The certainties which underpinned Christian belief have crumbled in a
world where science sets the standard of what is true. A rational case
for belief must therefore be constructed out of uncertainties.
Probability theory provides the tools for measuring and combining
uncertainties and is thus the key to progress.
This book examines four
much debated topics where the logic of uncertain reference can be
brought to bear. These are: miracles, the paranormal, God's existence,
and the Bible. Given the great diversity of evidence, it is not
surprising that opposite conclusions have been drawn by supposedly
rational people. An assessment of the state of the argument from a
probabilistic perspective is overdue.
In this book Professor Bartholomew
examines and refutes some of the more extravagant claims, evaluates the
weight of some of the quantitative evidence, and provides an answer to
the fundamental question: can a rational person be a Christian?
Through intimate conversations with some of the world's most distinguished scientists (including two Nobel Laureates), Faith in Science invites
us to explore the connections between scientific and religious
approaches to truth. Subjects range from the existence and nature of God
to the role of spirituality in modern science. The result is a clear
account of how two major cultural forces can work together to offer
unique insights into questions of existence.
In 1633, at the end of one of the most famous trials in history, the
Inquisition condemned Galileo for contending that the Earth moves and
that the Bible is not a scientific authority. Galileo's condemnation set
off a controversy that has acquired a fascinating life of its own and
that continues to this day. This absorbing book is the first to examine
the entire span of the Galileo affair from his condemnation to his
alleged rehabilitation by the Pope in 1992. Filled with primary sources,
many translated into English for the first time, Retrying Galileo will
acquaint readers with the historical facts of the trial, its aftermath
and repercussions, the rich variety of reflections on it throughout
history, and the main issues it raises.
How does modern science bear upon such ultimate questions as the origin
of the universe and the existence of God? Cosmos, Bios, Theos is a
portfolio of opinions and arguments from 60 scientists, including 24
Nobel Prize winners, on the relationshiip between the scientific
enterprise and the religious view of reality.
In Cosmos, Bios, Theos Scientists Reflect on Science, God, and the Origins of the Universe, Life, and Homo sapiens.
The book is edited by Henry Margenau and Roy Abraham Varghese.
Why did an atheist like Carl Sagan talk so much about God? Why does NASA
climatologist James Hansen plead with us in his recent book not to
waste "Our Last Chance to Save Humanity"? Because science advisors are
our new prophets, Lynda Walsh argues in Scientists as Prophets: A Rhetorical Genealogy.
She does not claim, as some scholars have, that these public scientists
push scientism as a replacement for religion. Rather, she puts forth
the provocative argument that prophetic ethos is a flexible type of
charismatic authority whose function is to manufacture certainty.
Scientists aren't our only prophets, Walsh contends, but science
advisors predictably perform prophetic ethos whenever they need to
persuade their publics to take action or fund basic research.
Walsh
first charts the genealogy of this hybrid scientific-prophetic ethos
back to its roots in ancient oracles before exploring its flourishing in
17th century Europe. She then tracks its performances and mutations
through several important late-modern events in America: Robert
Oppenheimer's role in the opening of the atomic age; Rachel Carson's
interventions in pesticide use; the mass-media polemics of science
popularizers such as Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Stephen Jay Gould;
and finally the UN's climate change panel and their role in
Climategate. Along the way, Walsh highlights the special ethical and
political defects embedded in the genealogy of the scientist-prophet,
and she finishes by evaluating proposed remedies. She concludes that
without a radical shift in our style of
deliberative policy-making, there is little chance of remedying the
dysfunctions in our current science-advising system. A cogent rhetorical
analysis of over 1,000 archival documents from 10 historic cases,
Scientists as Prophets engages scholars of scientific rhetoric, history,
and literacy, but is also accessible to readers interested in the roots
of current political debates about the environment, nuclear energy, and
science education.
