THE FAITH EQUATION!

I get letters and other unsolicited materials all the time from sincere creationists who think that if they can just get this or that source into my hands that I’ll suddenly see that the Bible really is a science textbook and that my defense of science education is misguided. This one’s a new one on me, though: the Bible, apparently, is also a math text, and the fellow who makes this claim is also, intriguingly, something of an expert when it comes to the statistical analysis of one of my passions....baseball! Weird, huh?

Anyway, the author, one Dr. Marvin L. Bittinger, seems to be quite an interesting fellow. Bittinger:

• is a retired professor mathematics education at Purdue University

• has written best-selling college math texts for Addison-Wesley

• as a member of SABR, has collaborated with Dusty Baker on a book on hitting a baseball (!)
  

• actually has a chair named after him.

He has a web site for his book here. The book in question (“The Faith Equation”) was marketed to me with a letter signed by one Bryan Gambrel, who professes to be the Marketing Director of Literary Architects. They can be found on the web here. The letter I received carried an endorsement from the creationist engineering professor (Baylor) Walter Bradley, and also from pop psychology guru M. Scott Peck, who writes (amusingly) that Bittinger’s book is “the kind of wacky genius one is lucky enough to encounter but a few occasions during his or her lifetime.”

(Less amusing is the fact that M. Scott Peck has been dead nearly two years as I write this, and the book in question was only published in July of this year. So, presumably, he commended a draft of the present work but might not have actually approved the work as published. It's border-line dishonest to enlist the dead post facto as a positive 'review' of an unpublished work, and obviously seeks to trade on Peck's modest celebrity)

I can't add more to that, but I bet a lot of you (particularly Zeno, or Jason Rosenhouse) can, and will.