What's really bothersome is the suggestion that believers rarely question themselves while atheists ask all the hard questions. But as Novak argued -- in one of the best critiques of neo-atheism -- in the March 19 issue of National Review, "Questions have been the heart and soul of Judaism and Christianity for millennia." (These questions get a fair reading in another powerful commentary on neo-atheism by James Wood, himself an atheist, in the Dec. 18 issue of the New Republic.) "Christianity is not about moral arrogance," Novak insists. "It is about moral realism, and moral humility." Of course Christians in practice often fail to live up to this elevated definition of their creed. But atheists are capable of their own forms of arrogance. Indeed, if arrogance were the only criterion, the contest could well come out a tie.
ken meece on 13 Apr 08His book, A New Science of Life, was published a week after the New Scientist article. In it, Sheldrake put forward the hypothesis of formative causation (the theory of morphic resonance)[9], which proposes that phenomena - particularly biological ones - become more probable the more often they occur, and therefore that biological growth and behaviour become guided into patterns laid down by previous similar events. He suggested that this underlies many aspects of science, from evolution to laws of nature. Indeed, he wrote that the laws of nature might be thought of as mutable habits that have evolved since the Big Bang.
