Daniel Dennett and Paul Bloom attempt to explain Religion
There are a couple of new pieces by evolutionists who have been trying to develop materialistic and evolutionary explanations for the existance of religion.
Daniel Dennett’s new book, “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon,” is due out on February 2. I expect that the ideas expressed in that book are paralleled in this recent article by Daniel Dennett:
Daniel C. Dennett, “Contagious ideas hitch a ride in our infected brains”
January 25, 2006
http://www.stnews.org/commentary-2583.htm
For more information on the book, see this link to Amazon’s website:
Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
by Daniel C. Dennett
http://tinyurl.com/86w49
Also, The Atlantic Monthly recently published this article by Yale’s Paul Bloom:
Paul Bloom, “Is God an Accident?”
The Atlantic Monthly, December 2005. 296(5): 105-112.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200512/god-accident
“Despite the vast number of religions, nearly everyone in the world believes in the same things: the existence of a soul, an afterlife, miracles, and the divine creation of the universe. Recently psychologists doing research on the minds of infants have discovered two related facts that may account for this phenomenon. One: human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena. And two: this predisposition is an incidental by-product of cognitive functioning gone awry. Which leads to the question …”
You’ll need to a subscription to read the full article. For the moment, however, a copy is available online here:
http://bill.srnr.arizona.edu/classes/596b/Schaffer/God-Accident.html
FWIW, Albert Mohler wrote a response to some of the claims made by Paul Bloom’s article:
Albert Mohler, “Is God an Accident of Evolution? The Next Step in Evolutionary Theory”
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
http://www.albertmohler.com/commentary_read.php?cdate=2006-01-18
TrackBack
http://www.evangelicalresources.org/blog/wp-trackback.php?p=7
Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post
sitemap
Trackback on May 5, 2007 @ 9:27 pm
sitemap …
sitemap …