In Species of Origins,
Karl W. Giberson and Donald A. Yerxa examine America's controversial
conversation about creation and evolution. While noting that part of the
discord stems from the growing cultural and religious diversity of the
United States, they argue powerfully that the real issue is the headlong
confrontation between two seemingly incompatible worldviews upon which
millions of Americans rely: modern naturalistic science and traditional
Judeo-Christian religions.
Hawking and the Mind of God examines the pseudoreligious connotations of
some of the key themes in Hawking's work, and how these shed light not
only on the Hawking cult itself, but also on the wider issue of how
scientists represent themselves in the media.
Peter Coles was born in 1963. He received his undergraduate degree from
the University of Cambridge and his doctorate from the University of Sussex. He is a professor of Astrophysics at Cardiff University. His
primary subject of interest is Cosmology and he has written numerous
books on the subject.
Many scientists regard mass and energy as the primary currency of
nature. In recent years, however, the concept of information has gained
importance. Why? In this book, eminent scientists, philosophers and
theologians chart various aspects of information, from quantum
information to biological and digital information, in order to
understand how nature works. Beginning with a historical treatment of
the topic, the book also examines physical and biological approaches to
information, and its philosophical, theological and ethical
implications.
Information and the Nature of Reality
Paul Davies and Niels Henrik Gregersen
Tim Maudlin's broad historical overview examines Aristotelian and
Newtonian accounts of space and time, and traces how Galileo's
conceptions of relativity and space-time led to Einstein's special and
general theories of relativity. Maudlin explains special relativity
using a geometrical approach, emphasizing intrinsic space-time structure
rather than coordinate systems or reference frames. He gives readers
enough detail about special relativity to solve concrete physical
problems while presenting general relativity in a more qualitative way,
with an informative discussion of the geometrization of gravity, the
bending of light, and black holes. Additional topics include the Twins
Paradox, the physical aspects of the Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction, the
constancy of the speed of light, time travel, the direction of time,
and more.
In this concise book, Tim Maudlin, introduces nonphysicists to the core philosophical
issues surrounding the nature and structure of space and time, and is
also an ideal resource for physicists interested in the conceptual
foundations of space-time theory.
This 1896 volume by Reverend J. A. Zahm, a professor of physics at the
University of Notre Dame, considers the Catholic theological tradition
as it relates to evolution. The author discusses Darwin's theory of
evolution in detail, and traces the debate between theologians and
scientists back to the early days of evolutionary theory. He compares
late nineteenth-century evolutionary theory and the beliefs of the
Catholic church, carefully evaluating the arguments and probing errors
and misconceptions in theory and terminology. He also attempts to shed
light on the little-understood relations between evolutionism and
Christianity as a whole, and discusses whether a person of any Christian
denomination can be an evolutionist. Zahm's thoughtful work is
considered to be one of the most important volumes on evolution ever
written by a Catholic.
Here are some facts you probably didn't learn in school:
- People in the Middle Ages did not think the world was flat. In fact, medieval scholars could prove it wasn't
- The Inquisition never executed anyone
because of their scientific ideas or discoveries (actually, the Church
was the chief sponsor of scientific research and several popes were
celebrated for their knowledge of the subject)
- It was medieval
scientific discoveries, methods, and principles that made possible
western civilization's Scientific Revolution
If you were taught
that the Middle Ages were a time of intellectual stagnation,
superstition, and ignorance, you were taught a myth that has been
utterly refuted by modern scholarship.
As a physicist and historian of science James Hannam shows in his book, The Genesis of Science: How the Christian Middle Ages Launched the Scientific Revolution, without the scholarship of the "barbaric" Middle Ages, modern science simply would not exist.
The
Middle Ages were a time of one intellectual triumph after another. As
Dr. Hannam writes, "The people of medieval Europe invented spectacles,
the mechanical clock, the windmill, and the blast furnace by themselves.
Lenses and cameras, almost all kinds of machinery, and the industrial
revolution itself all owe their origins to the forgotten inventors of
the Middle Ages."
The adjective 'medieval' has become a synonym for brutality and
uncivilised behaviour. Yet without the work of medieval scholars there
could have been no Galileo, no Newton and no Scientific Revolution.
In God's Philosophers, James Hannam debunks many of the myths about
the Middle Ages, showing that medieval people did not think the earth
was flat, nor did Columbus 'prove' that it is a sphere; the Inquisition
burnt nobody for their science nor was Copernicus afraid of persecution;
no Pope tried to ban human dissection or the number zero.
God's Philosophers is a celebration of the forgotten scientific
achievements of the Middle Ages - advances which were often made thanks
to, rather than in spite of, the influence of Christianity and Islam.
Decisive progress was also made in technology: spectacles and the
mechanical clock, for instance, were both invented in thirteenth-century
Europe.
Charting an epic journey through six centuries of history, God's
Philosophers brings back to light the discoveries of neglected geniuses
like John Buridan, Nicole Oresme and Thomas Bradwardine, as well as
putting into context the contributions of more familiar figures like
Roger Bacon, William of Ockham and Saint Thomas Aquinas.
Contrary to prevailing opinion, the roots of modern science were planted
in the ancient and medieval worlds long before the Scientific
Revolution of the seventeenth century. Indeed, that revolution would
have been inconceivable without the cumulative antecedent efforts of
three great civilisations: Greek, Islamic, and Latin. With the
scientific riches it derived by translation from Greco-Islamic sources
in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Christian Latin
civilisation of Western Europe began the last leg of the intellectual
journey that culminated in a scientific revolution that transformed the
world. The factors that produced this unique achievement are found in
the way Christianity developed in the West, and in the invention of the
university in 1200. As this 1997 study shows, it is no mere coincidence
that the origins of modern science and the modern university occurred
simultaneously in Western Europe during the late Middle Ages.
Sir John Eccles, a distinguished scientist and Nobel Prize winner who
has devoted his scientific life to the study of the mammalian brain,
tells the story of how we came to be, not only as animals at the end of
the hominid evolutionary line, but also as human beings possessed of
reflective consciousness. Eccles traces the line of human evolutionary
descent through developments such as skilled bipedal walking and dawning
spirituality, linking them with the growth of the human brain. He
conjectures that the beginning of human language came with Homo
habilis and its greatly enlarged brain, while the mystery of
self-consciousness is related to the newly developing neocortical areas
of the brain.
Harvard University researcher Edward Green shows how four forces —ideology, politics, a fixation on technology, and money— have produced AIDS policy failures in Africa, where two-thirds of all AIDS victims live.
Ideological blinders have led to millions of preventable AIDS deaths in Africa. Dr. Edward C. Green, former director of the Harvard AIDS Prevention Project, describes how Western AIDS "experts" stubbornly pursued ineffective remedies and sabotaged the most successful AIDS prevention program on that ravaged continent. He calls for new emphasis on promoting sexual fidelity-the only strategy (besides male circumcision) shown to work there.
Edward C. Green is former director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard School of Health and the author of six previous books, including Rethinking AIDS Prevention, AIDS and STDs in Africa, and AIDS, Behavior, and Culture. For more than 30 years, he has worked in the field of applied anthropology and international health, conducting research in Africa, Southeast Asia, and other parts of the world. He has served on boards of directors and advisory boards for many organizations, including the Presidential Advisory Council for HIV/AIDS, the Office of AIDS Research Advisory Council at the National Institutes of Health, the UNAIDS AIDS 2031 Steering Committee, AIDS.org, and the Global Initiative for Traditional Systems of Health.