In recent years, the relations between science and religion have been the object of renewed attention. Developments in physics, biology and the neurosciences have reinvigorated discussions about the nature of life and ultimate reality. At the same time, the growth of anti-evolutionary and intelligent design movements has led many to the view that science and religion are necessarily in conflict.
This book provides a comprehensive introduction to the relations between science and religion, with contributions from historians, philosophers, scientists and theologians. It explores the impact of religion on the origins and development of science, religious reactions to Darwinism, and the link between science and secularization. It also offers in-depth discussions of contemporary issues, with perspectives from cosmology, evolutionary biology, psychology, and bioethics.
The volume is rounded out with philosophical reflections on the connections between atheism and science, the nature of scientific and religious knowledge, and divine action and human freedom.
Like detectives sleuthing out the greatest mystery of all, scientists over the centuries have uncovered clues about the structure and origins of the universe. The work of Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and a host of other tenacious researchers and thinkers reveals a cosmos of almost unimaginable wonder and beauty.
If we then honestly follow the evidence of science wherever it leads, where do we end up? Karl Giberson takes us on a fascinating guided tour of planets and protons, galaxies and gamma rays. We discover that if gravity were slightly stronger, neutrons a tiny bit lighter, the size of our sun somewhat larger or a dozen other factors altered by fractions, there would be no life.
The author shows that for many observers, even those who do not embrace religious faith, all of this looks suspiciously like the expression of a grand plan--a cosmic architecture capable of both supporting life such as ours, and inspiring observers like us to seek out hints of a creator.
Hints of God in Our Fine-Tuned World
Historian Edward Grant illuminates how today's scientific culture originated with the religious thinkers of the Middle Ages. In the early centuries of Christianity, Christians studied science and natural philosophy only to the extent that these subjects proved useful for a better understanding of the Christian faith, not to acquire knowledge for its own sake.
However, with the influx of Greco-Arabic science and natural philosophy into Western Europe during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Christian attitude toward science changed dramatically. Despite some tensions in the thirteenth century, the Church and its theologians became favorably disposed toward science and natural philosophy and used them extensively in their theological deliberations.
Dr. John C. Polkinghorne examines whether a personal, interacting God
is a credible concept in today's scientific age. Encouraging the belief
that there is a compatibility between the insights of science and the
insights of religion, this book focuses on the viewpoint that the world is one in which both
human beings and God have the freedom to act.
A modern
understanding of the physical world is applied to questions of prayer
and providence, such as: Do miracles happen? Can prayer change anything?
Why does evil exist? Why does God allow suffering? Why does God need us
to ask him?
God's involvement in time is considered, from both a
temporal and an eternal perspective. The roles of incarnation and
sacrament are discussed in terms of whether or not they have a credible
place in today's worldview. And the Final Anthropic Principle (FAP) is
presented, with its attempt at a physical eschatology, showing it to be
an inadequate basis for hope. Real hope can reside only with God,
Polkinghorne concludes.
John C. Polkinghorne, internationally renowned priest-scientist,
addresses fundamental questions about how scientific and theological
worldviews relate to each other in this, the second volume (originally
published in 1988) of his trilogy, which also included Science and Providence and One World.
Dr. Polkinghorne illustrates how a scientifically minded person
approaches the task of theological inquiry, postulating that there
exists a close analogy between theory and experiment in science and
belief and understanding in theology. He offers a fresh perspective on
such questions as: Are we witnessing today a revival a natural
theology—the search for God through the exercise of reason and the study
of nature? How do the insights of modern physics into the interlacing
of order and disorder relate to the Christian doctrine of Creation? What
is the relationship between mind and matter?
Polkinghorne states that the "remarkable insights that science
affords us into the intelligible workings of the world cry out for an
explanation more profound than that which it itself can provide.
Religion, if it is to take seriously its claim that the world is the
creation of God, must be humble enough to learn from science what that
world is actually like. The dialogue between them can only be mutually
enriching."
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.
