|
The Dawkins Delusion
''The Dawkins Delusion? Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of the Divine'' is a book by the theologian Alister McGrath and the psychologist Joanna Collicutt McGrath. It is written from a Christian perspective as a response to arguments put forth in ''The God Delusion'' by Richard Dawkins. The work was published in the United Kingdom in February 2007 by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and in the United States in July 2007. Synopsis McGrath criticizes Dawkins for what he perceives to be "a dogmatic conviction" to "a religious fundamentalism which refuses to allow its ideas to be examined or challenged." He objects to Dawkins' assertion that faith is a juvenile delusion, arguing that numerous reasonable persons chose to convert as adults. He cites himself and Antony Flew as two specific examples. Like Dawkins, McGrath rejects William Paley's watchmaker analogy as specious. To express his true feelings on the subject of irreducible complexity, McGrath instead cit ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The God Delusion
''The God Delusion'' is a 2006 book by British evolutionary biologist and ethologist Richard Dawkins. In ''The God Delusion'', Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator, God, almost certainly does not exist, and that belief in a personal god qualifies as a delusion, which he defines as a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence. He is sympathetic to Robert Pirsig's statement in '' Lila'' (1991) that "when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion."; In the book, Dawkins explores the relationship between religion and morality, providing examples that discuss the possibility of morality existing independently of religion and suggesting alternative explanations for the origins of both religion and morality. In early December 2006, it reached number four in the ''New York Times'' Hardcover Non-Fiction Best Seller list after nine weeks on the list. More than three ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alister McGrath
Alister Edgar McGrath (; born 1953) is an Irish theologian, Anglican priest, intellectual historian, scientist, Christian apologist, and public intellectual. He currently holds the Andreas Idreos Professorship in Science and Religion in the Faculty of Theology and Religion, and is a fellow of Harris Manchester College at the University of Oxford, and is Professor of Divinity at Gresham College.'Gresham College Press Release, 08/04/15' (accessed 8 April 2015) He was previously professor of theology, ministry, and education at and head of the Centre for Theology, Religion and Culture, professor of historical theology at the [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould ( ; September 10, 1941 – May 20, 2002) was an American Paleontology, paleontologist, Evolutionary biology, evolutionary biologist, and History of science, historian of science. He was one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1996, Gould was hired as the Vincent Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University, after which he divided his time teaching between there and Harvard. Gould's most significant contribution to evolutionary biology was the theory of punctuated equilibrium developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972.Eldredge, Niles, and S. J. Gould (1972)"Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism."In T.J.M. Schopf, ed., ''Models in Paleobiology''. San Francisco: Freeman, Cooper and Company, pp. 82–115. The theory proposes that most evolution is ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Francis Collins (geneticist)
Francis Sellers Collins (born April 14, 1950) is an American physician-scientist who discovered the genes associated with a number of diseases and led the Human Genome Project. He served as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, from 17 August 2009 to 19 December 2021, serving under three presidents. Collins announced his retirement publicly from the NIH on March 1, 2025, after 32 years of service. Before being appointed director of the NIH, Collins led the Human Genome Project and other genomics research initiatives as director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), one of the 27 institutes and centers at NIH. Before joining NHGRI, he earned a reputation as a gene hunter at the University of Michigan. He has been elected to the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences, and has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science. Collins has written books on science, medicine, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Owen Gingerich
Owen Jay Gingerich (; March 24, 1930 – May 28, 2023) was an American astronomer who had been professor emeritus of astronomy and of the history of science at Harvard University and a senior astronomer emeritus at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. In addition to his research and teaching, he had written many books on the history of astronomy. Gingerich was also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the International Academy of the History of Science. A committed Christian, he had been active in the American Scientific Affiliation, a society of evangelical scientists.Stephen C. Meyer.Owen Gingerich. ''Eternity''. May 1986. He served on the board of trustees of the Templeton Foundation. Early life Gingerich was born March 24, 1930, to Melvin and Verna (Roth) Gingerich, a Mennonite family in Washington, Iowa, but was raised on the prairies of Kansas where he first became interested in astronomy. His father taught his ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spirituality
