Rationality in Science, Religion, and Everyday Life

Rationality in Science, Religion, and Everyday Life PDF Author: Mikael Stenmark
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Pess
ISBN: 0268091676
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Book Description
Mikael Stenmark examines four models of rationality and argues for a discussion of rationality that takes into account the function and aim of such human practices as science and religion.

Why We Need Religion

Why We Need Religion PDF Author: Stephen T. Asma
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190469692
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
How we feel is as vital to our survival as how we think. This claim, based on the premise that emotions are largely adaptive, serves as the organizing theme of Why We Need Religion. This book is a novel pathway in a well-trodden field of religious studies and philosophy of religion. Stephen Asma argues that, like art, religion has direct access to our emotional lives in ways that science does not. Yes, science can give us emotional feelings of wonder and the sublime--we can feel the sacred depths of nature--but there are many forms of human suffering and vulnerability that are beyond the reach of help from science. Different emotional stresses require different kinds of rescue. Unlike secular authors who praise religion's ethical and civilizing function, Asma argues that its core value lies in its emotionally therapeutic power. No theorist of religion has failed to notice the importance of emotions in spiritual and ritual life, but truly systematic research has only recently delivered concrete data on the neurology, psychology, and anthropology of the emotional systems. This very recent "affective turn" has begun to map out a powerful territory of embodied cognition. Why We Need Religion incorporates new data from these affective sciences into the philosophy of religion. It goes on to describe the way in which religion manages those systems--rage, play, lust, care, grief, and so on. Finally, it argues that religion is still the best cultural apparatus for doing this adaptive work. In short, the book is a Darwinian defense of religious emotions and the cultural systems that manage them.

How to Relate Science and Religion

How to Relate Science and Religion PDF Author: Mikael Stenmark
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 9780802828231
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
Stenmark (philosophy of religion, Uppsala University, Sweden) replaces the paradigm of science and religion as opposing perspectives with a conciliatory model. He lays out the central issues of the debate between these two powerful cultural forces and shows what is at stake for the advancement of human knowledge, then demonstrates how science and r

Rationality and Religious Commitment

Rationality and Religious Commitment PDF Author: Robert Audi
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191619523
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
Rationality and Religious Commitment shows how religious commitment can be rational and describes the place of faith in the postmodern world. It portrays religious commitment as far more than accepting doctrines—it is viewed as a kind of life, not just as an embrace of tenets. Faith is conceived as a unique attitude. It is irreducible to belief but closely connected with both belief and conduct, and intimately related to life's moral, political, and aesthetic dimensions. Part One presents an account of rationality as a status attainable by mature religious people—even those with a strongly scientific habit of mind. Part Two describes what it means to have faith, how faith is connected with attitudes, emotions, and conduct, and how religious experience may support it. Part Three turns to religious commitment and moral obligation and to the relation between religion and politics. It shows how ethics and religion can be mutually supportive even though ethics provides standards of conduct independently of theology. It also depicts the integrated life possible for the religiously committed—a life with rewarding interactions between faith and reason, religion and science, and the aesthetic and the spiritual. The book concludes with two major accounts. One explains how moral wrongs and natural disasters are possible under God conceived as having the knowledge, power, and goodness that make such evils so difficult to understand. The other account explores the nature of persons, human and divine, and yields a conception that can sustain a rational theistic worldview even in the contemporary scientific age.

Scientific Models for Religious Knowledge

Scientific Models for Religious Knowledge PDF Author: Andrew Ralls Woodward
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532660200
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
Most comparisons of science and religion are really comparisons of science and Christianity, or science and Islam, and so forth. In Scientific Models for Religious Knowledge, the author aims to get outside typical polarized debates between traditional, a priori theism and radical, scientistic naturalism. Instead, a new science and religion compatibility system--between a scientific study of religion and a religious epistemology--is our new, elusive problem. Moreover, we shall look at a comparison and contrast of modern science with the simple deference of the human mind to the actions of culturally postulated superhuman agents. This book pays critical attention to the contributions of scholars in the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of science, and the scientific study of religion. Scientific Models for Religious Knowledge is useful for readers looking to expand their learning in the philosophies of science and religion as these subjects are taught and analyzed in modern research universities.

