Among the Creationists is a book about the creationist movement. By and large the author, Jason Rosenhouse, doesn’t “debunk” creationist arguments (though he does give some good discussion of the flaws in creationist arguments now and then). Rather, he recounts creationist meetups and talks he attended, and attempts to understand the thought processes of the attendees, among other things.
Among the Creationists is the ultimate go-to book for understanding why evolution poses a nasty problem to religion. Jason did an excellent job of summarizing the terrible problems: evolution destroys the argument from biological design, it implies that species came into existence through a wasteful and cruel process (doesn’t look like what we would expect from a God!), demonstrates definitively that species came about through a natural process (only a naturalist atheist would predict such a thing, the correct prediction is a feather in Atheism’s cap), and the problem of contingency (don’t know what that is? read the book!).
It covers much of the same ground as the book Evolving Out of Eden, and while both books are fascinating and have their own strengths, I think Among the Creationists is a better book. I am more comfortable recommending it to a creationist than Evolving. Why? Jason portrays creationists not as simple-minded banjo picking rednecks or close-minded dogmatists, but as people. That’s huge. As someone who grew up a very conservative Christian, I know first-hand that most people in attendance are good people, and some are very intelligent. I hate seeing conservative or fundamentalist Christians being caricatured or belittled, or to see the truth about them presented in a one-sided way. This makes the book accurate and less of a bitter pill to swallow for creationists reading it.
You can listen to a debate Jason had on the creation-evolution debate here.
