Articles

The New Atheism and Religious Fundamentalism: Are They a Mirror Image of Each Other

Dein Simon

Despite the fact that the new atheists are vehemently opposed to religious fundamentalists and their teachings there are marked similarities between the two groups. In this paper I analyse new atheism in terms of fundamentalist characteristics discussed by the…

Karl Giberson, ed. Abraham’s Dice: Chance and Providence in the Monotheistic Traditions, Oxford University Press, 2016, 376 pp., $35.00, ISBN 978-0-19-027716-1

Jordan Bradford

Mormon Metaphors of Restoration: Pathways to Identity and Understanding

Dallin D. Oaks, Cynthia L. Hallen

The important role of metaphors in interfaith understanding has received significant attention. The pervasiveness of certain metaphors in the lives of members of a religious community is especially significant when they are incorporated into sacred texts. This…

J. David Pleins, In Praise of Darwin: George Romanes and the Evolution of a Darwinian Believer (New York and London: Bloosbury, 2014)

Bradford McCall

D. Jason Slone and James A. Van Slyke, The Attraction of Religion: A New Evolutionary Psychology of Religion (Scientific Studies of Religion: Inquiry and Explanation, 3), London and New York: Bloomsbury 2015

Leonardo Ambasciano

Weinbergs Lament: Science and Religion

Gerald E. Marsh

Weinberg’s lament is the rather gloomy conclusion that the existence of the universe, and of intelligence in particular, appears to have no meaning. This essay explores the epistemological basis of this lament.

Gods and Dictatorships: A Defence of Heroical Apatheism

Ian von Hegner

 Democracy is usually contrasted with the concept of dictatorship, and is defined as a type of government in which power flows from the citizens to the leaders of government, who are selected through free elections. This article argues, that if the concep…

The Earthling's Secret Weapon: Cumulative Culture and the Singularity

Neil Levy

Abstract | Many researchers believe that the singularity – roughly, explosive growth in machine intelligence, resulting in the appearance of AIs that are vastly superior to us cognitively – will or might occur in the relatively near future. Underst…

The Earthling's Secret Weapon: Cumulative Culture and the Singularity

Neil Levy

Abstract | Many researchers believe that the singularity – roughly, explosive growth in machine intelligence, resulting in the appearance of AIs that are vastly superior to us cognitively – will or might occur in the relatively near future. Underst…

The Role of Sharia and Religious Leaders in Influencing Violent Radicalism

Moorthy S. Muthuswamy

Religious leaders have become influential in many Muslim communities. This is despite these leaders having had less influence about 50 years ago, due to the encroaching of modernity backed by science. Science not only contests religious leaders’ worldvie…

A Para-clerical Approach to the Galileo Affair and to Science vs. Religion

Maurice A. Finocchiaro

In 1633, the Inquisition condemned Galileo for defending Copernicus’s hypothesis of the earth’s motion and denying the scientific authority of Scripture. This ended the original controversy, but generated a new one that continues today, for example…

If God Didn't Satisfice, We Could Still Exist

Rick Repetti

Theodicies of satisficing – defenses of God’s goodness that justify creating minimally satisfactory beings/worlds – originate with Robert Merrihew Adams (1972, 1979). Adams (1972) argued that in creating imperfect beings God was graceful in g…

Dominic Erdozain, The Soul of Doubt: The Religious Roots of Unbelief from Luther to Marx. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016, 320+xiii pp, $35.00 Hardcover, ISBN: 0199844615

Corey McCal

In this engaging intellectual history, Dominic Erdozain (Theology, Emory University) seeks to account for European secularization during the modern period. Unlike Hans Blumenberg, and, more recently, Charles Taylor, who tell the story of secularization as a pr…

Andrew Steane, Faithful to Science: The Role of Science in Religion, Oxford University Press, 2014, 255pp, £19.99, ISBN 9780198716044

Elly Vintiadis

Faithful to Science is a book written by a professor of physics at Oxford University who is also a devout Christian. The aim of this book, as the author describes it in the introduction, is to show that scientific study of the natural world…

Rights, Virtue, and David Boonins Defense of the Implausible Conclusion of the Non-Identity Problem

Stephen Kershnar Email: stephen.kershnar@fredonia.edu

David Boonin is one of, if not the, most important applied ethicist in the world today. His books on race, punishment, and abortion are the gold standards in their respective fields. His most recent book, The Non-Identity Problem & the Ethics of Future Peo…

Jerry A. Coyne, Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incom- patible, Viking, 2015, pp. 311, $28.95, ISBN 978-0-670-02653-1

Reviewed by Dr William Patterson

Jerry Coyne’s first book meant for a popular audi- ence, Why Evolution is True, was a masterful exposition of the evidence supporting evolutionary biology. It was rightly seen by many as one of the best books yet written on that subject for a genera…

Buddhist Meditation and the Possibility of Free Will

Rick Repetti

I argue that an analysis of Buddhist meditation theory and practice may be used to ground a model of the possibility of free agency that stands up against four powerful arguments for free will skepticism in contemporary analytic philosophy: Peter van…

Jay L. Garfield, Engaging Buddhism: Why it Matters to Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 2015, 400pp., $29.95, ISBN 978-0-19-020434-1 (paperback)

Rick Repetti

Engaging Buddhism is the most impressive, insightful, informative, and accessible book I’ve ever read on Buddhist philosophy, a subject I’ve studied for over 40 years, and in this assessment I include both primary and secondary…

Living the Secular Life: New Answers to Old Questions by Phil Zuckerman, Penguin Press, 2014, 288 pp. $25.95 (hardcover), ISBN 978-1594205088

Amanda Schutz

Living the Secular Life begins with a popular assumption: life without religion is empty and meaningless. Without religion, one cannot develop a moral compass, raise decent and happy children, navigate tragedy, or cooperate effectively with others in society.…

Explaining the Secularity of Academics: Historical Questions and Psychological Findings

Benjamin Beit-Hallahmi

Religious beliefs are the products of natural, intuitive human thinking, and are shared by most humans. Academic research, or science, is the product of counter-intuitive, unnatural psychological processes, and the resulting concepts are beyond the reach of mo…