The book was launched at a workshop at the 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting in Chicago,[1] and then in the UK at a discussion at the Royal Society chaired by Onora O'Neill, in a week when it was also featured on the Today Programme.

Those who would most benefit from reading it are in fact fundamentalists who think that evolutionary science must be wrong, and overconfident atheists who believe that the religious are manifestly irrational.”[5][6] A. C. Grayling wrote a highly critical review in the New Humanist.

He considers the first two refutable by undergraduates, and for the third strategy to work, he contends that one has to "cherry-pick which bits of scripture and dogma are to be taken as symbolic and which as literally true" in order to conveniently avoid the possibility of direct and testable confrontation with science.

He concludes the review by expressing his outrage at the Royal Society's decision to allow its premises to be used for the launch of the book, as in his opinion this amounts to having "the superstitious lucubrations of illiterate goatherds living several thousand years ago given the same credibility as contemporary scientific research.

"[7] Physics World commends the authors for handling the diverse readership, skeptics and believers, in a "remarkably even-handed way", but laments that concerns with specifics of Christian doctrine may limit the book's appeal; however, scientifically minded readers may find the extensive appendices a good starting point.