Science and Humanity: A Humane Philosophy of Science and Religion

Description

Andrew Steane reconfigures the public understanding of science, by drawing on a deep knowledge of physics and by bringing in mainstream philosophy of science. Science is a beautiful, multi-lingual network of ideas; it is not a ladder in which ideas at one level make those at another level redundant. In view of this, we can judge that the natural world is not so much a machine as a meeting-place. In particular, people can only be correctly understood by meeting with them at the level of their entire personhood, in a reciprocal, respectful engagement as one person to another. Steane shows that Darwinian evolution does not overturn this but rather is the process whereby such truths came to be discovered and expressed in the world. From here the argument moves towards other aspects of human life. Our sense of value requires from us a response which is not altogether the same as following logical argument. This points us towards what religion in its good forms can express. A reply to a major argument of David Hume, and a related one of Richard Dawkins, is given. The book finishes with some brief chapters setting religion in the context of all human capacities, and showing, in fresh language, what theistic religious response is, or can be, in the modern world. Cover Science and Humanity: A Humane Philosophy of Science and Relition Copyright Dedication Acknowledgements Contents Epigraph 1 Introduction Part I: Science and Philosophy (Finding Room to Breathe) 2 Light 3 The Structure of Science, Part 1 3.1 A Case Study: Digital Computing 3.2 Getting the Problem in View 3.3 Symmetry in Physics 3.3.1 Avoiding an Overstatement 3.4 Thermodynamics 4 The Structure of Science, Part 2 4.1 The Embodiment Principle 4.2 Biology 4.2.1 The Evolutionary Development of the Brain 4.3 The Role of Uncontrolled Change 5 Logic and Knowledge: The Babel Fallacy 6 Reflection 7 Purpose and Cause 7.1 Why Has an Anteater Got a Long, Sticky Tongue? 7.1.1 Premature Telelogy 7.2 Science and Intellectual Discipline 7.3 The Multi-Layered View 8 Darwinian Evolution 9 The Tree Part II: Value and Meaning 10 What Science Can and Cannot Do 10.1 A Brief Historical Survey 10.2 Completeness and Cogency 10.2.1 Cogency 11 What Must Be Embraced, Not Derived 11.1 A Philosophical Investigation 11.2 Reason and Faith 12 Religious Language 13 The Unframeable Picture 14 A Farewell to Hume 14.1 Introduction 14.2 The Argument fromLack of Explanatory Power 14.3 An Example Witness 14.4 Resolution: The Full Expression of Human Personhood 14.4.1 Words, Usage, Categories 14.4.2 Thomas Aquinas and Divine Simplicity 14.4.3 Opening the Self, Not Just the Mind 14.5 FourWitnesses 14.5.1 The Gospels 14.5.2 Bonhoeffer 14.5.3 The Desert Fathers 14.5.4 Soundings from R. S. Thomas 14.6 The Refutation of the Superfluity Argument 15 Drawing Threads Together 16 Extraterrestrial Life 17 Does the Universe Suggest Design, Purpose, Goodness, or Concern? Part III: Breathing 18 Silence 19 The Human Community 20 Encounter 21 The Human Being 22 Witnessed to Appendix: Boyle’s Law Notes Bibliography Index