Religion

From medievalist Tim O’Neill (an atheist) at History for Atheists: The Church had always accepted that the Bible could be interpreted in a non-literal manner and that it should be if Biblical exegesis and rational analysis of the world conflicted. That’s why all those Biblical references that talk about a flat earth had long since been regarded as poetic rather than literal. So in 1615 Cardinal Bellarmine made it clear in his letter to Paolo Foscarini that the same could potentially happen with passages that were traditionally interpreted as saying the earth was fixed and unmoving: “[I]f there were a true demonstration that the sun is at the centre of the world and the earth in the third heaven, and Read More ›

You know, Dawkins dumped at Berkeley and all that. From Elliot Kaufman at National Review: Why must ardent secularists from the Islamic world like Ayaan Hirsi Ali — the type of people the Left looks to for inspiration in the history of Western secularism — be deemed bigots, while Sharia-supporting conspiracy theorists like Linda Sarsour are cherished? Why has criticizing Islam caused the New Atheists to cross a red line in the progressive imagination? These positions make no sense if one thinks of the Left as seriously secular, convinced of the need to end the reign of superstition. But American liberals profess neither the passionate skepticism of David Hume nor the honest, urgent atheism of Nietzsche. They prefer to embrace Read More ›

From David Sloan Wilson at This View of Life: Anything and Everything from an Evolutionary Perspective: ERS [Evolutionary Religious Studies] has made rapid progress during the last 20 years, in part by organizing the vast amount of empirical information on religion that has accumulated, much as Darwin was able to organize the vast amount of information on plants and animals during his day. More. It has made rapid progress if churning out a vast amount of idle naturalist speculation is progress. But remember, many of these people, deep down in their hearts, really do believe in that stuff. It would be easier to feel sympathy for them if it were not so ridiculous. See also: “The evolutionary psychologist knows why Read More ›

Rob Sheldon’s book is The Long Ascent: Genesis 1–11 in Science & Myth, Volume 1 (Wipf & Stock). The book tries to probe the minds of early biblical characters struggling to understand nature in the absence of any formal body of science knowledge. Order here. As “Part I” suggests, he is working on another installment in the series.

From Robert Larmer at Sophia: Contemporary Thomists, by and large, have been very critical of the intelligent design movement. Their criticism raises two important issues; the first being whether such criticism is well-founded, the second being whether it is consistent with the views of St. Thomas, from whom they claim to take their direction. I shall argue that their criticism typically misses the mark and that they are mistaken in their representation of Thomas’s views as regards intelligent design. (paywall) More. Readers unfamiliar with philosopher and theologian Aquinas (1225–1274) should read his views on the mind at First Things and ask whether he sounds in any way like a typical Christian evolutionist anxious to accommodate naturalism at any cost. Nothing Read More ›

From Denis MacEoin at Gatestone: The strictures in the ways of thinking in Islamic fundamentalism affect all sorts of things, from politics to history to interfaith relations to peace negotiations. … We may ask why a wealthy state such as Saudi Arabia still beheads people on charges of witchcraft and sorcery, yet the USA, the UK and other countries engage in close trade relations with it. In 2005, Shafayat Mohamed declared that the 2004 Indonesian tsunami had been caused by a rise in homosexuality, yet he remains the imam of the Deobandi militant Darul Uloom Institute in Florida. In 2016 a Muslim man, Omar Mateen, murdered 49 gay men at a nightclub in Orlando. Had he been influenced by Shafayat Read More ›

Bad news for Separation of Church and State lawyers. From Laura Geggel at LiveScience: Despite his criticism of intelligent design and creationism, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins told people at a science festival this past the weekend that he believes religious education is a key subject for schoolchildren. Dawkins, who is open about his atheism, said that understanding religion can help students get a better grasp of the world’s history and culture. He made the statement during a public conversation at the Cheltenham Science Festival in Gloucestershire, England, on Sunday (June 11), according to The Telegraph. It’s basically impossible to study English literature without some knowledge of Christianity, Dawkins noted. More. Religious education gets people used to the idea that other Read More ›

Asks BioLogos’s Jim Stump at at Christian Today, sneering: But after this initial good news, what strikes many people in the UK and elsewhere in the world is that there are still almost 40 per cent of Americans who are young earth creationists, holding beliefs that are contradicted by the overwhelming majority of scientists (in a separate poll from 2015, 99 per cent of those with a PhD in biology or medicine affirmed that humans evolved). And when restricted to Americans who attend church weekly, 65 per cent select the young earth creationist option. What accounts for this stunning disconnect between Americans’ religious convictions and what science has discovered about our origins? The reasons are surely multifarious and complex. There is Read More ›

