scholarly journals The 'Beauty Fallacy'

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
Arianna Borrelli ◽  
Alexandra Grieser

The relationship between science and religion has been, and still is, the subject of much discussion, both among scholars of religion and among historians and philosophers of science. Despite the cultural and historical complexity of the issue, since the nineteenth century the question of the interaction between science and religion has been constantly framed in the rather simple terms of their mutual ‘compatibility’ or ‘exclusion’. The historical roots of such discussions are entwined with the emergence both of modern science as a practice and an ideal, and of the field of the cultural study of religion. It was in the modern period that the assertion of the existence of a ‘conflict’ between science and religion emerged and a series of binary oppositions were constructed, such as those between ‘rational’ scientific knowledge and ‘irrational’ religious belief, or between an ‘objective’ scientific representation of reality and the poetic imagination allegedly characteristic of religious traditions and mythology.

1989 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 167-191
Author(s):  
Eleonore Stump

Recent work on the subject of faith has tended to focus on the epistemology of religious belief, considering such issues as whether beliefs held in faith are rational and how they may be justified. Richard Swinburne, for example, has developed an intricate explanation of the relationship between the propositions of faith and the evidence for them. Alvin Plantinga, on the other hand, has maintained that belief in God may be properly basic, that is, that a belief that God exists can be part of the foundation of a rational noetic structure. This sort of work has been useful in drawing attention to significant issues in the epistemology of religion, but these approaches to faith seem to me also to deepen some long-standing perplexities about traditional Christian views of faith.


2003 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-78
Author(s):  
Stephen C. Dilley ◽  

For those who wish to affirm a culture that values human life, the relationship between science and religion continues to be of import. Some, like Edward O. Wilson, think that naturalistic science will eventually account for all phenomena, even religious experience itself. This essay considers Wilson's hypothesis by surveying three classic explanations of universal religious belief: Sigmund Freud's projection theory, Charles Darwin's evolutionarry paradigm, and John Calvin's sensus divinitatis. Both Freud's and Darwin's views suffer from self-referential and evidential problems. In contrast, Calvin's model handles well major objections of religious pluralism and atheism. Of these three, Calvin's view is superior. Religion may not be reducible to a naturalistic explanation, and those who wish to promote a culture of life ought to view the relations between science and religion in a non-Wilsonian fashion, eschewing reductionism.


Author(s):  
Oskar Gruenwald

Curiously, in the late twentieth century, even agnostic cosmologists like Stephen Hawking—who is often compared with Einstein—pose metascientific questions concerning a Creator and the cosmos, which science per se is unable to answer. Modern science of the brain, e.g. Roger Penrose's Shadows of the Mind (1994), is only beginning to explore the relationship between the brain and the mind-the physiological and the epistemic. Galileo thought that God's two books-Nature and the Word-cannot be in conflict, since both have a common author: God. This entails, inter alia, that science and faith are to two roads to the Creator-God. David Granby recalls that once upon a time, science and religion were perceived as complementary enterprises, with each scientific advance confirming the grandeur of a Superior Intelligence-God. Are we then at the threshold of a new era of fruitful dialogue between science and religion, one that is mediated by philosophy in the classical sense? In this paper I explore this question in greater detail.


Author(s):  
Terence Keel

Chapter 5 provides a summary of the major claims of the book. It also explains how the conflict thesis for representing the relationship between science and religion fails to capture how Christian intellectual history has been key to the formation of the race concept in modern science. Citing recent data from a 2015 Pew Research Survey, this chapter argues that the conflict thesis remains a fixture in the minds of Americans, which has consequences for shifting public perceptions about the assumed secularity of the scientific study of race. It closes with a call for recognizing that the scientific study of race is involved in providing a solution to the existential dilemma of defining what it means to be human. This solution is neither value-free nor detached from the cultural and religious inheritance that has fastened itself to the work of Euro-American scientists who study race.


2009 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 268-279
Author(s):  
Andrew Cambers

Life, the afterlife, and life beyond the Earth are matters of scientific inquiry as well as religious belief. As we might expect, in the wake of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the afterlife was subjected to new scrutiny. Such scrutiny, notably the demonology of Joseph Glanvill and Henry More, both fellows of the Royal Society, was undoubtedly scientific and serious, even if it has rarely been treated as such by scholars preferring to treat belief in witchcraft as a hangover from an earlier age. Far from being opposed, or necessarily pulling in opposite directions, the conjunction of science and religion in this era breathed new life into old problems and opened up new questions for debate. One such area, with a long history as a philosophical conundrum, was the possibility of life beyond Earth. It is this question, its place within religious cultures, and its relation to traditional ideas about the afterlife, that is the subject of this essay.


