In our last two articles, we've explored one book in the exciting new field of cognitive science of religion. And we've seen how one of the findings in this area is that belief in God, or something like God, is natural to us, given the types of minds we have. Of course, this doesn't show that one ought to believe in God—that would be to commit the naturalistic fallacy. After Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part XXXIV: Justin L. Barrett—Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Part B
In our last article, we explored some recent findings in the cognitive science of religion (CSR). We saw how current research suggests that belief in God, or something like God, comes naturally to most human beings, most of the time, in virtue of the types of brains we have. I'd like to explore Justin L. Barrett's arguments on this front in a bit more depth in this Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXXIII: Justin L. Barrett—Why Would Anyone Believe in God? Part A
In the last four articles, we explored two sides of the theist/atheist debate. On the atheist side, we explored Antony Flew's argument that we start from a position of atheism, as a default, and that the onus is on the theist to persuade us otherwise. We also heard from William Kingdon Clifford, who contended for a strong evidentialist position—i.e., that we must have Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part XXXII: Alvin Plantinga and Reformed Epistemology
In our previous discussions of Antony Flew and William Kingdon Clifford, we've been exploring the evidentialist thesis in the philosophy of religion. Evidentialism is the view that we require evidence to ground our beliefs: belief in the absence of evidence is contrary to reason, perhaps even to morality. Confronted with this challenge, a person of faith can either accept the Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part XXXI: William James—The Will to Believe
In our last article, we explored William Kingdon Clifford's "The Ethics of Belief," in which he argued that "it is wrong, always, everywhere, and for everyone, to believe anything on the basis of insufficient evidence." Thus Clifford is not just an evidentialist (i.e., someone who takes the position in epistemology, that all beliefs must be grounded on sufficient evidence), but Continue Reading …
Science, Secularism, and Religion, Part XXX: William Kingdon Clifford—The Ethics of Belief
Imagine a ship owner who sells tickets for transatlantic voyages. He is at the dock one day, bidding his ship farewell, when he remembers a warning he had received from his mechanics the week before, that the integrity of the ship’s hull was questionable and that it might not be seaworthy. But on some plausible grounds or other he forms the sincere, honest conviction that his Continue Reading …
Science, Secularism, and Religion, Part XXIX: Antony Flew—The Presumption of Atheism
In our last articles, we explored Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. Although there's much more that could be said about this important and influential book, I have to plead exhaustion. Taylor is not always the easiest author to understand, and we've spent a lot of time on him already. For the rest of the series, I'd like to explore some of the authors and ideas that have Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXVIII: Charles Taylor—The Dark Abyss of Time
In our last article we explored Charles Taylor’s concept of “the buffered self,” a peculiar kind of self-consciousness engendered by Enlightenment rationalism, and which has become customary (at least for educated elites) in our own time. We saw how it can be at once a source of pride, a profound source of accomplishment and self-worth, and also a source of confinement and Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXVII: Charles Taylor—The Malaise of Modernity
In our last article, we explored Charles Taylor’s discussion of a new religion that took shape in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Providential Deism. Yet, as we saw, it was not entirely new but in many respects a development and expansion of themes already expounded on by the Protestant Reformation. Where the Protestant Reformers accused Catholicism of being Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXVI: Charles Taylor — Providential Deism and the Impersonal Order
In the last article, we saw how the Protestant Reformation challenged the premodern conception of reality, and began to put in place some of the elements we can recognize today in modern, Western-style secularism. In particular, there was a “flattening effect” when it came to time, space, and devotion. More and more, secular, ordinary time came to the forefront. The sacred Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXV: Charles Taylor—The Protestant Reformation and the Rise of the Disciplinary Society
In previous articles, we’ve taken some first steps toward answering the underlying question of Charles Taylor’s book, A Secular Age. He asks us to look at Europe around the year 1500, and observe that belief in God had an unproblematic, normative, even a central, character for those societies. But when we look around today, we find a very different climate. While certainly a Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXIV: Charles Taylor—Time, Space, and Self in the Enchanted World (Part B)
In our previous articles, we began to explore what Charles Taylor calls the “bulwarks of belief.” These are the aspects of psychology and society that made belief nearly irresistible for most Europeans around the year 1500. Taylor postulates these bulwarks thus: that purpose and design were evident in nature and history; that God was implicated in the very existence of society; Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXIII: Charles Taylor—Time, Space, and Self in the Enchanted World (Part A)
In the previous article, we explored the “Bulwarks of Belief”—those features of the premodern, European mindset that, according to Charles Taylor, made belief in transcendent realities nearly inescapable. There were basically three of them: God’s purposes were evident in the design of nature, and in particular incidents (often construed as this-worldly dispensations of divine Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XXII: Charles Taylor—The Bulwarks of Belief (A Secular Age, Part B)
In our last article, we began to explore the philosophy of secularism, through Charles Taylor’s book, A Secular Age. We saw how Taylor’s three senses of the word describe a progressive development: first, a retreat of religion (itself a problematic term) from the public to the private sphere; then, a decline of religiosity in the private sphere; and finally, the emergence of Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part XXI: Charles Taylor: A Secular Age (Part A)
Of the three elements in our series—science, religion, and secularism—science has probably received the most philosophical attention, at least in the contemporary context. Indeed, the constitution of a category, “philosophy of religion,” presumes a sectioning-off of certain topics that have, historically, been integral to philosophy. It presumes, in other words, a growing Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part XX: What is Science? (Part B)
In my last essay, I argued that it was important to distinguish science from non-science, and that a first step toward doing so was to distinguish between nomothetic (law-seeking) sciences like physics and chemistry, and idiographic (particularizing) sciences like biology and geography. I tried to show that science doesn’t have to copy methods characteristic of physics in order Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part XIX: What Is Science? (Part A)
So far in this series, I’ve been using the word “science” as if its meaning were self-evident. And in a sense, it is: science is the investigation of the natural world. Insomuch as every society acquires knowledge of the natural world, every society has science. It seems to me this is the usual sense of the word “science”; what one might call its naive, or non-philosophical, Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism, Part XVIII: Humanistic, Scientific, and Theistic Approaches to History
In a previous article, we finished our exploration of Michael Allen Gillespie’s Theological Origins of Modernity. One of the things I tried to show, on the basis of Gillespie’s argument, was that modern intellectual history can be mapped, more or less exhaustively, according to a three-part diagram, where the axes are defined by the place where explanation stops. The medieval Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XVII: Galileo Goes to Jail?
One thing that quickly becomes apparent in discussions about science and religion is that there are a lot of stories out there. Some of them are quite good. Too good, even. Consider, for instance, Myth #8 in Galileo Goes to Jail, an essay anthology edited by historian of science Ronald L. Numbers. According to this myth, Galileo was imprisoned in an inquisition dungeon, and Continue Reading …
Science, Religion, and Secularism Part XVI: Did Medieval Islamic Theology Subvert Science?
Part of the way the prestige of science has been established in our own time is through the rhetoric of favorable contrasts. In previous articles, we’ve seen one instance of this contrast in the tripartite division of European history: rational inquiry flourished in the ancient world, withered in the medieval times, and was revived again in the time of the Renaissance and the Continue Reading …