Reviews

Readings

Our writers and guests give reviews and recommendations of what they’ve been reading of late.

So many books and blogs—so little time…

Featured Reviews

A Review of Science, Religion, and Human Experience

by Stephen Friberg

Abstract: Science, Religion, and the Human Experience is one of those books where a number of influential thinkers contribute individual sections.  This review examines in detail several sections of this interesting—and sometimes frustrating – book:

- The Reception of Darwinism by John Hedley Brooke, a professor of history at Oxford leader and leader in the ongoing reassessment of the historical record of the conflict between science, evolution and religion.  His work has made it clear that the reception of Darwinism was much more complicated than the simplistic view of Darwinian scientific advance and clerical resistance.

- Evolution as a Secular Religion by Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science specializing in biology and a staunch evolutionist. He views the conflict between evolution and science as arising because they were set against each other by evolutionists ‘for social and political reasons of the mid-19th century.’ This means, he argues, that the conflict is resolvable.

- An Evolutionary Psychological Approach to Religion by Pascal Boyer, a cultural anthropologist who studies religion via the lens of evolutionary psychology, an approach that continues to generate controversy. For a religion to be successful, Boyer argues in his chapter, it must have been successfully acquired and then passed along over many generations. This will only take place, he argues, if it ‘activates many different mental systems in ways that favor retention’.