The meaning of ''spirituality'' has developed and expanded over time, and various meanings can be found alongside each other. Traditionally, spirituality referred to a religious process of re-formation which "aims to recover the original shape of man", oriented at "the image of God" as exemplified by the List of founders of religious traditions, founders and sacred texts of the religions of the world. The term was used within early Christianity to refer to a life oriented toward Holy Spirit (Christianity), the Holy Spirit and broadened during the Late Middle Ages to include mind, mental aspects of life. In modern times, the term both spread to other religious traditions and broadened to refer to a wider range of experiences, including a range of Western esotericism, esoteric and religious traditions. Modern usages tend to refer to a subjective experience of a Sacredness, sacred dimension, and the "deepest values and meanings by which people live", often in a context separate from ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Naturalism (philosophy)
In philosophy, naturalism is the idea that only Scientific law, natural laws and forces (as opposed to supernatural ones) operate in the universe. In its primary sense, it is also known as ontological naturalism, metaphysical naturalism, pure naturalism, philosophical naturalism and antisupernaturalism. "Ontological" refers to ontology, the philosophical study of what exists. Philosophers often treat naturalism as equivalent to materialism, but there are important distinctions between the philosophies. For example, philosopher Paul Kurtz argued that nature is best accounted for by reference to Matter, material principles. These principles include mass, energy, and other Physical property, physical and Chemical property, chemical properties accepted by the scientific community. Further, this sense of naturalism holds that spirits, Deity, deities, and ghosts are not real and that there is no "Teleology, purpose" in nature. This stronger formulation of naturalism is commonly ref ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Moral Equivalence
Moral equivalence is a term used in political debate, usually to deny that a moral comparison can be made of two sides in a conflict, or in the actions or tactics of two sides. The term had some currency in polemic debates about the Cold War. "Moral equivalence" began to be used as a polemic ''term-of-retort'' to " moral relativism", which had been gaining use as an indictment against political foreign policy that appeared to use only a situation-based application of widely held ethical standards. International conflicts are sometimes viewed similarly, and interested parties periodically urge both sides to conduct a ceasefire and negotiate their differences. However these negotiations may prove difficult in that both parties in a conflict believe that they are morally superior to the other, and are unwilling to negotiate on basis of moral equivalence. Cold War In the Cold War context, the term was and is most commonly used by anticommunists as an accusation of formal fallacy f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Religion
Religion is a range of social system, social-cultural systems, including designated religious behaviour, behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, religious text, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics in religion, ethics, or religious organization, organizations, that generally relate humanity to supernatural, transcendence (religion), transcendental, and spirituality, spiritual elements—although there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion. It is an essentially contested concept. Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacredness, faith,Tillich, P. (1957) ''Dynamics of faith''. Harper Perennial; (p. 1). and a supernatural being or beings. The origin of religious belief is an open question, with possible explanations including awareness of individual death, a sense of community, and dreams. Religions have sacred histories, narratives, and mythologies, preserved in oral traditions, sac ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Science
Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which study the physical world, and the social sciences, which study individuals and societies. While referred to as the formal sciences, the study of logic, mathematics, and theoretical computer science are typically regarded as separate because they rely on deductive reasoning instead of the scientific method as their main methodology. Meanwhile, applied sciences are disciplines that use scientific knowledge for practical purposes, such as engineering and medicine. The history of science spans the majority of the historical record, with the earliest identifiable predecessors to modern science dating to the Bronze Age in Ancient Egypt, Egypt and Mesopotamia (). Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped the Gree ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Denis Noble
Denis Noble (born 16 November 1936) is a British physiologist and biologist who held the Burdon Sanderson Chair of Cardiovascular Physiology at the University of Oxford from 1984 to 2004 and was appointed professor emeritus and co-director of computational physiology. He is one of the pioneers of systems biology and developed the first viable model of the working heart in 1960.Biography , Denis Noble homepage. In 2014, Noble established The Third Way of Evolution (TWE) project with James A. Shapiro which rejects as the primary cause of |
Sir Martin Rees
Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow, (born 23 June 1942) is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He is the fifteenth Astronomer Royal, appointed in 1995, and was Master of Trinity ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
