The authors describe the book's primary aim as being "to show how new ways of understanding past science can be used to suggest fresh approaches to the science-religion domain." [xi] The "Introduction" kicks off with some discussion of "nature," as well as what it means to "construct" or "reconstruct nature." Brooke and Cantor explain: "In the world of science, as in art, nature is apprehended through idealisation. It is not encountered, as it were, in the raw." [p. 6] This builds upon Cicero's distinction between "first" (aka "unworked nature") and "second nature" (aka "worked nature"), with constructed/reconstructed, "second nature" now acknowledged as the lens through which one sees "first nature." Understanding what is meant by "nature" is, of course, germane to the topic of natural theology, but more than this, the authors' notion of constructed/reconstructed nature opens the conversation up beyond science to the aesthetic, for, once the cultural is seen as (that through which one sees) the natural, the aesthetic can't be ignored.

The post-Introduction book is divided into four parts: 1) Science and Religion, 2) Reconstructing History, 3) Having Designs on Nature, and 4) Structuring Experience. Writing with reference to the third section, the authors note: "At the heart of the book are chapters 5–7, which discuss the erstwhile theme of the Gifford Lectures – natural theology – from different but largely complementary points of view." [p. 9] What follows is a summary of this key section. Chapter 5, "Natural Theology and the History of Science," walks the reader through the 18th–19th c. evolution of natural religion (and natural theology, limited in this book to consideration of the design argument) up to and through Darwin. Chapter 6, "The Language of Natural Theology," proposes a unique take on natural theology as rhetoric, i.e. inductive arguments moving from possibility to probability. Here again, the authors give ample space to consideration of the aesthetic, and also to the imagination more generally. This leads naturally to Chapter 7, "From Aesthetics to Theology," with Brooke and Cantor rejecting a sharp distinction between the scientific and the aesthetic, and then seeking to draw attention to "the aesthetic elements in scientific creativity" [p. 212] 

Thoroughly interdisciplinary, the book is a welcome invitation to construct and reconstruct not only nature, but also natural theology.