books tagged “Science and Religion”

Winner of a Christianity Today 2005 Book Award!A 2005 Gold Medallion finalist.Is it science? Is it religion? What exactly is the Design Revolution?Today scientists, mathematicians and philosophers in the intelligent design movement are challenging a certain view of science--one that limits its investigations and procedures to purely law-like and mechanical explanations. They charge that there is no scientific reason to exclude the consideration of intelligence, agency and purpose from truly scientific research. In fact, they say, the practice of science often does already include these factors! As the intelligent design movement has gained momentum, questions have naturally arisen to challenge its provocative claims. In this book William A. Dembski rises to the occasion clearly and concisely answering the most vexing questions posed to the intelligent design program. Writing with nonexperts in mind, Dembski responds to more than sixty questions asked by experts and nonexperts alike who have attended his many public lectures, as well as objections raised in written reviews. The Design Revolution has begun. Its success depends on how well it answers the questions of its detractors. Read this book and you'll have a good idea of the prospects and challenges facing this revolution in scientific thinking. [via]

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's spiritual masterpiece, The Divine Milieu, in a newly-revised translation by Siôn Cowell, is addressed to those who have lost faith in conventional religion but who still have a sense of the divine at the heart of the cosmos. "The heavens declare the glory of God," sings the Psalmist. Teilhard would agree. "We are surrounded," he says, "by a certain sort of pessimist who tells us continually that our world is foundering in atheism. But should we not say rather that what it is suffering from is unsatisfied theism?" He sees a universe in movement where progress is the spiritualization of matter and its opposite is the materialization of spirit. Teilhard opts for progress. The Divine Milieu is the divine center and the divine circle, the divine heart and the divine sphere. The book is written for those who listen primarily to the voices of the Earth; its purpose is to provide a link to traditional Christianity (as expressed in Baptism, Cross and Eucharist) in order to demonstrate that the fears prevalent in contemporary world society as it abuses its very foundation - Mother Earth - may be better understood by the Gospel path. Teilhard's primary purpose is to show a way forward which he sees as the "Christian religious ideal". The Foreword is by Thomas M. King, S.J., Professor of Theology at Georgetown University, and author of Teilhard's Mysticism of Knowing, editor of The Letters of Teilhard de Chardin and editor of Lucile Swan. [via]

From a leading authority on the evolution debates comes this critically acclaimed investigation into one of the most controversial topics of our times

Wade Rowland questions one of the great turning points in the history of science and though in this provocative reexamination of Galileo's prosecution.

In his provocative reexamination of one of the turning points in the history of science and thought, Wade Rowland contends that the dispute concerned an infinitely more profound question: What is truth and how can we know it? Rowland demonstrates that Galileos mistake was to insist that scienceand only scienceprovides the truth about reality. The Church rejected this idea, declaring that while science is valid, truth is a metaphysical issuebeyond physicsand it involves such matters as meaning and purpose, which are unquantifiable and therefore not amenable to scientific analysis. In asserting the primacy of science on the territory of truth, Galileo strayed into the theological realm, an act that put him squarely on a warpath with the Church. The outcome would change the world. Wade Rowlands thoughtful exploration promises to disarm the most stubborn of skeptics and make for scintillating debate.

Genesis is a book of origins--the origin of the universe, the origin of life and the origin of man. It places man in his cosmic setting, shows his particular uniquness, explains his wonder and his flaw, and begins to trace the flow of human history through space and time. Many today, however, view this book as a collection of myths, useful for understanding the Hebrew mind, perhaps, but certainly not a record of what really happened. Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer challenges that view and shows how the first eleven chapters of Genesis stand as a solid, space-time basis for answering the tough questions posed by modern man. Francis August Schaeffer (30 January 1912 - 15 May 1984) was an American Evangelical Christian theologian, philosopher, and Presbyterian pastor. He is most famous for his writings and his establishment of the L'Abri community in Switzerland. Opposed to theological modernism, Schaeffer promoted a more historic Protestant faith and a pre-suppositional approach to Christian apologetics which he believed would answer the questions of the age. A number of Christian leaders, authors, and evangelists credit Schaeffer's ideas with helping spark the rise of the Christian Right in the United States and were strongly influenced by him. Among them are Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry, Focus on the Family's James Dobson, the 700 Club's Pat Robertson, Prison Fellowship's Charles Colson, columnist Cal Thomas, preacher and author Tim LaHaye, former Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, and Liberty University and Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell. [via]

This book is a response to the PBS television documentary Evolution (2001). It points out areas where the history is inaccurate or the reasoning flawed. It illustrates how issues vigorously debated within the scientific community are presented as established facts. [via]

