By Colin Howson
The expansion of technological know-how and a correspondingly medical means of taking a look at facts have for the final 3 centuries slowly been gaining floor over spiritual reasons of the cosmos and mankind's position in it. even though, not just is secularism now below renewed assault from non secular fundamentalism, however it has additionally been extensively claimed that the medical facts itself issues strongly to a universe intentionally fine-tuned for all times to conform in it. furthermore, sure features of human existence, like recognition and the power to realize the lifestyles of common ethical criteria, appear thoroughly immune to evolutionary clarification. during this ebook Colin Howson analyses intimately the facts that is claimed to help trust in God's lifestyles and argues that the declare isn't really well-founded. additionally, there's very compelling facts that an omnipotent, all-knowing God not just doesn't exist yet can't exist, a end either fabulous and provocative.
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This policy leaves it open, and in any case reveals that one is using one’s own moral faculty to discriminate between the acceptable and the unacceptable parts of scripture. But that implies that one’s own moral intuition is primary, in which case still insisting on finding scriptural backing is a form of moral cowardice. r By elevating obedience and a-rational faith into cardinal virtues these command-religions discourage critical thought and threaten thereby the single most important safeguard of civil liberty.
The Greece of Aristotle was a very mixed society, or societies, engaging in a great deal of primitive god-worship. But at the same time, for reasons that have never been fully explained and probably never will, those societies were the origin of arguably all that is best in our contemporary world but is every day in danger of being lost: a spirit of free enquiry and a thirst for knowledge, coupled with the keen cultivation of a critical and analytical temperament. These found their expression not only in Greek science and mathematics, but also in its literature and drama.
If we all must develop a moral code, but may choose to do so without a formal appeal to religion, then how can this subject claim equal importance and dignity with science . . 8 How indeed? Gould’s answer is so weak that it is difficult to credit his sincerity in offering it: it is to appeal to etymology! Quoting T. H. 9 What, you might well ask, is ‘fundamentally religious’ in that? I will answer for you: nothing whatever. In a final paroxysm of logic Gould even goes so 8 Gould, Rocks of Ages, pp.