Introducing God To You

A short, concentrated meditation on the nature of Christian faith.

Aymes’ very brief debut centers on both the nature of God and the nature of good and evil, moving from the concrete to the conceptual and back. The strength of the book lies in its straightforward preaching about the ways God makes himself manifest to his followers as “a marvel and a wonderment for all the universe to see.” God made the spirit of man immutable, Aymes writes, and he intends that spirit to triumph over sin. On these scriptural questions, the author is on his home ground, and Christian readers will appreciate these passages’ tightly written fervor. Overall, the book’s prose is scripturally literate but often so densely argued that the threads of discussions sometimes get lost. At times, for example, the author reaches for ideological complexity, as when he grapples with God’s nature as a “person” and a principle; at others, however, he slips into oversimplifications such as, “If the thought is good the action is good and if the thought is evil the action is evil.” Consistently, the work takes ill-judged swipes at science, specifically the theory of evolution, citing its “pompous attitude” that seems to say, “I don’t need you, I can get along without you”; this mischaracterizes a scientific schema that’s as dependent on intraspecies cooperation as it is on interspecies competition. Likewise, when the book states that “Nature is too complex to be a product of evolution because evolution is the reaction of substances to change becoming living forms and this indicates pre-existence,” it muddles several ideas without aiding the author’s main points about the nature of faith. Also, when the book states that God’s “existence and presence are positively confirmed,” it’s unlikely to convince nonbelievers, scientists, or members of religions such as Hinduism.

A heartfelt but occasionally murky elaboration of personal devotion.