Digital Faith

Living in the Second Religious Aftershock

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.

Is Evolution a Secular Religion?

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?

Christian Responses to Evolution

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.

The Truth About Evolution

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.