How did the universe begin and how will it end? What is matter? What is mind, and can it survive death? What are time and space, and how do they relate to ideas about God? Is the order of the universe the result of accident or design? The most profound and age-old questions of existence -- for centuries the focus of religion and philosophy -- may soon be answered through the extraordinary advances of a field of science known as the new physics. In this illuminating work, Paul Davies, author of the acclaimed Other Worlds and The Edge of Infinity, writes that the discoveries of 20th-century physics -- relativity and the quantum theory -- are now pointing the way to a new appreciation of man and his place in the universe. They could, in fact, bring within our grasp a unified description of all creation. Demanding a radical reformulation of the most fundamental aspects of reality and a way of thinking that is in closer accord with mysticism than materialism, the new physics, says Davies, offers a surer path to God than religion. Described by The Washington Post as "impressive," God and the New Physics is a fascinating look at the impact of science on what were formerly religious issues. Elegantly written, a book for both scholars and lay readers of science, it is, according to the Christian Science Monitor, a "provocative...rewarding intellectual romp." [via]

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955) was a priest , paleontologist and geologist whose highly original publication, LE PHENOMENE HUMAIN, attracted world-wide attention when it was first published. He wrote of the beginnings of our planet, the emergence of life, the birth of thought and the development of socialization in order to give humankind the inner vision necessary to thrive in an expanding universe. The original translation into English contained many fundamental mistakes clouding our understanding of Teilhard de Chardin's vision. Sarah Appleton-Weber has based her new translation, which is endorsed by the Teilhard de Chardin Foundation (Paris), on her careful comparison of the four versions of the French text. Poet and scholar Appleton-Weber, who has closely studied Teilhard's essays, letters, and other writing, gives a consistent and coherent voice to this translation of Teilhard's book. [via]

The book is divided into three parts. The first part is concerned with the history of science and religion, the second with the methods of science and religion, and the third with the issues themselves. Barbour provides introductions to several schools of philosophy in order to give the reader knowledge enough to understand how relations between science and religion look from these distinct viewpoints.[2] The book also includes several specific, non-philosophical areas of science are employed in its discussion. Several specific concepts and objects are brought up in the discussion generally along with summaries of significant criticisms. 470 pages. [via]

The age-old war between religion and science has taken a new twist. Once the dedicated scientist-martyr fought heroically against rigid religionists. But now the tables have turned, and it is established science crusading against religion, pushing atheistic agendas in the classroom, in textbooks, and in the media. This book shows how science has now become a religion of its own-an often fanatical one at that-furiously preaching atheism, punishing dissenters, dictating how and what we should think, and subtly inserting its worldviews in everything from education to entertainment. And, with stunning clarity, it proves that, with billions of dollars up for grabs in the race for stem cell research, intellectual integrity has been replaced with good old-fashioned greed. With sharp insight and completely original reporting, this book defiantly shows the extent to which science is beating down religion and how this systematic tyranny is unmistakably weakening culture and society.

As a poet, novelist, and farmer, Wendell Berry has worked and written in favor of tried and tested ways, rejecting the notion that the modern is always to be preferred over the old. Technology may have its uses, he has insisted in books like The Gift of Good Land, but what matters more is the crafting of sound human communities and of self-reliant living. Religious faith lies at the heart of Berry's unapologetically old-fashioned program. Faith, which supposes that life is full of unpredictable mysteries, stands against much of modern science, an opposition that Berry explores in Life Is a Miracle. Taking particular issue with entomologist E.O. Wilson's recent book, Consilience, which maintains the supremacy of scientific explanation over religious conjecture and supposes that science will one day be able to answer every question about the hows and whys of life, Berry revisits C.P. Snow's "two cultures" thesis to observe that science and religion address different kinds of necessary questions. "Science cannot replace art or religion," he writes, "for the same reason that you cannot loosen a nut with a saw or cut a board in two with a wrench." Against science's "false specification and pretentious exactitude," Berry notes quietly that the more he observes his own little corner of the planet, a small Kentucky farm, the less patient he is with reductionist, materialist explanations of the way things work--for here, and everywhere, "life ... is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated."

Berry's slender essay offers a thoughtful repudiation of an increasingly technological--and, some would say, soulless--culture. --Gregory McNamee [via]

Abortion. Euthanasia. Infanticide. Sexual promiscuity. Ideas and actions once unthinkable have become commonplace. We seem to live in a different moral universe than we occupied just a few decades ago. Consent and noncoercion seem to be the last vestiges of a morality long left behind. Christian moral tenets are now easily dismissed and have been replaced with what is curiously presented as a superior, more magnanimous, respectful and even humble morality. How did we end up so far away from where we began? Can the decline be stopped? Ben Wiker, in this provocative and insightful book, traces the amazing story that explains our present cultural situation. Wiker finds the roots of our moral slide reaching all the way back to the ethical theory and atheistic cosmology of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus. Christian teaching had been in contention with this worldview long before it reached its pinnacle with the rise and acceptance of Darwinism. But it was Darwinism, Wiker contends, that provided this ancient teaching with the seemingly modern and scientific basis that captured twentieth-century minds. Wiker demonstrates that this ancient atomistic and materialistic philosophy supplies the guiding force behind Darwinism and powerfully propels the hedonistic bent of our society while promoting itself under the guise of pure science. This book is a challenge not only to those who believe Darwinism to be purely scientific fact but to Christian who have at times inconsistently lived out their Christian moral convictions and so have failed to recognize and address the ancient corrosive underpinnings of our present moral and intellectual crisis. [via]