2018 ◽  
Vol 67 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen H. Jones ◽  
Rebecca Catto ◽  
Tom Kaden ◽  
Fern Elsdon-Baker

Islam’s positioning in relation to Western ideals of individuality, freedom, women’s rights and democracy has been an abiding theme of sociological analysis and cultural criticism, especially since September 11 2001. Less attention has been paid, however, to another concept that has been central to the image of Western modernity: science. This article analyses comments about Islam gathered over the course of 117 interviews and 13 focus groups with non-Muslim members of the public and scientists in the UK and Canada on the theme of the relationship between science and religion. The article shows how participants’ accounts of Islam and science contrasted starkly with their accounts of other religious traditions, with a notable minority of predominantly non-religious interviewees describing Islam as uniquely, and uniformly, hostile to science and rational thought. It highlights how such descriptions of Islam were used to justify the cultural othering of Muslims in the West and anxieties about educational segregation, demographic ‘colonization’ and Islamist extremism. Using these data, the article argues for: (1) wider recognition of how popular understandings of science remain bound up with conceptions of Western cultural superiority; and (2) greater attentiveness to how prejudices concerning Islamic beliefs help make respectable the idea that Muslims pose a threat to the West.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 7-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ayman Shabana

One of the most important types of scholarly literature to highlight the contentious debate on the relationship between Islam and modern science has been modern commentary on the Qur'an (tafsīr). This paper examines how modern commentators have conceptualised the relationship between religion and science and how, in turn, this modern concern with science has led to the emergence of a new genre within tafsīr literature. The article explores the extent to which this new genre represents an extension to earlier forms of tafsīr and how authors of this genre relate their work to the extended exegetical tradition. Special attention is devoted to Tafsīr al-manār by Muḥammad ʿAbduh and Rashīd Riḍā and its impact on subsequent works of tafsīr, with a particular focus on Tafsīr al-jawāhir by Ṭanṭāwī Jawharī. The article aims to analyse the epistemic authority of science in these works and explore how this authority has been used for the construction of the divine text in light of modern knowledge and sensibilities.


1959 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 339-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glanville Downey

The relationship—or lack of it—between religious belief and socalled secular culture is a topic which has been of perennial interest both to ancient students of religion and history and to modern historians. Students today use the phrase Unity of Faith and Culture because it has become current and because it bears some relationship to our own situation and problems, but we must also consider the subject, at least as we see it in antiquity, in terms of the interdependence or the interaction of faith and culture.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 148-170
Author(s):  
Aleksei F. Losev ◽  
Aza A. Takho-Godi ◽  
Victor P. Troitskii ◽  
◽  

The publication of newly discovered materials from the archive of A.F. Losev relating to the original composition of the famous philosopher’s book “Philosophy of the Name” (1927) continues. Previously, the “Philosophy Journal” (No. 3, 2019) published “The gen­eral characteristic of tetractide dialectics”, a fragment which was intended to open the second, unreleased part of the book. In it, a kind of categorical system unfolds from the “dialectics of the first-entity” to the “dialectics of the name of the entity”. This new piece bearing the provisional title of “The Phenomenology of the subject – object rela­tion” presents the closing sections of the second part of the book. Here, Losev begins with treating the relationship of the primo-entity and the name of the entity in energetic terms (eidos, energy, energema). Then, in terms of the same notions he describes the rela­tions between the outside world and the subject of understanding. At the same time, all nuances of such connections and relations are expressed by a list of carefully selected an­tinomies (matter and essence, object and subject). This demonstrates the effectiveness of the phenomenological-dialectical method adopted by A.F. Losev. The very same dialecti­cal system is well found in other works of A.F. Losev (1920s), such as in the book “An­cient Space and Modern Science” (chapter “Name and its Dialectics”) and “Philosophy of the Name”. In those other works, it is presented in a slightly less detailed form, albeit still in terms of the same antinomies. In the excerpt presented here, the subtle distinction be­tween the two types of meon – the essence (internal) and material (external), receives a clearer exposition than in the above-mentioned books. This distinction is important be­cause it determined the specificity of Losev’s phenomenology in many ways.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 74-79
Author(s):  
Bernyukevich Tatiana V. ◽  

The article analyzes the relationship between Buddhism and science, presented in the works and activities of Buddhist leaders and scholars. The aim of the study is to determine the specifics of the relationship between Buddhism and science, associated with both the peculiarities of the development of modern science and the peculiarities of the religion itself. The study is based on an integrated approach that allows to identify the problem of relations between Buddhism and science at different levels: the doctrinal provisions of Buddhism, the texts of Buddhist leaders and their activities, the analysis of these relations made by representatives of science. One of the phenomena of the dialogue between Buddhism and science is the Mind and Life Institute, created in 1987, initiated by the 14th Dalai Lama, scientist and philosopher Francisco Varela, lawyer and entrepreneur Adam Engle. The creation of this Institute was based on the idea that science is not only a modern source of knowledge but also a critical means of improving the quality of life; this means can be developed by combining it with the wisdom of Buddhist teachings. Interest in the problem of interaction between Buddhism and science has noticeably intensified in the last decade in Russia. It was expressed in the publication of books of Buddhist leaders and scholars on this topic, holding meetings of researchers and Buddhist clergy for discussions on complex topics of knowledge, organizing scientific conferences on the dialogue between Buddhism and science. The intensification of the dialogue between Buddhism and science and its reflection in the research of scientists and the activities of Buddhist organizations are associated with a number of reasons: the search for new effective ways to solve global problems; the actualization of a systematic approach to solving a number of complex research problems (for example, the problem of consciousness); interest in the possibility of synthesizing Buddhist techniques and ideas and scientific approaches as a resource for the development of both Buddhism and science. Keywords: science and religion, Buddhism, Dalai Lama, Tibetan Buddhism, Buddhist studies, Buddhology


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