20 Compelling Evidences that God Exists
by Kenneth Boa and Robert Bowman, River Oak Publishing,
ISBN 1-58919-306-7, 2002, 317 pages

Every book that deals with the evidence for the existence of God has its own weaknesses and strengths. I know from personal experience that when you get into the business of writing a book for this purpose, you are quickly overwhelmed with all of the evidence that is available and all of the approaches that can be used. The problem is that, if you do everything that you know is available, you never stop writing and you never get the book done. If you try to do a little in every area you know about, you end up doing nothing well and leaving yourself open to all kinds of problems because of the incompleteness. If you try to avoid all of these problems you end up not doing justice to the subject.

What Boa and Bowman have done to solve this is to take 20 chapters and try to divide them more or less evenly subject-wise. The first seven chapters deal with scientific evidence for the existence of God using fairly traditional approaches of origins and design. The next four chapters deal with biblical evidence from an external standpoint--reliability, accuracy, prophecy, etc. The last eight chapters deal specifically with Christ--His claims, death, resurrection, and the effect of His association on His followers. About half of the book is extra-biblical, and about half is biblical.

For some reason, the sentences are double spaced in the book, making it appear bigger than it is; and the main method of offering proof is to quote a wide range of people from various disciplines. While all of this may frustrate some apologetics students, it makes the book very useful to the casual reader. The authors write very well and their vocabulary is very understandable and workable. There is a lot of width to the study, and this makes it a good introductory book for people who have not had contact with the broad range of books in apologetics. It is obvious the authors have done exhaustive research and their work will be helpful to people writing and presenting material in all areas of apologetics.

The book is not without problems, but we recommend it highly as an introduction for high school and beginning college students and a resource for preachers and teachers.

Back to Contents Does God Exist?, JulAug04.