I am reading my way through the hot new book American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us (Simon & Schuster, 2010). [Note: T&S is running a 12 Questions feature with David E. Campbell, one of the authors of the book.] In the first few chapters, the authors survey how religion in America has changed over the last fifty years, starting with the cultural earthquake of the Sixties, followed by two aftershocks: a conservative retrenchment that peaked in the eighties and then a renewed move away from organized religion that is presently in the ascendant. We're living in the second aftershock.
This is the third and final post commenting on philosopher Michael Ruse's The Evolution-Creation Struggle (see Part 1 and Part 2). Ruse thinks evolutionism (his term for the popular side of evolution) is something of a secular religion. Why?
This is the second post commenting on Michael Ruse's The Evolution-Creation Struggle (see Part 1). Christian responses to evolution come in three flavors: those that reject it as inconsistent with Christian beliefs; those that accept it and find evolution compatible with Christian belief; and those that minimize the interaction of belief and evolution by placing scientific knowledge and religious belief in two different domains.
I am working my way through The Evolution-Creation Struggle, by Michael Ruse, a philosopher at Florida State. That's important: he's not a biologist for whom science can do no wrong and religion can do nothing right, he's a philosopher interested in a broader set of questions about the protracted debate between science and religion. I'll cover topics from the first half of the book in this post.
The first point is that evolution didn't start with Darwin. It was in the air ever since the Enlightenment produced a a general belief in the possibility of human progress. Christians could be as progressive as more secular thinkers. The idea that human effort could and should make the world a better place was a central tenet of postmillennialism and of the social gospel of the late 19th century.
Alone in the Universe: Why Our Planet Is Unique The prolific astrophysicist and science writer John Gribbin reviews where Earth came from, why it is here, and how it will end (in a rain of cometary chunks from the Oort Cloud in about a million years). Read all about it in my post The Fate of the Earth.
What Saint Paul Really Said Conservative Anglican scholar N. T. Wright corrects prevalent misunderstandings of Paul under four topics: history, theology, exegesis, application. • My post
After Theory Terry Eagleton on whatever it is that comes after postmodernism. My Post
Experiments in Ethics A moral philosopher's surprisingly entertaining critique of traditional philosophical ethics using modern experimental data. • My post
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