Nor do Jacoby’s condemnations of religion ever interact with the arguments of many contemporary theistic scientists and philosophers who say that a theistic, and particularly a Christian, conception of nature provides a far superior defense and explanation of a scientific worldview. Alvin Plantinga’s recent Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism, for example, revises and expands upon his earlier Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism by arguing that the regularity and reasonableness of nature suggest some sort of non-arbitrary ordering, and that a theistic perspective provides the requisite intellectual defense for why the cognitive content of our minds is trustworthy and not merely a naturalistic accretion and confluence of neurochemicals. Though it is clear that Jacoby’s intent in the book is to use the life of Ingersoll as a base from which to launch an agnostic and naturalistic apologetic against theism in general and against Christianity in particular, she never engages with any of the theistic treatments of science that Pascal and Plantinga represent.

On the contrary, she goes so far as to tout the joys of “the gospel of science.” With this slight phrase, she tips her hand and reveals her conviction that science, and science alone, is a sufficient Good News for humanity. And Christianity must always be opposed to such a scientism, not because religious people think science is bad, but because we don’t think science is Gospel. Science is rewarding, but not redemptive. When it dresses as a servant of the King who created the universe, every minute spent in studying it is nothing less than an act of worshipping that King. Yet when it usurps the place of the Creator, then science becomes nothing less than idolatry. Unfortunately, this distinction alone seems sufficient to awake the ire of Jacoby’s Enlightened Inquisition; the great god Science the Almighty with his naturalistic Gospel has been blasphemed, and the heretics must be called to account.

Another example: Jacoby frequently characterizes Christians as being opposed to medical progress because “it violated God’s plan for women to be freed from the promised anguish attached to childbirth” or that “vaccination against smallpox usurped the divine prerogative.” But this treatment of Christian interaction with medicine is almost universally ignorant of most of the history of medicine. She says nothing of Christians rescuing deformed children exposed to perish as undesirable mutants in the Roman Empire. She is silent on the history of Christian hospitals throughout the Holy Land for pilgrims and travelers, medical missionary missions to the developing world, the YMCA with its aim to promote health among inner city boys, the Salvation Army, or the formation of the Red Cross.

The omission of the Red Cross is a doubly amusing one: first because its founder, Jean Henri Dunant, was a faithful adherent to Calvinism—the very same belief system that Jacoby identifies as being most prone to resigning the sick and injured to their fate—and second, because it was founded in the year 1863, the exact period that Jacoby identifies as the height of Christian opposition to medical research and care. Since its inception, Christianity has gone hand in hand with the alleviation of suffering throughout the world. Just this year, Yale University sponsored a conference on the history of Christian medical missions, during which scholars presented research documenting the wide-ranging and pioneering medical work of Christian missionaries. Far from attempting a refutation of this massive and growing body of literature, Jacoby simply ignores it.