Philosophy of Science Commons^™

Christian Faith And The Scientific Explanation Of Religion, Donald H. Wacome

Northwestern Review

The cognitive theory of religion seems to threaten to debunk religion, including Christianity, as irrational. The cognitive theory explains human religiosity as an accident, a mere byproduct, of the interaction of mental mechanisms evolved for other purposes. The threat to religion can be neutralized by finding good reasons for religious beliefs which can be identified independent of the operation of the cognitive mechanisms the theory posits. Christian faith should be understood not as sub-rational belief, but as trust in the God who resurrected Jesus Christ. Our natural religiosity, like our natural morality, has no necessary connection to God, but God …

Thinking Nature, "Pierre Maupertuis And The Charge Of Error Against Fermat And Leibniz", Richard Samuel Lamborn

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this dissertation is to defend Pierre Fermat and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz against the charge of error made against them by Pierre Maupertuis that they errantly applied final causes to physics. This charge came in Maupertuis’ 1744 speech to the Paris Academy of Sciences, later published in different versions, entitled Accord Between Different Laws Which at First Seemed Incompatible. It is in this speech that Maupertuis lays claim to one of the most important discoveries in the history of physics and science, The Principle of Least Action. From the date of this speech up until the end …

A Hermeneutic Exploration Of And Proposed Solution To The Schism Between Researchers And Clinicians In Psychology, Mark S. Green

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Fragmentation in the field of psychology has persisted throughout its history (Slife, 2000). One example of this fragmentation is the gap between researchers and clinicians (Teachman, Drabick, Hershenberg, Vivian, & Wolfe 2012). Although many attempts have been made to bridge this gap, there is still no consensus regarding its resolution. This dissertation provides an explanation for the gap at the philosophical level and provides a method for communicating across potentially incommensurable philosophies, based on Gadamer’s (1960/1989) hermeneutic opus: Truth and Method.

Scientism, Satire, And Sacrificial Ceremony In Dostoevsky's "Notes From Underground" And C.S. Lewis's "That Hideous Strength", Jonathan Smalt

Masters Theses

Though the nineteenth-century Victorian belief that science alone could provide utopia for man weakened in the epistemological uncertainty of the postmodern era, this belief still continues today. In order to understand our current scientific milieu--and the dangers of propagating scientism--we must first trace the rise of scientism in the nineteenth-century. Though removed, Fyodor Dostoevsky, in Notes From Underground (1864), and C.S. Lewis, in That Hideous Strength (1965), are united in their critiques of scientism as a conceptual framework for human residency. For Dostoevsky, the Crystal Palace of London's Great Exhibition (1862) embodied the nineteenth-century goal to found utopia through the …

Contesting Faith, Truth, And Religious Language At The Creation Museum: A Historical-Theological Reflection, Brent A. R. Hege

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, attempts to demonstrate the flaws in contemporary science and to offer an alternative explanation of human origins and biological complexity rooted in a specific reading of the biblical narrative. This effort, however, is paradoxically rooted in the worldview of modern science and the Enlightenment. This article will examine the Creation Museum’s definitions of faith, truth, and religious language and will compare these definitions to those of mainline Protestant Christianity to uncover the historical and theological presuppositions of Creationist and mainline Protestant engagements with contemporary science.

Educator Perceptions Of The Opitimal Professional Development Experience, Kent Lloyd Pettet

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No abstract provided.

Removing The Classical Landmark: Assessing An Epistemology Governed By Methodological Naturalism, Kegan Shaw

Masters Theses

This paper proposes to assess the naturalist project in epistemology with an eye towards exposing the project as deficient for serving as a robust epistemological project. Epistemologists treasure a certain family of questions and burden themselves with a number of specific concerns the most important of which, I think, cannot be answered by the epistemological naturalist. Ignoring these questions, I will argue, essentially amounts to a dismissal of the principle tension that primarily motivates and properly guides epistemological theorizing. This tension is the familiar appearance vs. reality distinction and characterizes what I am calling the classical landmark or boundary-stone for …

Science And Religion Take Practice: Engaging Science As Culture, James K.A. Smith

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

This article argues that current paradigms in the theology/science conversation effectively treat “science” as if it were equivalent to “nature”—with detrimental effects for the encounter between Christian theology and the natural sciences. In contrast, I suggest that recognizing science as culture has important implications for reconfiguring the theology/science dialogue.