Scientism

Scientism PDF Author: Mikael Stenmark
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351815393
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 165

Book Description
This title was first published in 20/11/2001: The intellectual and practical successes of science have led some scientists to think that there are no real limits to the competence of scienece, and no limits to what can be achieved in the name of science. This view (and similar views) have been called Scientism. In this book, scientists' views about science and its relationship to knowledge, ethics and religion are subjected to critical scrutiny. A number of natural scientists have advocated Scientism in one form or another - Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, and Edward O. Wilson - and their impact inside and outside the sciences is considered. Clarifying what Scientism is, this book proceeds to evaluate its key claims, expounded in questions such as: is it the case that science can tell us everything there is to know about reality? Can science tell us how we morally ought to live and what the meaning of life is? Can science in fact be our new religion? Ought we become "science believers"? The author addresses these and similar issues, concluding that Scientism is not really science but disguised materialism or naturalism; its advocates fail to see this, not being sufficiently aware that their arguments presuppose the previous acceptance of certain extra-scientific or philosophical beliefs

Is Faith Rational?

Is Faith Rational? PDF Author: Wessel Stoker
Publisher: Peeters Publishers
ISBN: 9789042917880
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Book Description
Is faith rational? Some respond by providing proofs for God's existence. Others hold that no reasons for the Christian faith can be given. This book discusses different ways of accounting for faith, i.e. classical apologetics, the transcendental view that faith is part of human nature, and the view that argues for the rationality of faith on the basis of direct perceptions of God that appear to be objective. The author subsequently proposes a rational accounting for the Christian faith in our secularized and religiously pluralistic society. His starting point is the lasting religious experience of believers in everyday life. He also discusses the question of how this accounting for faith can function in a world of both secular worldviews and other religions. Religious experience is not subjective or arbitrary but rational. In these experiences human beings are involved with God. Religious experience can be described phenomenologically as an experience that transcends our capacities. God reveals himself to people primarily in narratives. Narratives have a rational structure and the Gospel narratives provide, in narrative form, arguments for faith. The assent to faith involves the whole person and stamps his life story and conduct. Assent to faith is thus affective, but that does not exclude its being rational. The positive reason for faith lies in experience itself. There are no reasons for faith outside the faith itself, but this does not mean that there are no points of contact in human existence for the Christian faith.

Faith, Freedom, and Rationality

Faith, Freedom, and Rationality PDF Author: Jeff Jordan
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780847681532
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 310

Book Description
The philosophy of religion, once considered a deviation from an otherwise analytically rigorous discipline, has flourished over the past two decades. This collection of new essays by twelve distinguished philosophers of religion explores three broad themes: religious attitudes of belief, acceptance, and love; human and divine freedom; and the rationality of religious belief.

Issues in Science and Theology: What is Life?

Issues in Science and Theology: What is Life? PDF Author: Dirk Evers
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331917407X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Book Description
This book explores the concept of Life from a range of perspectives. Divided into three parts, it first examines the concept of Life from physics to biology. It then presents insights on the concept from the perspectives of philosophy, theology, and ethics. The book concludes with chapters on the hermeneutics of Life, and pays special attention to the Biosemiotics approach to the concept. The question ‘What is Life?’ has been deliberated by the greatest minds throughout human history. Life as we know it is not a substance or fundamental property, but a complex process. It is not an easy task to develop an unequivocal approach towards Life combining scientific, semiotic, philosophical, theological, and ethical perspectives. In its combination of these perspectives, and its wide-ranging scope, this book opens up levels and identifies issues which can serve as intersections for meaningful interdisciplinary discussions of Life in its different aspects. The book includes the four plenary lectures and selected, revised and extended papers from workshops of the 14th European Conference on Science and Theology (ECST XIV) held in Tartu, Estonia, April 2012.

Scientism: Science, Ethics and Religion

Scientism: Science, Ethics and Religion PDF Author: Mikael Stenmark
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000156583
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 141

Book Description
This title was first published in 20/11/2001: The intellectual and practical successes of science have led some scientists to think that there are no real limits to the competence of scienece, and no limits to what can be achieved in the name of science. This view (and similar views) have been called Scientism. In this book, scientists' views about science and its relationship to knowledge, ethics and religion are subjected to critical scrutiny. A number of natural scientists have advocated Scientism in one form or another - Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, and Edward O. Wilson - and their impact inside and outside the sciences is considered. Clarifying what Scientism is, this book proceeds to evaluate its key claims, expounded in questions such as: is it the case that science can tell us everything there is to know about reality? Can science tell us how we morally ought to live and what the meaning of life is? Can science in fact be our new religion? Ought we become "science believers"? The author addresses these and similar issues, concluding that Scientism is not really science but disguised materialism or naturalism; its advocates fail to see this, not being sufficiently aware that their arguments presuppose the previous acceptance of certain extra-scientific or philosophical beliefs