Reminder: We’ll be watching the film “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero” next week. Please check the course website for instructions about doing the argument analysis exercise on the Mavrodes/Fankfurt articles.

PS: Bring your tissues. This one is a tearjerker.

911 The second plane

Although not entirely on the theme of religion, this, too, was in the NY Times today. It’s an article on Darwin and the abolitionist movement in Britain and the US.

• Darwin’s Sacred Cause: How a Hatred of Slavery Shaped Darwin’s Views on Human Evolution, Adrian Desmond and James Moore
• Angels and Ages,  Adam Gopnik

The Gopnik book really sounds interesting. The reviewer, Christopher Benfey, writes:

… Gopnik suggests that when facts and values clash we might live in accordance with our beliefs anyway. “It might be true — there is absolutely no such evidence, but it might be true — that different ethnic groups, or sexes, have on average different innate aptitudes for math or science,” he muses. “We might decide to even things out, give some people extra help toward that end, or we might decide just to live with the disparity.”

Gopnik’s short book takes its impetus from a striking historical coincidence: “On Feb. 12, 1809, two baby boys were born within a few hours of each other on either side of the Atlantic.” Those babies, one rich and one poor, as in a plot of Mark Twain’s, were Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. Though he makes some dubious claims about parallels — “lives lived in one time have similar shapes” — Gopnik’s real comparison is between two writers. “They matter most,” he claims, “because they wrote so well.” More specifically, Darwin and Lincoln, drawing on their seemingly unpoetic backgrounds in legal argument and natural history, invented “a new kind of eloquence” that we still use for “the way we live now and the way we talk at home and in public.”

While we won’t be examining the “intelligent design” (ID) argument(s) in detail, there certainly is lot of debate on the argument. This especially is true with respect to ID and education. This NY Times review of four books caught my attention. (So many books, so little time!)

• Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America’s Soul, Kenneth R. Miller
• Why Evolution Is True, Jerry A. Coyne
• Monkey Trials and Gorilla Sermons: Evolution and Christianity From Darwin to Intelligent Design, Peter J. Bowler
• Devil in Dover: An Insider’s Story of Dogma v. Darwin in Small-Town America, Lauri Lebo

This article from the Chronicle of Higher Education takes a look at the connection between religious belief and non-belief in a society and that society’s well-being.

I caught the very tail end of a KQED PBS/BBC documentary on disbelief. Wonderful stuff! The main website is here.

In this first ever television history of disbelief, Jonathan Miller goes on a 3-part journey exploring the origins of his own lack of belief and uncovering the hidden story of atheism.

Hi!

This is the home of PHIL 500 Philosophy of Religion for Spring 2009.

More to come! Dashing to class!