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The author of the UM is a Mormon (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or LDS), and since I'm a Mormon and also a Geological Sciences professor at Brigham Young University, which is owned by that church, some students brought the UM to my attention. Reading the book and interacting with the people who work for the author has been an astonishing experience for me, because I have never seen such an enormous pile of crackpot nonsense in my life, and I have never met anyone so unable to process thoughts other than his own than Dean Sessions. His mission is basically to take modern science and overhaul the WHOLE THING--I mean physics, chemistry, geology, biology--so it doesn't present any challenges to his interpretation of his religion. He sees himself as a scientific genius on the order of Newton or Galileo, and is basically trying to build some kind of cult for himself among a certain demographic of Mormons and Evangelicals (the ultra-right-wing home-schooling crowd). Here's the basic strategy he uses. 1. He first highlights problems or grey areas in current scientific theory. Once in a while, these are even real problems or grey areas. Most of the time, however, Dean Sessions misinterprets something the scientists say, ignores everything else they say, and pronounces the scientists to be clueless about how to resolve their (usually fake) problems. For instance, Sessions says scientists' estimate of the total mass of the Earth is wrong! These estimates are based on measurements of the "universal gravitational constant", and according to Sessions, Henry Cavendish's original 1798 experiment to measure it was tainted by not having his apparatus in a vacuum and zero gravity. 2. Sessions then gives some cockamamie alternative explanation of the supposed problem. In the case mentioned above, he claims that he has done a new measurement that is consistent with his belief that the Earth's core is made of... wait for it... ice! I pointed out to the UM Team that scientists had already done the Cavendish experiments in a vacuum and zero gravity, and got essentially the same answer as Cavendish. Eventually, they admitted that the experiment they did in Dean Sessions's garage was messed up, so they were in the process of re-doing it. But of course, he never admits that having the mass of the Earth off by a factor of about 3 is a problem for his Iceball Earth theory. 3. The main strategy is to win arguments through sheer verbosity. For example, one of Sessions's main points, which he comes back to over and over in the book, is that minerals like quartz cannot be made from molten rock, because nobody has ever made synthetic quartz from a melt. But when I showed the UM Team that some of the scientific sources Sessions quoted to support this claim actually said the opposite in context, the reply was always to bring up a litany of OTHER pieces of supposed evidence. My response was to say, "Sure, we can get to all that, but first can you at least admit that you were wrong about whether quartz has ever been synthesized from molten material?" But they never would. So in other words, Dean Sessions and the gang can't effectively defend against any particular criticism of the UM, so they just try to tire out their opponents by piling on more and more crackpot nonsense. Lots of people wish they could diminish all the tension between science and their religion, and I get that. But whether Dean Sessions is sincere, or not, the way he tries to do it is simply dishonest. Don't follow his lead and swallow patent crackpottery just so you don't have to feel bad about not having everything figured out, yet. And please, please don't teach your kids this kind of nonsense. As someone who has taught highly religious young people for many years, I can assure you that if at any point they make an effort to check up on Mr. Sessions's claims, they will quickly become disillusioned. If you have tried to use the UM to bolster their faith, they are very likely to throw out the baby with the bathwater. If you want more information on what's wrong with this book, see the articles in the Universal Model section of my blog, Climate Asylum. Google "climate asylum universal model" and it will show up.