We’ve known for years that there was a missing item in the library of books about intelligent design. Well, not only one, but one that has been especially on our minds. ID is a challenging scientific subject to explain. Not everyone is ready to settle down with a hefty and heady tome of 500 pages or more — especially not if the reader is a teen or young adult. And yet, the purposeful design of life and of the cosmos is no less important for such a person to appreciate than it is for the older reader. In fact, it may be more important. 

For someone like that, an easily relatable story with charming and inviting artwork seemed to be the best approach. That’s why we’re so delighted to introduce The Farm at the Center of the Universe, by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jonathan Witt, with illustrations by Otniel Araujo. It’s the very first novel from Discovery Institute Press. The subject is the “book of nature,” as one character puts it, whose “pages are all around us.” The novel tells the story of Isaac, whose father died young. Why did he die? How could that be fair? Isaac’s older cousin Charlie — a science teacher — says he knows why. There’s no God. No afterlife. Just atoms in the void and the struggle for survival. Charlie says a week at their grandparents’ farm, seeing animals get killed and eaten, will prove it. 

But at the farm, both of them get more than they bargained for. And soon Isaac finds himself caught in a battle of wits between two men, and facing a choice he alone can make. How will he read nature’s book? As a work of design or as an authorless one, demonstrating, in Richard Dawkins’s phrase, “nothing but blind, pitiless indifference”?

The Farm at the Center of the Universe is available now on Amazon in Kindle and paperback forms. See the book’s home page at DI Press for more purchasing options.

About the Authors

Guillermo Gonzalez is an astronomer with over ninety publications in astronomy journals. He has taught at the University of Washington, Iowa State University, Grove City College, and Ball State University. He is coauthor of The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery and the textbook Observational Astronomy, 2nd ed. He lives in Alabama with his wife and three children. 

Jonathan Witt has written fiction and non-fiction for a wide variety of venues. His books include The Hobbit Party, Intelligent Design Uncensored, and A Meaningful World: How the Arts and Sciences Reveal the Genius of Nature. He was also the lead writer for the award- winning documentary Poverty, Inc. He lives in Texas with his wife and two cats.