The Correspondence Of Attachment Dimensions To Prayer Styles Among Undergraduate Students, Nathaniel Aaron Lamkin

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Practical Objectivity: Keeping Natural Science Natural, Alan G. Padgett

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Embryonic Stem Cell Research, Michael Phan, Jeniene Hassan

Festival of Communities: UG Symposium (Posters)

Embryonic stem cell research has the potential to regenerate malfunctioning tissues and replace harmful cancer cells. Although it holds the potential to alleviate malicious disabilities and diseases, it raises ethical concerns due to the destruction of a fertilized human embryo. In certain religions (Catholics and Christians), embryonic stem cell research is detested due to the destruction of a human at its early stages of life (embryo). On the other hand, scientists believe that embryonic stem cells can “someday…used to treat human diseases.” (Hansen 879) This analysis on embryonic stem cell research will consider both the supporting and opposing side of …

God And Time: Relative Timelessness Reconsidered, Alan G. Padgett

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

"The End Of Faith?" Science And Theology As Process, Noreen L. Herzfeld

Theology Faculty Publications

A spate of recent books would claim that science’s only role vis a vis theology is to discredit it. Sam Harris, in The End of Faith, credits religious faith as the source of much of the violence in today’s world. Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, views religion as, at best, a profound misunderstanding, and at worst a form of madness. Both find an antidote to such irrationality in science. To Harris and Dawkins religion is a body of accumulated knowledge. However, religion can also be thought of as a process, one based on experience, questions, and results. …

Teilhard And The Future Of Humanity, Thierry Meynard, S.J.

Religion

Fifty years after his death, the thought of the French scientist and Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1955) continues to inspire new ways of understanding humanity’s future. Trained as a paleontologist and philosopher, Teilhard was an innovative synthesizer of science and religion, developing an idea of evolution as an unfolding of material and mental worlds into an integrated, holistic universe at what he called the Omega Point. His books, such as the bestselling The Phenomenon of Man, have influenced generations of ecologists, environmentalists, planners, and others concerned with the fate of the earth.

This book brings together original essays …

The Science And Religion Dialogue: Are Philosophical Foundations Necessary?, Michael Ventimiglia

Philosophy, Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

William James is well-known for arguing that different words which describe the same practical state of affairs are, in fact, equivalent in meaning. This theory of meaning is one important strain of American pragmatism, the movement which remains America’s primary philosophical contribution to intellectual history, and it invites us to consider a unique perspective on the contemporary dialogue between science and religion. Specifically, it raises the question of the necessity of philosophical foundations when there is practical agreement.

This paper argues that when practical agreement can be reached there are certain purposes for which philosophical foundations can be strategically ignored. …

From Guts To God: Credulity, Postmodernism, And Contemporary Physics, Michael Hardin

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Editors' Introduction]

In an attempt to remove one of the major misunderstandings made by individuals in the humanities about contemporary physics, the issue of incredulity, this essay examines Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge against contemporary and twentieth-century theories and discoveries in physics. One of the best arguments against incredulity is the frequent use of god as metaphor within physics. In Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, two physicists, argue that the use of metaphor is one of the characteristics of postmodern science; this essay concludes with a discussion of those elements …

Does Evolutionary Science Rule Out The Theistic God? The Johnson-Pennock Debate, Dan D. Crawford

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Phillip Johnson, in a number of recent writings, most notably in his 1991 book, Darwin on Trial. has called into question the whole of evolutionary science by arguing that it is based on the philosophical system of naturalism which assumes without justification that God plays no part in the process by which living things come to be. The philosopher, Robert Pennock, in his recent book, Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism, defends science against Johnson's charge, arguing first that naturalism is not atheistic and so does not deny God, and second, that the principle naturalism uses to …

Afterword: The Hermeneutics Of Natural Science, Patrick A. Heelan

Research Resources

A Husserlean intentionality analysis of the early Bohr-Heisenberg view of the quantum theory; of quantum logic as a context logic of differently embodied inquirers; of the problems of causality and localization in quantum mechanics.

Heideggerian analysis of the ontological status of measurement and laboratory data. The Husserlean group transformation structure of perceptual objects in general, and of theoretically denominated laboratory entities construed as perceptual objects.

A critique of David Marr’s program for machine perception.

A study of Vincent Van Gogh’s painting, Bedroom at Arles (1888), of the art and aesthetics of the (negatively curved) local Riemannian pictorial space achieved by …

The Personality Of Educable Mentally Retarded Children As Compared To A General Child Population, Miles Raymond Mciver

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A Survey Of The Mathematics And Science Programs For The Gifted Students In The Secondary City Schools Of Indiana, George E. Roach

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An Analysis Of The Philosophy In The Poetry Of Edwin Arlington Robinson, Jock Wilson

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A Follow-Up Study Of The Graduates Of Mecca High School From 1930 To 1949, Charles Roccia

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A Survey Of The Economic Philosophy Of Herbert Hoover, Delbert E. Rice

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A Follow-Up Study Of The Graduates Of Mecca High School From 1930 To 1949, Charles Roccia

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An Occupational Survey Of The Graduates Of Mattoon High School From 1939 To 1948, Frank Edward Lash

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An Occupational Survey Of The Graduates Of Mattoon High School From 1939 To 1948, Frank Edward Lash

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A Follow-Up Study Of The Montezuma High School Graduates From 1930-1949, John Charles Hill

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A Follow-Up Study Of The Montezuma High School Graduates From 1930-1949, John Charles Hill

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A Study Of The Factual Knowledge Of Current Events Possessed By One Hundred High School Seniors, Vyron Lloyd Jones

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A Study Of The Vocational Pursuits Of Teachers' Children, R. Harold Vancleave

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No abstract provided.