This book discusses the belief in God, chaos, evolution, miracles, and prayer,and gives an answer to the question:Can a scientist believe? [via]

In his trilogy - "One World", "Science and Creation" and "Science and Providence" - Polkinghorne showed how new discoveries such as quantum theory and chaos theory opened the way to a new relationship between science and religion. In this book, he returns to the science-theology debate. [via]

Binding: Hardcover Publisher: Deseret Book Co. Date published: 1983 ISBN-13: 9780877479444 ISBN: 0877479445 [via]

Revered and eminently readable essayist Stephen Jay Gould has once again rendered the complex simple, this time mending the seeming split between the two "Rocks of Ages," science and religion. He quickly, and rightfully, admits that his thesis is not new, but one broadly accepted by many scientists and theologians. Gould begins by suggesting that Darwin has been misconstrued--that while some religious thinkers have used divinity to prove the impossibility of evolution, Darwin would have never done the reverse.

Gould eloquently lays out not "a merely diplomatic solution" to rectify the physical and metaphysical, but "a principled position on moral and intellectual grounds," central to which is the elegant concept of "non-overlapping magisteria." (Gould defines magisteria as a "four-bit" word meaning domain of authority in teaching.) Essentially, science and religion can't be unified, but neither should they be in conflict; each has its own discrete magisteria, the natural world belonging exclusively to science and the moral to religion.

Gould's argument is both lucid and convincing as he cites past religious and scientific greats (including a particularly touching section on Darwin himself). Regardless of your persuasions, religious or scientific, Gould holds up his end of the conversation with characteristic respect and intelligence. --Paul Hughes [via]

Although now an Anglican priest and head of one of the prestigious colleges in Cambridge University, John Polkinghorne has spent most of his adult life working as a theoretical physicist. He is therefore uniquely qualified  and frequently called upon  to set forth the relationship between science and theology in a way that takes the two disciplines seriously.Polkinghorne argues that the habits of thought that are natural to the scientist are the same habits of thought that can be followed also in the search for a wider and deeper kind of truth about the world. He calls this bottom-up thinking, that is starting not with general principles but with the particularity of experience, and then asking what is sufficient to explain the phenomena and give an understanding of what is going on.Portions of this book were delivered as the Pascal Lectures at the University of Waterloo (1992) and as the William Belden Noble Lectures at Harvard University (1993). The first half of the book seeks to establish an acceptable meeting point for science and religion. The second half looks at some specific theological issues approached  creation, the role of chance, Gods engagement with time, the anticipation of a destiny awaiting humanity beyond death, and the end of the universe.John Polkinghorne is President of Queens College in Cambridge University. He is the author of many books, including Reason and Reality, published by Trinity Press International. [via]

The debate over teaching evolution in the public schools remains one of the most emotionally-charged controversies in twentieth-century America. Now available in a revised and updated edition, Edward J. Larson's highly-acclaimed study--which ranges from before the Scopes trial of 1925 to the creationism disputes of the 1980s--offers the first comprehensive account of the educational and legal battles erupting from this persistent confrontation.
Larson traces the origins of the dispute back to the late nineteenth century, a period marked by the scientific acceptance of evolution, the rise of a distinct fundamentalist branch within Protestant Christianity, and the spread of public secondary education. He argues that the ever-increasing interaction between these factors led to a series of legal confrontations, all of the same nature, from the 1920s to the present day.
Analyzing the developments in teaching evolution and the statutes and court cases spawned by them, Larson concludes that public science education has never deviated too far from public opinion. Thus, strong regional opposition in the 1920s to Darwinism resulted in bans on evolutionary teaching, while the Supreme Court's overturning of those bans in 1968 came only when wider popular acceptance of the theory of evolution had occurred. While finding that legislators have responded more readily to public opinion than judges, Larson reveals that even the courts have operated within the boundaries set by public sentiment and have generally refused to rule on the scientific merits of either side's argument.
Lucid and provocative, this study offers a much-needed historical perspective on a debate that has resisted a final resolution for more than half a century. This edition contains a new chapter which treats the ramifications of the controversy in the 1980s. [via]

Recent years have seen the rise to prominence of ever more sophisticated philosophical and scientific critiques of the ideas marketed under the name of Darwinism. In Uncommon Dissent, mathematician and philosopher William A. Dembski brings together essays by leading intellectuals who find one or more aspects of Darwinism unpersuasive. As Dembski explains, Darwinism has gathered around itself an aura of invincibility that is inhospitable to rational discussionto say the least: "Darwinism, its proponents assure us, has been overwhelmingly vindicated. Any resistance to it is futile and indicates bad faith or worse." Indeed, those who question the Darwinian synthesis are supposed, in the famous formulation of Richard Dawkins, to be ignorant, stupid, insane, or wicked.

