explanation of the mind's organization, and Henry Stapp, who argues for a dualism between the mind and the brain coordinated at the quantum level. Similar discussions are had about the origin of life, the origin of the universe, the the nature of mathematics, and the nature of nature itself.
I recommend this book to any person who wants to take a deep look at life's deepest questions. There are no shallow arguments here. If you are a scientist, a theologian, or an interested layperson, this volume provides a host of scholarly papers examining life's most meaningful questions from a number of directions.