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/.
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.
Actually, I’m trying to get away from discussions concerning creationism and Intelligent Design, since I think in the last couple of years everything there’s to say about it has already been said. There are topics in the field of science and religion that are more interesting, rewarding, and fruitful. However, every once in a while I simply come across something that infuriates me and that I need to write about. Creationist brainwashing strategies to confuse the whit out of young children’s minds is one of them…
A lot of people believe that evolutionary theory is in deep conflict with the basic ideas of Christian theology – including US pastors. One of those conflicts is about the first humans, Adam and Eve. Many creationists point out that if you don’t accept that Adam and Eve have ever lived, you also have to give up the idea of the fall and thus of original sin. But if so, Christology also loses its force – for if the fall never happened, why then did God have to become human?
If one sticks to a literalist interpretation of the Genesis-text, there indeed is a problem. LeRon Shults, once a student of Princeton professor Wentzel van Huyssteen, now a professor in the philosophy of religion in Norway, writes in his Reforming Anthropology: After the Philosophical Turn to Relationality (Grand Rapids/Cambridge: Eerdmans 2003):
The idea of a first couple coming into existence in a state of perfection sometimes in the last ten thousand years simply cannot be reconciled with evolutionary science. The sciences of embryology and genetics deminstrate the continuity of human organisms with the rest of organic life as it has emerged and become more complex over millions and milions (not merely thousands) of years. Analysis of the mitochondrial deoxyribonucleic acid of contemporary homo sapiens indicates that human populations never consisted of fewer than several thousand individuals. Paleological evidence shows that death and suffering were in the world long before the emergence of human beings. (208)
Okay, doesn’t this indicate a problem? Again, on a literalist reading of the Bible, yes. However, Shults argues:
One can accept the illuminative force of evolutionary hypotheses without denying the heart of the doctrine of original sin, which is that each and every person is bound by relations to self, others, and God that inhibit the goodness of loving fellowship, and that only by divine grace may humans share in the righteousness of God. (209)
To this I fully agree. Leaving a literalist reading of the Bible behind doesn’t mean giving up on the basic ideas of Christianity. Indeed, in my view (and in Shults’), it opens up a perspective that allows one to incorporate insights of different (also scientific) disciplines. How that might work out in detail? – For that I urge you to check out LeRon Shults’ book (which, by the way, is about much, much more than merely original sin)…
Quite disturbing news today. A poll by LifeWay Research shows that apparently many US protestant pastors have big issues with evolutionary theory. 74% of the pastors believe that Adam and Eve were real people, and 64% reject the claim that God used evolution to create people. A startling conclusion follows:
“Recently discussions have pointed to doubts about a literal Adam and Eve, the age of the earth and other origin issues,” said Ed Stetzer, president of LifeWay Research. “But Protestant pastors are overwhelmingly Creationists and believe in a literal Adam and Eve.”
What for me was especially shocking that only 25% of the mainline pastors agrees that God used evolution to create people – meaning that 75% disagrees or doesn’t know. This means that even the more liberal pastors fall under the creationist category. Of course, I don’t know how reliable this poll is. But it seems obvious that there’s still much, very much to do for scholars in the field of science and religion…
Source: http://www.lifeway.com/Article/Research-Poll-Pastors-oppose-evolution-split-on-earths-age