Issue · 2014
Volume 1, Issue 1, Pages 1-69
10 articles · pp. 1-69 · All issues →
ArticlesIn a Mirror Dimly: Anthropology and Restoring a Sense of Presence to an Empty World
Timothy Helton
In this essay, I argue that, in the anthropology of religion, everything depends on the lens through which the ethnographers gaze at the objects of their study. Scholars that approach religion as an object fit only for analysis discover in it a model of an obj…
9 May 2014- Articles
A Defense of New Atheism: A Reply to Massimo Pigliucci
Victor J. Stenger
Philosopher Massimo Pigliucci has written an article highly critical of the new atheists and accusing them of scientism. He implies that only professional philosophers like himself are qualified to discuss the subject. However, the books Pigliucci criticizes w…
3 Mar 2014 - Articles
A Muddled Defense of New Atheism: On Stenger's response
Massimo Pigliucci
Victor Stenger (this issue) has responded to my recent criticism of the so-called New Atheism movement (2013). Here I endeavor to counter Stenger’s note and highlight several of the ways in which it goes astray. To begin with, however, let me summarize t…
3 Mar 2014 - Book Review
Essential Readings in Evolutionary Biology
Francisco J. Ayala, John C. Avise (eds.) Johns Hopkins University Press
This book is Ayala and Avise’s attempt to address a serious oversight in the scientific literature – no volume of essential readings in evolutionary biology exists, despite the fact that evolution remains central to and is the unifying principle of…
11 Mar 2014 - Articles
Scientific Atheology
John Shook
Atheology is the term for exploring unbelief and explaining its reasonableness. Scientific atheology specifically appeals to current sciences and scientific methodologies to help explain why no gods are real. Folk religions and anthropomorphic gods can’t…
8 Apr 2014 - Book Review
Reviewed by H. Bruce Rinker, Ph.D. Biodiversity Research Institute, 652 Main Street, Gorham, ME 04038 USA
Ruse, Michael, The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Pagan Planet, The University of Chicago Press
Decades ago, in an adolescent fit of rebelliousness, I stumbled upon the writings of Henry David Thoreau, particularly Civil Disobedience (1849) and Walden (1854). Respectively, Thoreau’s well-reasoned politics and his keen observations of the natural wo…
19 Apr 2014 - Editorial
Science, Religion and Culture: New Beginnings
Gregg D. Caruso
The relationship between science, religion, and culture has been a subject of profound interest for philosophers, scientists, theologians, and cultural historians for centuries. In fact, as far back as the ancient Greeks, when Thales of Miletus and other pre-S…
3 Mar 2014 - Commentary
The Grand Design: The Elimination of Mind
Keith Ward
In his book, ‘The Grand Design’ (with Leonard Mlodinow, Bantam Books, London, 2010), Stephen Hawking agrees that we should attempt to answer the questions ‘Why is there something rather than nothing? Why do we exist?’ and ‘Why thi…
3 Mar 2014 - Articles
Where in This World is the Human Soul?
Robert E. Pollack
Where is the soul in this world? I could go to the Sages for an answer from my religious tradition, but for a person like me — a scientist for fifty years and at seventy three already in Biblical terms 13 years an elder — it is easier instead to le…
11 Mar 2014 - Book Review
True Reason: Confronting the Irrationality of the New Atheism
Tom Gilson, Carson Weitnauer (eds), True Reason: Confronting the Irrationality of the New Atheism (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, Associate Professor of Philosophy
The present work is quite openly a work of Christian apologetics. Its aim, as the title suggests, is both to counter the work of the so-called “new atheists” and to offer a defence of the reasonableness of Christianity. Its essays cover an extraord…
1 May 2014