Dembski, West Make Olasky’s Book List

WORLD Magazine Editor in Chief Marvin Olasky is a reader whose impeccable taste is matched only by his voracious appetite. In the last seven years he has noted around 400 “books worth reading,” and now he has culled them down to 100 favorite books from July 2000 to now. William Dembski’s Signs of Intelligence and Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing were both included on the list, as was John West’s Darwin’s Conservatives: The Misguided Quest.


Olasky praises the books on this list in his characteristic pithy manner, using only a single sentence to describe each favorite. For Signs of Intelligence, he says, “Readily understandable essays illuminate the logical and evidential fallacies of Darwinism.” Darwin’s Conservatives, in contrast, required a semicolon to sum:

Critiques pundits and academics like George Will and James Q. Wilson who praise Darwin’s grinding materialism as a brake on liberalism’s utopian fantasies; West rightly points out that Darwinism corrodes religious beliefs and concepts of limited government. (emphasis added)

The list is featured in WORLD Magazine’s 2007 Books Issue, available here to subscribers.