However, when science is made to answer religious questions or vice versa confusion can result, as when slipstreaming cyclists in the Tour de France have a clash of wheels producing a chute or pile up.

A concluding epilogue brings the story up to date, arguing that contemporary attempts to use science to discredit religion are themselves evidence of "the entrenched need of human beings to make sense of the whole depth of their experience", and are "rooted in the cognitive capacities that...first gave rise to homo religiosus".

Reviewing the book in the Financial Times John Cornwell remarked on its "generally irenic tone" and describes it as a "gripping work of history and reference that deserves to be read on both sides of the science-art divide".

[5] Writing in the Church Times Richard Harries describes it as "an exceptionally ambitious and wide-ranging book which approaches the rather stale debate of religion and science with a fresh historical perspective".

Hotson describes how the book's thesis "at its most impressively robust" is illustrated in the "process in which the heritage of Greek natural philosophy and mathematics was reshaped by dialogue with the deepest principles of Judeo-Christian-Islamic monotheism and vice versa", adding that "Wagner and Briggs are themselves swimming in the slipstream of a huge amount of patient scholarly work undertaken at an exponentially accelerating rate".