Group items tagged

Salon interview with R.Wright, author of "The Evolution of God"

Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini's book What Darwin Got Wrong - says reviewer Richard C. Lewontin - considers an immense amount of biology missing from our modern formulation of evolution by natural selection. Why, when vertebrates evolved wings, did they have to give up their front legs to do it? Why don't birds that live in trees make a living by eating the leaves instead of spending so much of their energy looking for seeds or worms?

"Africa is everywhere, so pervasive in our lives that we barely see it. Since it is in all likelihood the continent where human evolution began, it is literally in the bloodstream of everyone. DNA aside, huge portions of everyday life and cultural achievement are unthinkable without Africa."

A non-theist argues for non-displacement of science and religion as systems of knowledge

Review by Judith Shulevitz (author of "The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time"): Wade asserts "the God gene" & its evolutionary function - "to bind human beings into cooperative groups," making altruism, group (over self-) interest & solidarity a matter of conscience (with the gods as enforcers). Shulevitz's criticism is "that he has under-ambitiously portrayed religion as less encompassing and consequential than it is."

letters by Daniel Dennett, Judith Shapiro & others (incl F.Smith) pro & con & in between

God as human projection over time, evolving toward universal and inclusive morality

Kugel uses his encounter with death to investigate and report on a state of mind notoriously resistant to literary exploration: the state of mind in which you intuit something on the order of God. . . . To the religious - or at least to Kugel and his sources - religion is an experience more than a cosmology. "It is not God's sovereignty over the entire universe that is at issue so much as his sovereignty over the cubic centimeter of space that sits just in front of our own noses," he writes. "That is to say, religion is first of all about fitting into the world and fitting into one's borders. There may indeed be something 'mythic' about it, but it pales before the mythic quality of our own clumsy, modern selves."