George Johnson reviews Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon in Getting a Rational Grip on Religion. Dennett wants to defend the idea that religion is a fit subject for scientific scrutiny?
"I appreciate that many readers will be profoundly distrustful of the tack I am taking here," he writes. "They will see me as just another liberal professor trying to cajole them out of some of their convictions, and they are dead right about that--that's what I am, and that's exactly what I am trying to do."I suspect the concern is less that Dennett is a "liberal professor trying to cajole them out of some of their convictions" but that he is a known unfriendly atheist. For example his ill thought involvement with the poorly named 'Brights', and his claims about some of us being relegated to "cultural zoos."
Our own Kevin Timpe on Truth, Christmas, and the Eucharist.
Toni Vogey Carey on The Ontological Argument and the Sin of Hubris
News of the absurd... Prove Christ exists, judge orders priest.
An Italian judge has ordered a priest to appear in court this month to prove that Jesus Christ existed. The case against Father Enrico Righi has been brought in the town of Viterbo, north of Rome, by Luigi Cascioli, a retired agronomist who once studied for the priesthood but later became a militant atheist. ... Signor Cascioli's contention -- echoed in numerous atheist books and internet sites -- is that there was no reliable evidence that Jesus lived and died in 1st-century Palestine apart from the Gospel accounts, which Christians took on faith. There is therefore no basis for Christianity, he claims.Really? Miracles aside, people really doubt there was a man Jesus? Someone send this guy a copy of F. F. Bruce's The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?
Faith, Freud and intellectual integrity a review of John Cottingham's The Spiritual Dimension: religion, philosophy and human value based on his 2003/4 Stanton Lectures.
V.V. Raman reviews William Wainwright's Religion and Morality
The questions are old and simple: Is morality always tied up with religion? Can there be religion without morality? Can there be morality without religion?
Rea, Plantinga, and Ruse on Theory's value for a science class debated.
"The view itself is not pushing any type of religion," Rea said. "You could be a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Platonist or a Stoic and believe intelligent design. One of the main reasons people think it's pushing religion is that Christianity, Judaism and Islam are the major religions that involve a creator."
The Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews brings us Steven Emmanuel's review Sylvia Walsh's Living Christianly: Kierkegaard's Dialectic of Christian Existence
Via the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy we get John Finnis on Aquinas' Moral, Political and Legal Philosophy, Aaron Hughes on Judah Abrabanel, and William Hasker on the Afterlife.
Online Papers in Philosophy [HT: OPP]
Edwin Curley's essay On Becoming a Heretic for the soon to appear in Philosophers Without God.
As I became an adult, I began to have doubts about the religion in which I had been raised. Partly this came from the failure of my attempts to pray for my grandmother's recovery from a debilitating illness. Partly it came from my reading Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge, which posed the problem of evil in a powerful way. But probably the most crucial factor was the prayer book my mother gave me when I was 16.
Robert Pasnau on Abstract Truth in Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas holds that the proper objects of intellect are the natures of material objects, conceived of universally through intellectual abstraction. This paper considers two questions regarding that doctrine: First, what are these abstracted, universal objects? Second, given that the world is concrete and particular, how can such abstract, universal thoughts yield true beliefs about the world?
Alexander Pruss on Altruism, Teleology and God
There is a long tradition of arguments for the existence of God. Early examples include Aristotle's cosmological argument in Book Lambda of the Metaphysics, arguing that if there change, there must be at least one unchanging and perfect being that originates all change, while the first chapter of Romans and chapter 13 of the Book of Wisdom insist that "from the greatness and the beauty of created things their original author, by analogy, is seen" (Wis. 13:5, NAB). This tradition continues, and indeed starting in the 1950s, analytic philosophy has seen impressive resurgence of more and more careful formulations and criticisms of arguments for the existence of God. I shall show how the phenomenon of altruism yields a theistic argument.
Branden Fitelson with Some Remarks on the "Intelligent Design" Controversy
There are various questions that arise in connection with the "intelligent design" (ID) controversy. This introductory section aims to distinguish five of these questions. Later sections are devoted to detailed discussions of each of these five questions. The first (and central) question is the one that has been discussed most frequently in the news lately: (Q1) Should ID be taught in our public schools?
Michael Murray and Glenn Ross on Neo-Cartesianism And The Problem Of Animal Suffering
The existence and extent of animal suffering provides grounds for a serious evidential challenge to theism. In the wake of the Darwinian revolution, this strain of natural atheology has taken on substantially greater significance. In this essay we argue that there are at least four neo-Cartesian views on the nature of animal minds which would serve to deflect this evidential challenge.
Michael Murray on Natural Providence (Or Design Trouble)
Recent work in Intelligent Design Theory (IDT) reopens a number of questions concerning God's providence over nature. Friends of IDT claim that their "explanatory filter" allows us to detect design empirically and that this provides a way to make appeal to supernatural design in properly scientific explanations while at the same time undercutting methodological naturalism. I argue here that the explanatory filter is fatally flawed, and that detection of detection of design would not undercut methodological naturalism in any case. Friends of IDT fail to see this because they adopt a Newtonian conception of natural providence, while failing even to consider a preferable Leibnizian conception.
2006 Edge Question -- "What is your dangerous idea?"
Scott Sampson "The purpose of life is to disperse energy"
Keith Devlin "We are entirely alone"
Karl Sabbagh "The human brain and its products are incapable of understanding the truths about the universe"
John Horgan "We Have No Souls"
Paul Bloom "There are no souls"
Scott Atran "Science encourages religion in the long run (and vice versa)"
Sam Harris "Science Must Destroy Religion"
Stephen M. Kosslyn "A Science of the Divine?"
Jordan Pollack "Science as just another Religion"
Daniel Dennett "There aren't enough minds to house the population explosion of memes"
Matthew,
I'm having a little trouble following the link to the V.V. Raman review of Wainwright.
Mike,
The link has been fixed. Thanks for pointing out the problem.