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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, ethologist Richard Dawkins, a professorial fellow at New College, Oxford and, at the time of publication, the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science at the University of Oxford. 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."; With many examples, he explains that one does not need religion to be moral and that the roots of religion and of morality can be explained in non-religious terms. In early December 2006, it reached number four in the ''New York Times'' Hardcover No ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alister McGrath
Alister Edgar McGrath (; born 1953) is a Northern 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 paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and 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 characterized by long periods of evolutionary stability, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Francis Collins (geneticist)
Francis Sellers Collins (born April 14, 1950) is an American physician-geneticist who discovered the genes associated with a number of diseases and led the Human Genome Project. He is the former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, from 17 August 2009 to 19 December 2021, serving under three presidents, and for over 12 years. 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 an LSU Fan 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 also has written a number of books on science, medicine, and religion, including the ''New York Times'' bestseller, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Owen Gingerich
Owen Jay Gingerich (; born 1930) is 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 has written many books on the history of astronomy. Gingerich is 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 has been active in the American Scientific Affiliation, a society of evangelical scientists.Stephen C. Meyer.Owen Gingerich. ''Eternity''. May 1986. He has served on the board of trustees of the Templeton Foundation. Early life Gingerich was born to a Mennonite family in Washington, Iowa, but was raised on the prairies of Kansas where he first became interested in astronomy. His father, Melvin Gingerich, taught at Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas, from 1941 to 1947, when he took a job at Goshe ... [...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 founders and sacred texts of the religions of the world. The term was used within early Christianity to refer to a life oriented toward the Holy Spirit and broadened during the Late Middle Ages to include 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 esoteric and religious traditions. Modern usages tend to refer to a subjective experience of a sacred dimension and the "deepest values and meanings by which people live", often in a context separate from organized religious institutions. This may involve belief in a supernatural realm beyond the ordinarily obs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Naturalism (philosophy)
In philosophy, naturalism is the idea or belief that only Physical law, natural laws and forces (as opposed to supernatural ones) operate in the universe. According to philosopher Steven Lockwood, naturalism can be separated into an ontological sense and a methodological sense. "Ontological" refers to ontology, the philosophical study of what exists. On an ontological level, philosophers often treat naturalism as equivalent to materialism. For example, philosopher Paul Kurtz argues 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 referred to as ''metaphysical naturalism''. On the other hand, the more ... [...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, and currently the Arab–Israeli conflict. "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 anticommun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Religion
Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, and spiritual elements; however, there is no scholarly consensus over what precisely constitutes a religion. Different religions may or may not contain various elements ranging from the divine, sacred things, faith,Tillich, P. (1957) ''Dynamics of faith''. Harper Perennial; (p. 1). a supernatural being or supernatural beings or "some sort of ultimacy and transcendence that will provide norms and power for the rest of life". Religious practices may include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration (of deities or saints), sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, funerary services, matrimonial services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance, public service, or other aspects of human cultur ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Science
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for scientific reasoning is tens of thousands of years old. The earliest written records in the history of science come from Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in around 3000 to 1200 BCE. Their contributions to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine entered and shaped Greek natural philosophy of classical antiquity, whereby formal attempts were made to provide explanations of events in the physical world based on natural causes. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, knowledge of Greek conceptions of the world deteriorated in Western Europe during the early centuries (400 to 1000 CE) of the Middle Ages, but was preserved in the Muslim world during the Islamic Golden Age and later by the efforts of Byzantine Greek scholars who brought Greek ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Denis Noble
Denis Noble (born 16 November 1936) is a British 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 mathematical model of the working heart in 1960.Biography , Denis Noble homepage. Education Noble was educated at and (UCL). In 1958 he began h ...[...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sir Martin Rees
Martin John Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: (born 23 June 1942) is a British cosmologist and astrophysicist. He is the fifteenth Astronomer Royal, appointed in 1995, and was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 2004 to 2012 and President of the Royal Society between 2005 and 2010. Education and early life Rees was born on 23 June 1942 in York, England.Anon (2017) After a peripatetic life during the war his parents, both teachers, settled with Rees, an only child, in a rural part of Shropshire near the border with Wales. There, his parents founded Bedstone College, a boarding school based on progressive educational concepts. He was educated at Bedstone College, then from the age of 13 at Shrewsbury School. He studied for the mathematical tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating with first class honours. He then undertook post-graduate research at Cambridge and compl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