The hostility of dogmatic Darwinians like Dawkins has not, however, prevented the advent of a growing cadre of scholarly critics of metaphysical Darwinism. The measured, thought-provoking essays in Uncommon Dissent make it increasingly obvious that these critics are not the brainwashed fundamentalist buffoons that Darwinisms defenders suggest they are, but rather serious, skeptical, open-minded inquirers whose challenges pose serious questions about the viability of Darwinist ideology. The intellectual power of their contributions to Uncommon Dissent is bracing. [via]

On the 10th anniversary of his death, brilliant astrophysisist and Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Sagan's prescient exploration of the relationship between religion and science and his personal search for God.

Carl Sagan is considered one of the greatest scientific minds of our time. His remarkable ability to explain science in terms easily understandable to the layman in bestselling books such as Cosmos, The Dragons of Eden, and The Demon-Haunted World won him a Pulitzer Prize and placed him firmly next to Isaac Asimov, Stephen Jay Gould, and Oliver Sachs as one of the most important and enduring communicators of science. In December 2006 it will be the tenth anniversary of Sagan's death, and Ann Druyan, his widow and longtime collaborator, will mark the occasion by releasing Sagan's famous "Gifford Lectures in Natural Theology," The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God. The chance to give the Gifford Lectures is an honor reserved for the most distinguished scientists and philosophers of our civilization. In 1985, on the grand occasion of the centennial of the lectureship, Carl Sagan was invited to give them. He took the opportunity to set down in detail his thoughts on the relationship between religion and science as well as to describe his own personal search to understand the nature of the sacred in the vastness of the cosmos.

The Varieties of Scientific Experience, edited, updated and with an introduction by Ann Druyan, is a bit like eavesdropping on a delightfully intimate conversation with the late great astronomer and astrophysicist. In his charmingly down-to-earth voice, Sagan easily discusses his views on topics ranging from manic depression and the possibly chemical nature of transcendance to creationism and so-called intelligent design to the likelihood of intelligent life on other planets to the likelihood of nuclear annihilation of our own to a new concept of science as "informed worship." Exhibiting a breadth of intellect nothing short of astounding, he illuminates his explanations with examples from cosmology, physics, philosophy, literature, psychology, cultural anthropology, mythology, theology, and more. Sagan's humorous, wise, and at times stunningly prophetic observations on some of the greatest mysteries of the cosmos have the invigorating effect of stimulating the intellect, exciting the imagination, and reawakening us to the grandeur of life in the cosmos. [via]

A 2001 ECPA Gold Medallion Award winner!

A 2001 Award of Merit winner!

Science is the supreme authority in our culture.

If there is a dispute, science arbitrates it. If a law is to be passed, science must ratify it. If truth is to be taught, science must approve it. And when science is ignored, stroms of protest are heard in the media, in the university--even in local coffee shops.

Yet a society ruled by science (and the naturalistic philosophy that undergirds much of it) faces major problems. Science speaks so authoritatively in our culture that many are tempted to use its clout to back claims that go beyond the available evidence. How can we spot when such ideological slight of hand has taken place?

More important, while we may learn a great deal from science, it does not offer us unlimited knowledge. In fact, most scientists readily acknowledge that science cannot provide answers to questions of ultimate purpose or meaning. So to what authority will we turn for these?

The deficiencies in science and the philosophy (naturalism) that undergirds it call for a cognitive revolution--a fundamental change in our thinking habits. And it all begins with a wedge of truth.

This wedge of truth does not "wedge out" a necessary foundation of rational thought. But it does "wedge in" the much-needed acknowledgment that reason encompasses more than mere scientific investigation. Phillip E. Johnson argues compellingly for an understanding of reason that brings scientific certainty back into relational balance with philosophical inquiry and religious faith.

Applying his wedge of truth, Johnson analyzes the latest debates between science and religion played out in our media, our universities and society-at-large. He looks to thinkers such as Newbigin, Polanyi and Pascal to lay a foundation for our seeing the universe in a totally different way. And from that base he then considers the educational programs and research agendas that should be undertaken--and have already begun in some earnest--during this new century.

In the end, Johnson prophetically concludes that the walls of naturalism will fall and that the Christian gospel must play a vital role in building a new foundation fro thinking--not just about science and religion but about everyhting that gives human life hopeand meaning. [via]