For almost 5 years now I review in my free time new books in theology, theology and science, and philosophy for the Dutch library & schools system, NBD Biblion. I started in April 2007 and I am still very much enjoying it. Just for fun, I counted all my reviews up to today. And it turns out, to my own astonishment, that I reviewed 120 books so far…
When Eve met Adam, Paradise was lost…
Source: http://wulffmorgenthaler.com/strip/2012/02/01/.
Happy Valentine’s Day anyway… 
On 23 February, there will be an interesting debate between Rowan Williams (the Archbishop of Canterbury), Richard Dawkins and Anthony Kenny on the issue of “The Nature of Human Beings and the Question of their Ultimate Origin”.
Time and venue: THE SHELDONIAN THEATRE, OXFORD, THURSDAY, 23 FEBRUARY 2012, 4.00-5.30PM (UK time).
Because of the huge amount of interest, it will also be broadcasted live on the internet.
For more information, go here: http://originsofnature.com/home.html.
Nicholas Rescher is an American philosopher, an extremely productive one (or at least, he used to be like that). He has written a lot on epistemology. And he is also a theist, a religious believer.
Just a couple of minutes ago I received an e-mail from a German friend who pointed out to me that the German publisher Ontos Verlag will publish a new book by Rescher, titled Productive Evolution: On Reconciling Evolution with Intelligent Design. According to the description on Amazon.com the book will attempt to argue that Darwin’s evolutionary theory itself can lead to intelligent design (thus defusing the antagonism between evolutionary theory and Intelligent Design). It seems to me that Rescher wants to develop some kind of theory of “theistic evolution”, but at the same time I admit to be highly suspicious of the result. Anyway, I will postpone my judgment until I have seen the book. I just wanted to point some attention to it.
Update: I just found an interesting and quite thorough review of Rescher’s book here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/28786-productive-evolution-on-reconciling-evolution-with-intelligent-design/.
Have you ever looked at the website of the Richard Dawkins http://richarddawkins.net, and then I mean especially the store section: http://store.richarddawkins.net/? I recently noticed that “they” (I don’t presume Dawkins is selling stuff in person) sell jewelry. In itself there’s of course nothing wrong with that. But notice that The Richard Dawkins store sells jewelry in the form of DNA-strands, and Darwin’s sketch of the tree of life. These apparently are adopted as the symbols of the atheism that Dawkins is preaching. It’s interesting to see how science and symbolism here go hand in hand. But what is also interesting, is particular dynamics that is at work here. Creationism and Intelligent Design are taking evolutionary theory as a symbol for evil. Evolutionary theory symbolizes everything that in the eyes of creationists and ID-adherents is morally wrong in our contemporary society. Creationists and ID-people consider especially Darwin’s tree of life, representing common ancestry, a deeply problematic symbol. And now here you have Richard Dawkins who does exactly that: Dawkins takes DNA and Darwin’s idea of the tree of life, and turns them into – yes jewelry, I know, but also – symbols for atheism. Science, symbolism, and ideology are getting lumped together in the discourse of the new atheism. In my view a highly problematic combination and potentially dangerous because of its ideological undertones. Wacky stuff.
In this post the second, revised part of my final evaluation of Jesse Bering’s The God Instinct (in the US published as The Belief Instinct).
FOR DUTCH VISITORS: De Nederlandse samenvatting van Berings boek, is in delen HIER te vinden.
Later today I will post the second part of my evaluation of Jesse Bering’s The God / Belief Instinct. However, I recently found an interesting interview with Bering that also can function as an interesting summary of the book, here:
http://www.listener.co.nz/commentary/religion-as-instinct/
Note the following passage:
When we understand how the mind works in relation to supernatural beliefs, we can stop ourselves from becoming suckers at the hands of illusion. “Once we’re aware of how the illusion operates, and how mechanistic it is and how predictable it is, we can catch ourselves as falling prey to it really easily,” says Bering.
Can you spot the fallacy?
A while ago, I read Jesse Bering’s The God Instinct (which is the British title, in the US the book was published as The Belief Instinct). It’s a highly stimulating book and one of the more interesting contributions to both the science and religion debate as well as the debate concerning atheism. I published my elaborate review on my weblog in Dutch, but since it attracted quite a few non-Dutch visitors who used online translation tools to make some sense out of my Dutch text, I decided to publish my final evaluation of Bering’s book in English. I now publish a revised version of that evaluation here on my website, again in two parts. This is part one. Please note that this is not the review or summary of the book, but only my evaluation of the book as a whole (in other words: it assumes some knowledge of the book already).
Theoretical physicist and atheist Marcelo Gleiser asks himself in a blogpost why so many religious believers have issues with evolutionary theory. And his conclusion is excellent:
Does evolution really need to be such a stumbling block for so many? Is it really that bad that we descended from monkeys? Doesn’t that make us even more amazing, primates that can write poetry and design scientific experiments? Behind this strong resistance to evolution there is a deep dislike for a scientific understanding of how nature works. The problem seems to be related to the age-old God-of-the-Gaps agenda, that the more we understand of the world the less room there is for a creator God. This is bad theology, as it links belief to the development of science.
Yes, it is bad theology indeed! This theology assumes a competition between God the Creator and the created world. Such a view is theologically totally inadequate. Thanks Marcelo!
http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2012/01/18/145338804/why-do-so-many-have-trouble-with-evolution
Today I ordered the new book by Karl Giberson and Randall Stephens, The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age, published by Belknap/Harvard University Press. I was especially struck by the following description:
Exploring intellectual authority within evangelicalism, the authors reveal how America’s populist ideals, anti-intellectualism, and religious free market, along with the concept of anointing—being chosen by God to speak for him like the biblical prophets—established a conservative evangelical leadership isolated from the world of secular arts and sciences.
Since Giberson is familiar with the evangelical scene, I expect an authoritative description that will also shed some light on the evangelical/creationist/fundamentalist mindset, which is apparently so different from my own. I hope to be able to come back to the book in due time.
According to Giberson’s blog, the book was recently nominated for the 100,000 dollar 2013 Grawemeyer Award in Religion.