A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Science and Religion

  • Doing without Adam and Eve

    One argument you sometimes hear for the necessity of a “historical” fall and a “historical” Adam and Eve goes like this: if there was no historical first couple and fall into sin, then we are in no need of a savior and therefore the entire gospel loses its raison d’etre. This seems odd to me. Read more

  • More theo-podcasts: Evolutionary Christianity

    Speaking of theology podcasts, readers might also be interested in this series: The Advent of Evolutionary Christianity. The series is a production of Michael Dowd, author of Thank God for Evolution, and the topic is integrating Christian faith with an evolutionary understanding of the world. Interviewees include Ian Barbour, John Cobb, Brian McLaren, and others. Read more

  • Ruse on The Moral Landscape

    Philosopher Michael Ruse takes a sledgehammer to Sam Harris’s new book on morality: I don’t know what Harris studied in his philosophy courses as an undergrad at Stanford, but they don’t seem to have penetrated very deeply. He denounces philosophers before him (including myself, I should admit) without really addressing the challenge their arguments pose Read more

  • Mid-week links

    – 2010’s was the hottest June on record in Washington, D.C. (I believe it!) – Glenn Beck pulicizes liberation theology. – On the authority of the Bible. (And more.) – Is Amazon killing the publishing business? – Keith Ward argues that there are things science can’t explain. – The ideology of marriage. – I heartily Read more

  • Purpose and design

    …the question of whether there is a point or purpose to the universe is not answered simply be reference to evidence for or against a designer. Purpose is a much wider notion than design, and it can live much more comfortably with chance, disorder, and the abyss of cosmic time than can the all too Read more

  • Physicalism, reductionism, and the soul

    This off-the-cuff post on atheism generated some interesting discussion with Gaius about physicalism, reductionism, and humanism, among other things. I don’t know that I can express my views on the matter better than I tried to do in this post from a few years ago discussing Keith Ward’s Pascal’s Fire. In short, we often abstract Read more

  • The truth about scientists and religion?

    I thought this book review, from today’s WaPo, was worth highlighting: Rice University sociologist Elaine Ecklund offers a fresh perspective on this debate in “Science vs. Religion.” Rather than offering another polemic, she builds on a detailed survey of almost 1,700 scientists at elite American research universities — the most comprehensive such study to date. Read more

  • Natural theology or theology of nature?

    Following up a bit on this post… In his book Religion and Science, which is based on his Gifford Lectures, Ian Barbour distinguishes between natural theology and the theology of nature. Natural theology tries to prove God’s existence by appealing to some feature of the created order. Barbour denies that natural theology can achieve its Read more

  • Science, faith, and the “God hypothesis”

    Kim Fabricius has another set of provocative theological propositions at Faith & Theology–these ones on what he calls the “God hypothesis.” By this he means the attempt, by various religious thinkers, to take on the “new atheists” on their own turf and argue for God’s existence on “scientific” grounds. As usual, Fabricius definitely scores some Read more

  • Proof vs. “motivated belief”

    I liked this interview with physicist/Anglican priest John Polkinghorne. In particular, his distinction between proving a belief and having a belief that is well motivated is worth highlighting: Is it important to be able to prove the existence of God? Well, I don’t think it’s possible to prove the existence of God. There are many Read more