From Laura Geggel at LiveScience: Scientists ran a meta-analysis of 63 studies and found that religious people tend to be less intelligent than nonreligious people. The association was stronger among college students and the general public than for those younger than college age, they found. The association was also stronger for religious beliefs, rather than religious behavior, according to the meta-analysis, published in 2013 in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Review. But why does this association exist? Dutton set out to find answer, thinking that perhaps it was because nonreligious people were more rational than their religious brethren, and thus better able to reason that there was no God, he wrote. But “more recently, I started to wonder if Read More ›

  Here re Controversy of the Ages: Why Christians Should Not Divide Over the Age of the Earth: Second, chapter 9 is worth the price of the whole book. Cabal notes that Christians need to have theological boundaries to protect the faith, but ought to draw them with charity and proper balance between inclusivity and restrictiveness. While he does have some criticisms for Reasons to Believe, the leading OEC organization, since they are committed to biblical inerrancy, he reserves his primary criticism for Answers in Genesis (AiG) and BioLogos. As for AiG, Cabal is concerned that they draw doctrinal lines to narrowly—including such things as a young earth, a flood-shaped geology, Neanderthals, and details about taxonomy in the definition of inerrancy. Read More ›

From William Doino, Jr. at First Things: To appreciate his achievement, one should start by noting what Plantinga had to overcome. As Heather Templeton Dill said, announcing this year’s prize: When Dr. Plantinga began his career in the late 1950’s, most academic philosophers deliberately rejected religiously informed philosophy. But early on, Dr. Plantinga defended a variety of arguments for the existence of God, marking the beginning of his efforts to put theistic belief back on the philosophical agenda. Plantinga’s first important work, God and Other Minds, re-examined the classic arguments for and against God. It concluded that belief in the existence of God was rational, just as belief in other minds is. Arguments for the existence of other minds cannot Read More ›

From astrophysicist Adam Frank at NPR: Sharf has no problem with the creative misreading that allows Buddhist Modernism to share space with scientific worldviews. “My concern,” he told Tricycle, “is not with the selectivity of those who read Buddhism as a rationalist and scientific religion — it is perfectly understandable given the world in which we live. It is really not a question of misreading. It is a question of what gets lost in the process.” Part of the problem for Sharf and others is that by focusing only on the domains of inner experience (i.e. mindfulness via contemplative practice), Buddhist Modernism loses aspects of its function that were central to its history. “Look at how suspicious many Western Buddhists Read More ›

From John L. Allen, Jr., at Crux Now: Most basically, Consolmagno said, it’s important to maintain the proper distinction between what science can prove, and what faith can add. “God is not something we arrive at the end of our science, it’s what we assume at the beginning,” he said, adding emphatically: “I am afraid of a God who can be proved by science, because I know my science well enough to not trust it!” More. Excuse us. Faith can add nothing to what cannot be demonstrated. Many popular theories such as the multiverse, Darwinism, alt right eugenics, cannot be demonstrated at all. So, translation from Consolmagno: Not to worry, we really are theistic naturalists: Nature is all there is. Read More ›

I (News) usually run this kind of question on Sunday but at a recent post, “Intelligent design: The materialist double standard” there was an exchange: Bob O’H: Seriously, what is the IDers’ answer to the “who designed the designer” question? (failure to answer this will – of course – immediately condemn all IDers as poopyheads, despite any efforts by the Federation of Creationist Scientists, International/Overseas to suppress this categorisation) and it was replied to: Barry Arrington: Bob, have you ever heard the old saw “there’s no such thing as a stupid question?” It is false. Stupid questions abound. The one you just asked is one of them. As has been pointed out on these pages 1,303,261 times (all of which Read More ›

From Ray Cavanaugh at Salvo: After his ordination [to the priesthood], Lemaître won a scholarship to study abroad and headed to Cambridge University, where he worked with the astronomer Arthur Eddington. He then migrated from Cambridge in the U.K. to Cambridge, Massachusetts, so he could study at Harvard and M.I.T., where he earned a doctoral degree. Returning to Belgium (at least for a while), he was appointed professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven. Right around this time, he published the formidably titled paper, “A Homogenous Universe of Constant Mass and Increasing Radiation, Taking Account of the Radial Velocity of Extragalactic Nebulae,” which questioned Einstein’s idea of a static universe. … By the latter half of the 1920s, Read More ›